The Drawings of Al Taylor

Featuring more than ninety drawings and numerous sketchbook pages that span Al Taylor’s entire career, this book documents the artist’s important achievements as a draftsman.

This fully illustrated catalogue investigates important and illuminating aspects of Al Taylor’s drawings, which numbered over five thousand at the time of his death. It includes a chronological survey of Taylor’s drawings from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, highlighting the combination of technical refinement, humor, and sensuousness that characterizes his works on paper.

Stunning reproductions of the works, which were inspired by such ordinary things as tin cans, pet stains, and broomsticks, reveal the drawings’ minute details, nuanced shading, and playfully agile pencil lines. Lively texts explore how the rich and complex visual sensibilities of Taylor’s drawings resonate with that of late Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters.

Taylor’s innovative approach to process and materials, such as photocopier toner, with its intense black, and the extreme white of correction fluid, is also closely examined. Created with equal parts humor and technical virtuosity, and informed by scientific models as well as everyday minutiae, Al Taylor’s magnificent drawings are meditations on form and structure that stand as testament to great draftsmanship.

Published by the Morgan Library & Museum and DelMonico Books · Prestel

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