NEW YORK, NY.- The highly acclaimed Master Drawings New York returns to Manhattan where dealers from around the world are holding coordinated exhibitions in art galleries located on New York’s Upper East Side. This annual event, which has attracted four new international dealers this year, enables both collectors and curators to view a broad range of master works dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Exhibitors hail from the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the USA but, during this week, their finest drawings are all displayed within walking distance of each other, allowing connoisseurs to buy drawings across a broad range of prices, styles and centuries. There is a preview at all galleries on Friday January 25 from 4 to 8 pm enabling collectors to view the exhibitions before the opening weekend.

New York dealer Les Eluminures are exhibiting the intensely colourful Presentation in the Temple (c. 1520/30) by Netherlandish artist Simon Bening (1483/4-1561). The vibrancy of expression with which Bening depicts these biblical characters lends the work, almost 500 years old, a remarkable vitality. Fellow New Yorker Margot Gordon, who organises the event with London-based Crispian Riley-Smith, is showing a 17th-century study for the ‘Sala di Apollo’ at the Palazzo Pitti by Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669), which highlights the movement and dynamism of the artist’s work.

18th- and 19th-century European drawings are one of the strengths of the 2013 edition of Master Drawings New York. Madrid based dealer José de la Mano Galería de Arte is bringing The Apparition of the Virgin del Carmen to Saint Simon Stock (1780), a stately biblical scene depicted in black chalk, sepia ink and brown wash on laid paper by Antonio González Velázquez (1723-1793). The drawing reveals Velázquez’s subtlety of stroke and includes fascinating sketches around the border. Paolo Antonacci from Rome, a first time exhibitor at Master Drawings New York, brings Paolo and Francesca surprised by Giangiotto Malatesta by Giuseppe Cades (1750 – 1799) in ink and brown wash on paper while Crispian Riley-Smith is exhibiting a pencil and watercolour by Cornelia Maris Haakman (1787- 1834) of Tulips, Carnations, Blue Bells in a Vase with a Still-Life of Butterfly and Snail (1806). London dealer James Mackinnon is bringing a pencil and watercolour drawing of The Monastery Cloister at Amalfi (1840) by Achille Vianelli (1803-1894). The roof of the cloisters vaulting above the habited monks creates an atmosphere of peace and contemplation in an Italian midday heat. Parisian dealer Laura Pecheur is bringing a vibrant pencil and watercolour on paper signed by Lorenz Frölich (1820 –
1908), of a Fisherman from Capri (c. 1850).

Moving into the 20th century, London dealer Stephen Ongpin Fine Art is bringing The Sleeping Child, a dream-like watercolour sketch by French symbolist Odilon Redon (1840 – 1916). The blooming, cloud-like forms and feverish colours of the sketch typify Redon’s drawings, described by Huysmans as, “[defying] classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting”. New York dealer Sigrid Freundorfer Fine Art is exhibiting an inkon-paper sketch of Albert Einstein drawn by his friend Josef Scharl (1896 – 1954) in Princeton in 1950 (pictured left), which is signed by both Scharl and Einstein. Moeller Fine Art, also from New York, is showing The Academician (The Poet) (1954), a colourful oil pastel and ink on paper by Richard Lindner (1901 – 1978). Described by Claude Clement as “full of urban energy, and driven by weird eroticism”, Lindner was also in Einstein’s circle and an eminent academic until his death in 1978.