"Storied Past" at N.Y.U."s Grey Art Gallery Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection An unfinished Manet seascape helps fill a 19th-century gap. At first glance "Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings From the Blanton Museum of Art," at the Grey Art Gallery, looks like a dreary affair: a gathering of little-known draftsmen, almost all of them beholden to the Academy. Give it time, though, and like a dull professorial type after a few gin and tonics it may surprise you with sudden flights of vivacity. The core of this 50-piece show is the Suida-Manning collection, a group of European drawings initially amassed by the Austrian art historian William Suida (1877-1959) in the early 20th century and later expanded by his daughter Bertina and son-in-law Robert Lee Manning. It was acquired by the Blanton Museum, at the University of Texas at Austin, in 1998. Mr. Suida's tastes were very particular, which is why the exhibition feels narrower than its title would suggest. An Italian Renaissance specialist, he favored among French artists those who had studied in Italy or worked in an Italianate style. He gravitated to drawings from the 17th century, the heyday of the Academy. And he valued rigorous Academic classicism, made somewhat less stuffy by Italian Baroque and Rococo influences. What's here, in other words, is a stiff, peculiar, sometimes inauthentic-feeling assortment of French drawings. As Jonathan Bober, formerly the Blanton's senior curator of European art (now at the National Gallery), puts it in the show's catalog, " "Storied Past" implies an unconventional, at times eccentric, and often provocative counterpoint to the standard history of French draftsmanship." Valentin Lefebvre's pen-and-ink and wash drawing "Esther and Ahasuerus" (about 1650-75) exemplifies Mr. Suida's preferences; it's a biblical scene by an artist from Flanders who spent time in Venice, looking at (and slavishly imitating) Tintoretto and Veronese. Another would-be Italian in the collection, Etienne Parrocel, made Rome his permanent home and acquired the moniker Le Romain. His allegorical drawing of Justice, as a somber-looking female figure wrapped in yards of drapery, was once attributed to the Rococo artist Pompeo Batoni. Some artists had only secondhand knowledge of Italy. A postcard-perfect classical landscape of hilltop villas and a meandering stream is credited to Étienne Allegrain, who channeled Nicolas Poussin's renderings of the Italian countryside but is not known to have made his own trip. And others learned selectively from the Italian masters. The 17th-century artist Raymond Lafage, for instance, fancied himself a virtuoso along the lines of Michelangelo. After spending a year in Rome he made his reputation in Brussels by "dashing off finished drawings of randomly selected subjects before an amused audience," according to the catalog entry for a wobbly "Elevation of the Cross" attributed to Lafage. The 18th-century drawings, bolstered by Boucher, Fragonard and the Circle of Watteau, look more characteristically Gallic. This holds true even when the subjects are Italian, as in Boucher's feathery black-and-white chalk drawing of the Roman hero Mucius Scaevola or Fragonard's "Reconciliation of the Romans and Sabines" (which he copied from Rubens). Here too are works of courtly obsequiousness: Charles-Antoine Coypel's "France Thanking Heaven for the Recovery of Louis XV" and Michel Corneille the Younger's "Aspasia Among the Philosophers of Greece," both made in preparation for paintings that would grace the queen's chamber at Versailles. Cutting through the pomp and circumstance is a charming study by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, of a bird pinned ever so gently between the plump hands of a young girl. The drawing extends only to her elbows but is as expressive as any full-length figure treatment in the show. As it moves into the 19th century, and away from the Suida-Manning collection, the show becomes more eclectic. It includes a few works by artists who refused to toe the Academy line or, like the Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau, were stymied by rejections. Alas, it does not account for the Romantics. Delacroix, for one, is absent. The torchbearers of Neoclassicism are present only by proxy (as in a portrait of a foppish young man by Henri-Joseph Hesse, an Ingres contemporary and pupil of David). And Impressionism? Forget about it. What's left are works of mainly historical value, some of which hint at the 19th century's political and economic disparities. Hanging close to an unattributed scene of swank ballgoers at the Hotel de Ville is François-Marius Granet's moody drawing of monks entering a darkened cloister, made in sympathy for the religious orders who suffered during the Napoleonic wars. The Grey has also mounted a companion show, "French Art From N.Y.U."s Collection," which fills in some of the 19th-century gaps of the Blanton's exhibition and proceeds well into the 20th. Though uneven in quality, it includes curiosities like an unfinished Manet seascape and the first print Braque ever made (an angular proto-Cubist study of a nude, from 1907-8). It begins, in jarring fashion, with a roomful of op-art compositions by Victor Vasarely - given to the university by the Parisian dealer Denise René in 1965, the year of the Museum of Modern Art's infamous op-art show "The Responsive Eye." More disconcerting is the physical state of the modernist works downstairs, many of which look to have been in storage for a long time and could stand to be cleaned and reframed. As N.Y.U. pours money into the expansion of its Village campus, it may want to siphon some off for taking care of its art. "Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings From the Blanton Museum of Art" and "French Art from N.Y.U."s Collection" continue through July 14 at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village; (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart.