Join co-curator Martin Bressani for a private tour of Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds, on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery from January 28 to May 24, 2026. This is the first major U.S. exhibition devoted to Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), celebrated restorer of Notre-Dame de Paris and one of modern architecture’s most influential figures. It is also the first to spotlight the primacy of drawing in his career. Spanning four decades, the exhibition gathers over 150 works that animate both history and nature—antique theatres and medieval cathedrals reborn on paper, Alpine landscapes dissected with geological precision, even bold speculations on climate and race. Bressani will reveal how Viollet-le-Duc’s art was driven by a single obsession: making time visible. In this, he belonged to a century equally fascinated by the mysteries of temporality—pursued by geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and social theorists alike.

Martin Bressani is William C. Macdonald Emeritus Professor at McGill University’s Peter G-H Fu School of Architecture in Montréal. He is the author of Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc 1814-1879 (Ashgate, 2014), and co-editor of Gothic Revival Worldwide. A.W.N. Pugin’s Global Influence (Leuven University Press, 2017), The Companions to the History of Architecture – Nineteenth-Century Architecture (Wiley Blackwell, 2017), and Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture (MIT Press, 2024).

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This event is organized by The Drawing Foundation and Bard Graduate Center Gallery.

Image: Dr Martin Bressani leading the Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds tour during Drawings Week 2026