Albrecht Durer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina.

At The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Eight years after the thirteen year old Durer made his 1484 self portrait in silver point, Columbus set sail for and discovered the new world. Durer died in 1528 and so we should understand that the whole history of the western hemisphere since Columbus has happened after Durer’s lifetime. Furthermore: other than art works these drawings and prints should be seen as objects from another time and place, these still fresh sheets of paper, a relatively new medium at that time, were worked on in rooms amongst persons who spoke a language that no one alive today likely could understand. In fact, when these drawing were 100 years old William Shakespeare invented the English language and wrote a play entitled “Hamlet”. These works were three hundred years old when George Washington took the oath of office as President of the United States. It is a testament to the esteem in which they have been held and the care they have been given that they are as fresh as the day they were made. They have survived floods and fires, famine and plague, war, war, war and still more war.

This is a very rare exhibition: there are only 49 Durer drawings outside of Europe; there are 91 in this exhibition. It should also be noted that every one of the works has been beautifully framed and presented to the public using illumination in which there are no reflections or glare from overhead lighting fixtures. This is one of the best museum installations I’ve seen in quite a while….why they all can’t be this thoughtfully presented is a mystery to me.

Albrecht Durer grew up as the son of a successful goldsmith and we can assume that he had a comfortable early life and an early and constant exposure to the fine arts and an ease with and understanding of the society in which he lived. Thus when he told his father that he wanted to be an artist/draftsman rather than a smith, the father could sufficiently assay his achievement in order to acquiesce to his son’s wishes. And so off he went to study with a local painter Michael Wolgemut and later to Colmar to study painting with Martin Schongauer who unfortunately, died before his arrival. But while there the surviving members of that man’s workshop allowed young Durer to study his work. It is clear that Durer had a high regard for the work of these men and wanted to emulate their achievements. And this raises a first question: Durer wanted to conform, to master the prevailing style. Why? Why didn’t he want to draw like Durer? Or, like most young men, to do something “new”?

Sometime thereafter he was able to go off to Italy and he was able to study with and among the well known Italian renaissance artists of the day. And soon his work took on the character of theirs incorporating the latest styles of figure drawing and linear perspective. At no time in the early years of his career, as presented in this exhibition, was there any indication that Durer wanted to master the art of drawing …in order to express himself. To be the best or an equal among a very talented few seems to have been his greatest ambition, that and the desire to be commercially successful…I sense in these catalogue notes that young Durer was as self centered and as ambitious as the young Ruiz Picasso of a later Barcelona. (In his striving for perfection one might suspect that he was somewhat insecure as well.) And in order to be successful he had to make drawings that catered to the prevailing wisdom. There was no daring do in this early career.

Now there is a remarkable parallel here to the life of Picasso. In his youth Picasso realized that the academic tradition was decadent and exhausted and that it was up to him and his generation to reinvigorate it. Once he and Braque had set off on the voyage of Cubism, all of the other ambitious young artist of his day fell into step behind them. In Durer’s day it was the rise of the new in the Italian renaissance that summoned the followers, of whom he was one. So we have good examples here of Gombrich’s matching and making and perhaps an insight into the psychology of representation…one masters craft not for self expression but as the means to personal and professional success: the life of an artist, often more bourgeois than one might suspect, is rarely without its for-profit motivations.

While he did work successfully as a painter Durer is usually thought of as a master draftsman; it is his drawings that resonate and lodge in the mind of the viewer. And although many might stare blankly at the mention of his name, when shown his works almost everyone will admit that his drawings are among their favorites. He is known for having done figure drawings and portraits, nature studies, landscapes, and designs for decorative objects. He worked in pen and ink, pen and brush, watercolor, charcoal, woodcuts and engravings. Examples of all of these are included in the exhibition.

His pen and ink drawings are lovely and spontaneous although not quite as spontaneous as the later Rembrandt’s. And his brush and ink, in which the tip of the brush is used as a pen, requires more explanation than the exhibition curators have given us. American museums are teaching museums and too often we are fed, as we are here, an over abundance of provenance as well as anecdotal back story. As the pen and ink and brush and ink look so much alike in the final presentation, it would be satisfying to know why he chose one over the other for the various works. (I believe his diary entries are extensive and I suspect they probably contain the answer.) It would also be nice to know what is meant by “pen”. I assume it was a goose quill, third from the wing tip was always the preferred feather, but it might also have been reed or metal. And as for the ink, was it a cake of ink such as Chinese or India ink? It would certainly be nice to know which brand has this kind of permanence.

