Say the word “drawing” to someone, and they’ll likely think of an image rendered on paper in a medium such as pencil, crayon, or charcoal. Say “sculptor’s drawings” and what will come to mind is a preparatory sketch for a soon-to-be-realized, three-dimensional object, or of something more fully worked up that renders as completely as possible, in two dimensions, what could not be executed in three.

At root, Richard Serra’s drawings are traditional, in that they consist of marks made by the artist on a two-dimensional surface that is then hung on the wall. But as the well-selected and illuminating retrospective that has been touring the country makes clear, any resemblance to drawing as the term is generally understood ends there.¹ Consisting of sheets of paper or canvas many feet wide and tall, uniformly covered with black that Serra applies using home-made bricks of paintstick, his drawings typically function as elements in an installation rather than as discrete works of art. They are conceived not as vehicles of depiction—preparatory sketches or fully wrought images—but as self-sufficient objects.

One wants to say “sculptural objects,” for they are designed to function aesthetically exactly as do his sculptures, engendering in the viewer a heightened awareness of the weight, balance, and gravitational pull of their forms, thereby to establish a highly charged, dynamic relationship between the work of art, the viewer, and the space they share. Blank(1978) consists of two roughly ten-foot-square black-covered sheets of linen facing each other