By Rebecca Park, Contributor

The contemporary global art scene is a dynamic, fluid international marketplace now, filled with figures as diverse as Swiss prankster Urs Fischer and American silhouette-maker Kara Walker. But audiences and curators are still obsessed with the same old white guys, a fact to which a perfect storm of three recent shows of French drawing in New York and Washington, DC attest.

The first in this survey, “Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings,” which ran from October 2 to January 10 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, offered an intimate glimpse into the artistic practices governing the strict standards of the 1700s. The relatively small one gallery show was packed with the sketchbooks, doodlings and more refined drawings of the artists that spanned frilly Rococo and rigid Neoclassicism. Not for the amateur appreciator, the overwhelmingly dense show was most accessible to museum-goers already familiar with the basics of French art during the period. Here, most evident was the hard work that went into developing the masterpieces that seem so effortless to us now.

A few blocks uptown, the Frick Collection’s “Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection,” which closed January 10 but is accessible through the thorough Frick website (www.frick.org), gave a different spin to the same subject. Drawing from the expansive collection of the late Dutch art historian, the show featured mini-masterpieces alongside the occasional eye-catching oddity, presenting a quick but well-explained tour through the major movements of the 1700s. A work like François Boucher’s Standing Woman Seen from Behind demonstrates all the grace for which the artist was known: fluid line, feminine contours, elegant movement, effortless light. One of the final images of the show, Edgar Degas’s mystical, Renaissance-inspired Head of a Soldier, leaves the viewer with a new vision of a popular artist.

“Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800” at the National Gallery in DC expanded the timeline of the previous two 18th century-centric shows. And perhaps this epic 300 year time span was a bit too ambitious. The impressive panorama exhibited many highlights, from early Renaissance drawings inspired by traditions of medieval manuscript illumination to Neoclassical architectural fantasies. Yet no clear intellectual center emerged to cohere the disparate works on display. Yes, every work offered a distinct beauty, meriting display and of which the Gallery should be proud to have in its collection. Yes, the modifier “French,” with all its implications of cultured heritage, is one to assure casual museum-goers of the exhibit’s pedigree and value. Essentially, though, little was done to explain the connections between the spatial and stylistic range of works on display.

These three shows, united in theme, diverse in accomplishment, do demonstrate the qualities that keep bringing audiences in to see variations on the same themes. Painters like Watteau and David—culturally distant but psychologically close to us—continue to offer the demands we still make of artists: elaborate aesthetic experience, hard work to achieve that genius, the culmination of intellect and spirit that jolts one’s senses. The fantastical lines seen in a Mannerist design for Renaissance armor at the National Gallery show find their natural continuation in the whimsical Calder mobiles on view a few galleries away. But it wouldn’t too painful if this same media and museum attention was spent on what these masters’ heirs have been up to, now would it?

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