Robert Adams

Robert Adams made spare black-and-white sketches and prints of abstract shapes in the late 1940s and 1950s. Two surviving works here — the 1957 pencil Study for Sculpture and a 1949 print of the same title — show clean, geometric volumes floating on the page, as though testing ideas for three-dimensional form. These drawings belong to the immediate postwar period when many artists were paring things down to line and tone. Tap Study for Sculpture (1949, Print) to see the same motif in ink.