Artists at Work, Courtauld Gallery, London, review: A fine show which demands close attention

A small but perfectly formed show of drawings from the 16th to the 20th century, showing how artists have depicted themselves at work

'The Inspiration of the Artist', Jean-Honore Fragonard (Private collection)

It feels a bit like saying goodbye to an old friend. In the summer of this year the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House will close for refurbishment for at least two years.

The building is a bit of an old curiosity shop of a place. Take the staircase against the back wall which rises up from basement level to top-most floor, for example. Descending and ascending feels a bit like gently wafting up and down against the inner wall of a gracefully curvaceous sea shell.

This exhibition – on the first floor you will arrive at in your steady upward climb – is the last to be staged there before that closure. It’s modest in size. Just 22 works on paper – made in ink, pencil, chalk or graphite are on display, and you can see it in the Drawings Gallery, mounted on all four walls of a low-ceilinged room with grey walls and a wooden floor.

All these works come from a private collection of 1,200 on the same theme, hand-picked by Deanna Petherbridge. You can get up very close. There’s nothing to stop you.

It encompasses drawings from the 16th to the 20th century, and its subject is how artists have depicted themselves at work, in the open air or in a studio, alone or with others.

It shows an artist in a landscape, dot-small, hunkered over an easel, as what he depicts rises up around him, an Alpine scene of near overwhelming immensity. How can something so large emerge from a being so vulnerably small? One of the enduring mysteries of the creative imagination. Artists snoop on other artists asking: how do they do it?

They are often shown from behind, as if being eavesdropped upon by such as ourselves. The studios in which they work, sites of calm or self-haunting un-calm, range from cluttered, humdrum abodes to theatres of pure phantasmagoria – whole worlds of mythological resonance are conjured up in a drawing in graphite by Donadini. A mannequin seems to be stirring into a momentous, out-flung gesture. It’s just like those toys which wake up in the playroom at night.

In a drawing by Fragonard of an artist seated at his drawing desk, the head is flung back, melodramatically. Hands over eyes, he is surrounded by the visions that he is coaxing into being: inspiration swoops down through the air, accompanied by a jester, a harpy, attendant putti.

Lovis Corinth, stroke victim, stares back at himself in the mirror. This drawing represents an act of furious striving to become yet again what he had always been: an artist fully in control of hand and eye. A lavish pink wash seems to add strange layerings of dream.

George Grosz, pipe clenched between teeth, has a concentrated, workaday look about him. His drawing implements are scattered around him in an unruly, explosive fashion. Ominous, uncontrollable symbols are emerging from his pen: a tree with ever spreading roots, beetle, wasp, bird of prey, rat. The world is on the tilt. The year is 1940 – he is already living in exile in America – and the work’s ironic title is Good Times.

This is a fine show which demands close attention, and it’s just as big as it needs to be. See it.

3 May to 15 July (courtauld.ac.uk)