In 1973, Vija Celmins painstakingly produced Galaxy #1 (Coma Berenices). A velvety drawing of a remote constellation, with white patches registering as blurred stars amid dense graphite marking, it packs a considerable amount of cosmological grandeur onto such a small piece of paper. The Latvian-born Celmins is concerned with changeable surfaces: she has made similarly meticulous drawings of rippling oceans and dewy spiders’ webs, for example. But her art also testifies to the power of drawing. What may be thought of as a modest medium is capable of enfolding, and evoking, the farthest fields of space. And the diversity of ways that artists have used drawing, particularly since the mid-twentieth century, suggests something similar: that drawing is not a minor supplement to painting and sculpture, but a significant art form in its own right.

Drawing is often associated with spontaneity and free expression, and the practices of Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline in the 1940s and 50s and, in a more lyrical vein, Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s, would appear to confirm that view. Early admirers of Abstract Expressionism argued that the gestural mark, as a real-time record of the artist’s innermost feelings, was what counted. In retrospect, Kline’s canvases have been revealed as less impulsive than originally thought: he enlarged details of sketches on a Bell-Opticon projector, copying them to get his speedy-looking strokes. But, myth-deflating aside, Kline’s deft and vigorous Study for Black & White #1 (1952) and Frankenthaler’s delicate Untitled (1961) seem to combine the energy of drawing and the gravity of painting. Such works tap into an ancient impulse: the human passion for mark-making.

Drawing is also, of course, a representational medium: a supremely flexible vehicle for the recording of physical characteristics and responding to the world. The American artist Philip Guston was vilified by his fellow Abstract Expressionists when, instead of his acclaimed gauzy abstract paintings, he returned to depicting what he called ‘tangible things’. His sometimes brutal, cartoonish figures show an artist seeking ‘impurity’, and are as attuned to newspaper comic strips as to the history of art. Guston’s Artist in His Studio (1969) shows himself as a hooded Ku Klux Klansman labouring on a self-portrait. The medium – charcoal – lends the image a particularly fragile, nervous and confessional quality.

The idea of drawing as a transmission direct from the unconscious, implicit in Guston, is made even more apparent in the German neo-Expressionism of artists such as Walter Dahn, Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz. The latter’s pen-and-ink drawing Peitschenfrau (Whip Woman) (1964) is a deliberately grotesque vision of humanity’s depravity and carnal urges. A year previously, Baselitz’s first public solo exhibition, in Berlin, sparked a public scandal over its sexual explicitness. The obscured half-human, half-animal portrait in Rosemarie Trockel’s gouache Untitled (1983) is a complex of narcissism and shame that anticipates her career-long interests in human attitudes to the sexual divide and our relationships to animals. But it is enigmatic and, like the Baselitz drawing, almost feels to have sped past the artist’s own mental gatekeepers.