Unseen: The Gilbert and Ildiko Drawings Gallery, Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld Gallery, London announces the opening of a new space in 2015 to display its internationally significant collection of more than 7,000 works on paper. These rarely glimpsed creations by quiet masters and famous artists such as Dürer, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, offer an insight into draughtsmanship and artistic practice which makes them important artworks in their own right. Named after the American philanthropists Gilbert and Ildiko Butler, the new gallery in London was made possible by a major donation from the foundation.
Under the wing of 2013 Stirling Prize for Architecture winners Witherford Watson Mann (the brains behind the Whitechapel Gallery’s assimilation of the old Public Library next door), the Courtauld is leading a Renaissance for works on paper.
The first exhibition in the new gallery, Unseen, is a kind of eclectic amuse-bouche for the forthcoming calendar and will boast works that haven’t been seen at the Courtauld for over 20 years.
Look out for Johann Heinrich Fuseli’s Back view of a female figure, a wonderfully swirling watercolour with swagger (despite being Swiss, Fuseli made much of his work in Britain). For your hit of Peter Paul Rubens, away from the chaos of the Royal Academy blockbuster, look out for Rubens’ Female nude. Cross-channel chivalry makes an appearance in Antoine Caron’s drawing of a Carousel of British and Irish Knights at the sixteenth-century French court. Our particular highlight is a drawing by sculptor Henry Moore from his famous series depicting Londoners hiding in the Tube during the Blitz bombing raids in World War II.
Exhibitions of drawings and watercolours are often the hidden gem alternatives to the hard-core monographic exhibitions that we have come to expect from London museums. With the 2015 London art calendar crammed full of strident crowd-pullers, this new drawings gallery at the Courtauld is something to get (quietly) very excited about.