Willem de Kooning once pronounced that “Style is a fraud,” adding, “I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.” Confronted with the restless array of styles found in the twenty-seven drawings on view in this significant and wholly engrossing show, one was tempted to swivel one’s head in disbelief. How could someone who approached drawing from so many angles, and whose pencil expressed so many moods, deny style? The answer, of course, was in the evidence before one’s eye. A limpid commercial drawing, abstract interiors, calm linear portraits, frenzied semi-abstract figures: what connects all of them is not a retreat from style but an unwillingness to settle for a particular way of looking. The undulant, parabolic curves that in Untitled (Mechanical Interior) from the late thirties connect circles and spoked wheels also describe the swell of hips in his drawings of women in the fifties, and, one r ...

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