Themes+Projects Presents | Paul Pickrel: Paul’s Drawings @ Lee’s Launderette

This exhibition presents a rare and intimate selection of drawings by Paul Pickrel (1917–2014), professor, writer, editor, lecturer, and lifelong observer of human nature and language. Drawn from more than forty sketchbooks created between 1972 and 1992, the exhibition features fifty curated works selected from over five hundred original drawings.

Comprised of 32 figure studies and 18 portraits, these works reveal a deeply attentive eye and a quiet but relentless curiosity about people. Whether capturing the posture of a seated figure, the gesture of a face in thought, or the fleeting psychology of a moment, Pickrel approached drawing with the same precision, intelligence, and sensitivity that defined his life as a scholar and teacher of literature.

Best known academically for his decades at Yale University and later as Professor of English at Smith College, Pickrel spent much of his life immersed in language, criticism, and the close reading of human behavior. He also served as Editor-in-Chief of The Yale Review, one of the nation's oldest and most respected literary journals. Yet within these sketchbooks, another side emerges: intimate, observational, personal, and often surprisingly modern. The drawings move fluidly between careful study and spontaneous expression, revealing an artist less interested in perfection than in presence, rhythm, and character.

Paul was deeply inspired by artists such as Rodin, Degas, and Cocteau, while also maintaining an appreciation for more contemporary voices including Warhol, Hockney, and later Elizabeth Peyton. That blend of classical draftsmanship and modern sensibility can be felt throughout the exhibition, where elegance, intimacy, and experimentation quietly coexist.

He was also deeply committed to observation as a daily practice. During his years teaching at Yale and later at Smith College, he often spent his free Sunday afternoons taking the train to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence to draw and immerse himself in art. He never drove a car, choosing instead to walk, take trains, and move through the world at a slower and more attentive pace, something that quietly shaped both his life and his work.

Curated by his great-nephew Bryan Yedinak, the exhibition traces a twenty-year journey through Pickrel's private creative practice. Together, the drawings form a portrait not only of the people he observed, but also of the mind behind them: thoughtful, disciplined, humorous, and endlessly engaged with the world around him.

Presented at Lee's Launderette, this exhibition offers the public a first look into an unseen archive that bridges literature, observation, memory, and drawing.