Narrator: The Rothschild Contemporary Drawings Collection was begun in early 2003, following an influential exhibition at MoMA called Drawing Now: Eight Propositions. The contemporary drawings in that exhibition testified to a return to figuration and narrative, and also suggested that they were made as finished works and were not in service to another medium, such as sculpture, painting or installation.
Curator, Christian Rattemeyer: With the emergence of figurative and representational practices, around the middle of the 1990s ... other artists whose work has drawn ... from sources of popular culture; comic strips, commercial illustration and narration ... were gradually rediscovered and brought back into focus.
At the same time so called "outsider artists"—artists working outside of the mainstream of accepted art history were discovered often by artists and acknowledged as having a major influence on their work.
As some of the younger artists acknowledged these influences, the collection chose to incorporate examples by these artists and others to illustrate this cross generational relationship.