For example, early in the absorbing survey of American drawings at the Brooklyn Museum, a pen-and-ink work from 1929 is instantly recognizable as one by Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935). This sculptor’s primary subject — the extravagantly curvaceous female form familiar from his bronzes, seen this time from the back — unfurls in a series of arcing lines, something like a musical staff made flesh. But the Lachaise work’s exceptional neighbor is unfamiliar: this spare pencil drawing offers another nude, also an exaggerated Amazon, who is more angular above the waist and defined by wavy lines below, as if she were standing in water. Most of us would not guess that it was made in the early 1930s by a young Louise Nevelson, a sculptor who would become known for her lavish painted-wood constructions.
“Fine Lines: American Drawings From the Brooklyn Museum” is full of such surprises and reintroductions, given that the museum’s holdings in this area have barely seen the light of day in decades. The show includes over 100 sheets and 6 sketchbooks by some 80 artists, dating from 1768 to 1946, with the bulk falling between 1860 and 1930, and they represent roughly 10 percent of the museum’s American drawings. Pervaded by the medium’s inherent lucidity and intimacy, the show enables you to see afresh both drawing and the ambition and striving of several generations of artists.
It has been selected and skillfully organized by Karen A. Sherry, the museum’s former associate curator of American art, who is now the curator of American art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. There is one major drawback:  as is so often the case at the Brooklyn Museum, the works suffer from an egregious exhibition design, this one punctuated with red and black walls and large, screenlike dividers made of blown-up details of some of the drawings. (They could almost be repurposed banners from the museum’s facade.) Looking at drawings on black walls is not too bad, but red walls interfere. Still, the onslaught of heavy hues may encourage a kind of tunnel vision that helps you concentrate.
On the upside, brilliant use has been made of the show’s six sketchbooks. Actual-size color reproductions of all their pages (covers included) have been made and arranged in grids on the wall. For example, it is impressive to see all at once, even in reproduction, the scores of well-developed portraits and self-portraits with which William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) filled a sketchbook in 1872 while studying at the Royal Academy in Munich. Chase’s bravura skills, which can look facile in oil paint, are less ingratiating in dry mediums like charcoal and conté crayon.
Ms. Sherry has grouped her choices by six general subjects: portraiture, the nude, clothed figures, narrative, landscape and the built environment, each spanning several decades and numerous styles. In nearly every case, neo-Classicism gives way to realism, which yields to the reductive or abstracting tendencies of Modernism. The best sections linger in the mind as discrete vignettes.
In the costume section, one standout is Winslow Homer (1836-1910), represented by two dazzling pencil sketches, one of two girls standing in a field, lost in thoughtful conversation, another of a girl seated on a rail fence. In each case garments, headgear, body language and even shadow and light are all accurately conveyed, but with a quick, effortless looseness rare in Homer’s paintings and prints. We see his commanding talent and pursuit of truth from a new angle.
The portrait section begins with the demure neo-Classical profile portraits of Mr. and Mrs. James Andrew Fulton (1808) by Charles de Saint-Mémin, a French artist who spent 25 years in the United States sitting out the French Revolution. Its surprises include Louis Bouché (1896-1969), a longtime teacher at the Art Students League who in 1918 made an elaborate, subtly Cubist portrait of the Stettheimer sisters. Florine, the artist; Ettie, the writer; and Carrie, the dollhouse builder, are seen in a living room with buoyantly doodled-upon wallpaper and drapery and a view through the window of what might be intended to evoke Mont Ste.-Victoire.
Their detailed garments and regal bearing befit the sisters’ stature as salonistes of the nascent New York art world, and it is interesting to realize that Bouché, who is all but forgotten, was part of their circle in his youth. Next to the Bouché is another little-known gem, from around 1924: Marguerite Zorach’s delicately limned three-quarters portrait of the poet Marianne Moore, looking starched and ascetic, with long and languid hands.
The show features a rich swath of artists that some of us have never heard of, many of them involved in one way or another with landscape.  They include the Scottish-born Alexander Robertson (1772-1841), whose fine pen-and-ink rendering of a mill on the Hudson River is one of three works from the late 18th century and easily the most alive. (Its competitors are drapery-fraught drawings by John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West.) Another is the German-born Constantine Hertzberg (1833-1919), whose “Drawing Lesson,” of 1865, pictures a male teacher instructing two female students as they sketch on a riverbank, achieving a slightly archaic but nonetheless enchanting blend of German Romanticism and botanical exactitude.
Another find is Joseph Frank Currier (1843-1909), who spent much of his career in Europe and is represented here by four small charcoal studies of trees and fields that recall the recently discovered drawings of the British artist Tom Fairs (1925-2007) in their fluency and staccato marks. And don’t miss the sketchbook of David Johnson (1827-1908) and its careful studies of trees up close and from afar.
One of the most vivid sections is “Recording Anatomy,” devoted to nudes. It begins with the 1849 anatomy sketchbook that the painter Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) used while studying art in Germany, open here to a meticulous and beautiful drawing of a skull. After the even more precise anatomy studies of Daniel Huntington and a sketchbook by John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper brings things down to earth with his gritty depiction of a male model whom Ms. Sherry identifies as visibly bored, while Robert Henri startles with a 1910s rendering of a nude model perched on a chair that has a positively postwar pinup cuteness.
The 20th century brings abstracting distortions in two pieces by Max Weber, drawing in the shadow of Picasso but with such skill and so early (1910, 1911) that he gets a pass. Isamu Noguchi tackles a seated figure from the back with traditional crosshatching and then uses Chinese-Japanese brush and ink for a woman bending over in a yogalike pose. Chaim Gross is represented by a graphite sculptural study from around 1940; it shows a stocky ballerina the size of a small child. In the final drawing, this one in pastel, Weber recaps his early Cubist work in 1946.
Although this show reaches tentatively into the 1940s, it gives no sign of the coming triumph of Abstract Expressionism, but you might not miss it. There is too much else to pore over.
“Fine Lines: American Drawings From the Brooklyn Museum” is on view through May 26 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.