William Kentridge, Drawing from Zeno Writing (2002) © 2009 William Kentridge

The first thing we see, on entering “Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is a large Cy Twombly: a confrontational tangle of red, orange, green, and ochre clusters and cascading drips of pink and red.[1] Visitors are drawn to the work—as the curators obviously intended them to be—but I’ve watched many of them study the Twombly closely and then look around them with puzzled expressions. Didn’t that big sign at the entrance promise an exhibition of drawings? When they return to the label for help, they learn that the complex palimpsest before them is made of “synthetic polymer paint, crayon, and cut-and-pasted paper on paper,” none of which seems to reassure the perplexed. But the conspicuous presence of the layered, painterly, enigmatic Twombly is, in fact, a canny and accurate introduction to “Compass in Hand.” It tells us what to expect as we move through the enormous, exhausting show—about 300 works by 150 artists—now lavishly installed in the high-ceilinged, ample contemporary art galleries on MOMA’s second floor.

Pacethose confused visitors, “Compass in Hand” is, indeed, as its subtitle promises, an exhibition of drawings—a small sampling of an astonishing group of approximately 2500 works by more than 650 artists donated to the museum in 2005 by the Judith Rothschild Foundation. The collection