The unexpected flash of inspiration, the moment we are “stung by the splendor of a sudden thought,” is a sensation beyond logic or reason, an inexplicable onrush of ideas that seems to leap out of the air. Even in the harsh light of our positivistic culture, inspiration continues to carry with it a sense of mystery and wonder. Deriving from the Latin inspirare, to breathe into,¹ its very etymology connotes an infusion from an outside entity that, over the centuries, has been interpreted as an intimate connection with the divine. For the ancient Greeks, the word was enthousiasmos — “enthusiasm” or the state of possession by a god — but the concept was the same: as early as the eighth century b.c.e., the farmer-poet Hesiod declared that the Muse had breathed into him the art of divine music.² The early Christians believed inspiration to be an action of the spirit of God upon the human mind and soul, in particular, the intervention that moved the hands of the Evangelists as they wrote the Gospels.³

Drawing, both as an art form and a visualizing tool, was first linked to the divine source of inspiration during the twilight of the Italian Renaissance. In his Idea of the Sculptors, Painters and Architects, the Mannerist painter and theoretician Federico Zuccari elevated drawing to a metaphysical activity, with its origins not in the intellect of the artist, but in the mind of God. In Zuccari's theoretical framework, disegno (a term that encompasses both “drawing” and “design” has two manifestations: “inner” and “external.” The inner design (disegno interno), or idea, is engendered in the human imagination only through the intercession of God, and the artist's conception is but a spark of the divine mind. The external design (disegno esterno) is the visual representation of that idea, i.e., the drawing itself.

The notion of inspiration as a channel to the divine has long since vanished with the advent of psychology and neuroscience. Still, the workings of the mind as it navigates the transition from inner thought to external materiality, and the artifacts generated during the course of that transition, retain an irresistible magnetism for what they reveal about the quintessential trait that makes us human: creativity.⁴

That magnetism was demonstrated when an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein was auctioned at Sotheby's last year. The document, as reported in The New York Times, exerts “an almost mystical fascination” that transcends its status as a landmark of scientific history and enters the realm of art. “What makes it art is not only the peculiar beauty of its yellowed pages, faded ink or elegant script, but that it lives, infused with the spirit of the author's own hand,” providing the viewer with “a window into how the gears turned in one of the greatest minds in history.”⁵

The drawings in this exhibition are artifacts, experiments, notations, breakthroughs. They are not representations of the outside world, but interior meditations on worlds yet to be created. By their very nature as working drawings, they document the progress of a concept from the wellspring of inspiration, whatever that may be, into material existence. Along the way, they lay bare both the mundane difficulties and the soaring leaps of imagination demanded by such a journey. They are, in effect, metaphors of the creative process, in which the handmade mark becomes a graphic echo of the mind's struggle to capture the elusive essence of an idea.

The women and men whose work is on display are exemplars of the protean impulse of the creative spirit, in all its restless energy and audacious experimentation. For these visionaries, the drawing surface becomes a meeting ground of knowledge and imagination, where ideas from science and art, politics and poetry, converge, cross-fertilize and transcend their boundaries. They have created works of art that seize and transform architectural space; architectural monuments that cross into the realm of art; and feats of engineering that embrace the geometric intricacies of pure abstraction. They elude categories, accept no received ideas and rethink their disciplines from the ground up. Their drawings may be functional, yet they possess an unparalleled strength and beauty — as images in their own right and as physical manifestations of human imagination and intelligence lit by creativity's flame.

1 Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English
(New York: Macmillan, 2nd ed., 1959), p. 652.

2 Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Art History: An Historical Introduction
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970), pp. 200­1.

3 Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 2nd ed., 1989), vol. vii, p. 1036.

4 Bernice Rose, Drawing Now (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976), p. 9.

5 Robin Pogrebin, “Einstein Manuscript on Sale Shows Science Can Be Art”, The New York Times, March 15, 1996, p. A1.