Following the money: Mark Lombardi was making art about the shadowy worlds of global money laundering, corporate malfeasance and international terrorism long before 9/11 and the Enron scandal. A traveling show of the late artist's drawings is currently on view in New York at the Drawing Center - Biography

Like other conceptual works that map complex systems, such as Sol LeWitt's "Incomplete Open Cubes," Mark Lombardi's flowchart drawings at first seem perceptually hard to grasp and, as LeWitt has said of his own work, "emotionally dry." (1) But although Lombardi's ink-and-graphite works appear abstract and elegantly minimal, the information they contain is not. In fact, they chronicle nearly every major financial-political scandal from the mid-1970s through the early '90s, including the U.S. savings and loan collapse; the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro's involvement in the arming of Iraq in the early '80s; the Iran-Contra conspiracy; the cloudy relationship between the Clintons, various satellite operations of the Indonesian-based Lippo Group and Arkansas-based banker Jackson Stephens; and the George W. Bush/Harken Energy nexus. They delineate the routes whereby shell corporations were established, money was transferred to offshore banking units, arms were delivered and, in some cases, criminals prosecuted. The drawings present a litany of the famous and the infamous: names of government and corporate officials, media magnates, sheikhs, mobsters and terrorists--everyone from Pope Paul VI to Osama bin Laden.

The first retrospective of Lombardi's works opened at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University on Jan. 25, before starting a national tour. It is on view at the Drawing Center in New York through Dec. 17. Curated by Robert Hobbs and organized by Independent Curators International, "Mark Lombardi: Global Networks" includes 25 drawings that range in size from 10 by 28 inches to over 4 feet high and nearly 12 feet wide. Also included in the exhibition is a selection of the pink and green index cards that Lombardi called his "data base." During the course of his research, Lombardi (1951-2000) produced over 12,000 cards, each containing the name of a person, corporation or government agency. As well as helping to keep track of vast amounts of information, the cards played a role in the actual drawing process--Lombardi would often lay them directly on the paper and shuffle them around as he worked.

The structures of the drawings vary, with some organized along timelines while others forgo such linear chronology. The former feature horizontal lines that run either the full or partial width of the drawings and are interrupted by small circles, each denoting a year in which activities took place. Arcing lines, which Lombardi drew with the help of a french curve, branch out from the circles on the timelines to chart exfoliating networks and overlapping spheres of influence. The lines lead to people's names and to other free-floating circles that are labeled with the names of companies, corporations and governments. Such elements can be seen, for example, in George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca. 1979-90 (5th version), a roughly 2-by-4 foot drawing that Lombardi made in 1999. It was Lombardi's practice to return repeatedly to a subject, broadening the networked connections and augmenting the number of individuals under scrutiny with each successive version. Here, he employs three separate stacked horizontal timelines, the top one commencing in 1979 and detailing the activities of Arbusto Energy in Texas, an oil and gas company established by Bush before he became governor of Texas. On the second timeline, beginning in 1982, Lombardi tracks the activities of the Ohio-based Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, which rescued the faltering Arbusto Energy in 1986. The third line documents the activities of Dallas-based Harken Energy Corporation, an oil-and-gas-drilling concern that acquired the ailing Spectrum 7 in 1986 and whose stock price rose dramatically after it was granted offshore oil-drilling rights by Bahrain.

The drawing ends in 1990, where Lombardi documents Bush selling, in June of that year, two-thirds of his shares of Harken Energy for $848,560. Shortly afterward, Harken Energy restated its earnings and the price of its stock plunged. Although the S.E.C. required that Bush report his sales by July 10, 1990, no filing was made until March 1991. As well as naming dozens of politicians, businessmen and companies that had dealings with Arbusto, Spectrum 7 and Harken, and tying them together in a network of carefully drawn lines, Lombardi's drawing suggests what critics have long conjectured: that Bush's timely, unreported sale of Harken Energy stock for a 100-percent profit was a case of insider trading. On the far right side of his drawing, Lombardi has penciled in two incidents: "July t990: Bush bails out with profit." And: "Two weeks later Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait."

With their marriage of branching patterns and mechanical flowcharts, Lombardi's drawings call to mind a host of visual forms, including maps, mandalas and genealogical charts. With deliberate irony, they also echo corporate efforts at conveying information efficiently. Like maps, Lombardi's drawings use a graphic shorthand that viewers need to learn in order to navigate the material. A curved line with all arrow on one end, for instance, indicates "some type of influence or control." A line with arrows at both ends describes "some type of mutual relationship or association." A line of short dashes indicates the "flow of money, loans or credits." A corkscrew line denotes "the sale or spin-off of a property." (2) As representations of information and how it flows, Lombardi's charts make visible facts that have been systematically and often illegally obscured from view. There is an even harsher side to the story the drawings tell--another layer, as the artist called it: red lines indicate fines levied, indictments, incarceration, death or other "restraints" (Lombardi's term) upon activity.