Le Salon du Dessin 2012 – UPDATE: Jorinde Voigt has won the Contemporary Drawing Prize of the Daniel & Florence Guerlain Art Foundation, by Michael Miller


Salon-dessins-anonymes

Father and son in the gallery of anonymous drawings at the Salon du Dessins, 2010. Photo © 2010 Michael Miller.

Knowing the Salon du Dessin at first hand, and contemplating its 2012 iteration, I find myself thinking back on the world of master drawings as it was when I first entered it in 1980 and how it has changed over the years. Attended by over 13,000 people in 2010, the Salon is a large, public event which spans five days. It brings together the larger part of the world’s curators, scholars, collectors, and dealers in the field in a busy, but rarely overcrowded public space, the Palais de la Bourse. One can survey the available stock at the dealers’ stands, attend conferences, lectures, and guided tours, visit exhibitions at the Bourse and at Paris museums, as well as satellite enterprises around the Hôtel Drouot, where drawings can be had at auction, and further afield. There is a wealth of opportunities to learn about drawings, as well as to collect them. In 1980, no one thought that a fair of this size might ever exist in the field, and in its early years, during the 1990s, no one ever thought it would grow to these dimensions.

Of course the Salon du Dessin is relatively small, considering that Art Basel Miami attracted 40,000 people that same year (2010) and jumped to 50,000 the following year, and in 2010 the Armory Show in New York attracted over 60,000 visitors in over a five-day run. On the other hand, 13,000 seems enormous, if you consider that drawings comprise only one type of artwork, defined by media and methods that can somehow be related to a representation in line and shadowed areas on a flat surface, classically embodied in a pen, chalk, or graphite drawing on a sheet of paper, but including at one end of the chronological spectrum a potsherd and at the other the Retina display of the new iPad.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!