There are questions raised about the various printing media as well. Both woodcut and engraving were new to the 1400’s, they were the photo shop and digital printing of their day, and apparently Durer was one of those artists who raised the process to its highest level of achievement. But I’m curious why he sometimes chose one over the other. In the catalogue it is mentioned that after he had drawn the picture on the wood it was sent to the woodcutter to be prepared for printing. So I think we can assume that there was a printing industry in Nuremburg that was much like that in Japan about which we know so much. Do we not know so much about the industry in Nuremburg or is it considered not important? I think it is important. Did the different printing media have to do with the price of the finished prints: were those prints that were the process of an industrial establishment cheaper than the engravings which were carved by the artist himself?

Engraving is a completely different way of drawing from pen and ink and I wonder if Durer did engrave the plates himself or if they too were sent to the “cutter”. I know that both methods are used and accepted and that some artists achieve their best work through the making of engravings themselves.

The woodcuts are charming and are steps above rustic, but the engravings enter into a whole different realm with their beautiful range of tonal values. Generally that is achieved by incising lines that are sometimes deeper here and there and sometimes lighter. And it is for that reason that I wonder who cut the plates. I would think that the artist would want to control the process: however, in the field of photography I know that both Richard Avedon and Yosef Karsh sat down with a work print and a pencil and described to the printer how they wanted every square inch of the final print to look. I have seen these work prints in exhibitions. Is there any written documentation or other evidence that Durer did the same in these engravings?

In his lectures, The Nude, Sir Kenneth Clark tells us that of all the subject matter of art it is the nude that elicits the most critical response and that this is because each of us has in his mind an ideal image of the human form. In the book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the beginning artist is encouraged to stop using language i.e.: foot, hand, back, leg, etc …and encouraged to see lines that are edges of contours giving each line the proportions that can be seen and that all the subsequent lines should be related in like manner to one another. Drawing is simply a process of coordinating our hand to record what our eyes see. When we use language …hand, foot, elbow…we tend to draw not what we see but what lies buried in our mind.

The dominant subject of Durer’s work is the human figure. As a young man he was convinced that there was a mathematical formula for creating the ideal human figure in art and he spent many years trying to discover it. Perhaps the closest he got was the Adam and Eve of 1510. Other than that his nudes are very obviously problematic…Clark places him squarely in the Alternate Tradition …the Gothic. And so we might assume that in his youth he had been so imbued with the conventions of Gothic art that it was almost impossible for him to cleanse it from his mind… he draws what he knows. For us it doesn’t require more than just a little study to realize that his problem was that he did not understand human anatomy. There are highlights and shadows that he has copied from the Italians to give interest to the interiors of the outlined forms but it is readily apparent that he does not understand for a moment that those geographical bumps and hollows and ridges and valleys are bones or muscles or ligaments.

And there are two areas where he has absolutely horrendous problems: the buttocks and the chin. Consistently over the years he evidenced his confusion as to how the chin was constructed and settled eventually on creating a generic mound that looks very much like a small pubescent breast. I cannot understand why that did not bother him.

I have never known an artist who has had more trouble drawing the buttocks than Durer does. In drawing after drawing he seems to get further and further away from any resemblance to the human figure and what is so amazing is that when he transfers the pen and ink preliminary drawing to the wood or copper plate, i.e. Adam and Eve, Plates 70 and 72, he does not see or correct his mistakes!

Now I have seen this before in works by other German artists, as recently as December when I saw the exhibition Durer to de Kooning, One Hundred Master Drawings from Munich at the Morgan Library. In German works that are beautifully executed with flawlessly depicted surrounds, details and ornamentation, you see in work after work the most grotesque distortions of the human anatomy. Why is that so persistently so? Is it a convention? Or do the German artists not see it or not care if they do see it? Is finish everything?

To give credit where credit is due, in the catalogue pages 102-103 we see the Durer buttocks at their worst, The Four Witches, and then on the facing page in the pen and ink Female Nude Praying, in the National Gallery Collection, a back view that was likely a three to five minute drawing from the model, we see an almost perfectly depicted female form …almost perfect but not quite …her right leg is too short. But other than that he has captured the form and the energy of someone who could easily be mistaken for a contemporary American working class housewife. Both of these are dated 1504.

And it is in drawings like these that we realize Durer main fault, especially in his prints: his human form is never presented as expressive form. His subject/figure is always an actor in a well known tableau and in its serenity it is statuesque, statuesque in that it is rock like. Most of these woodcuts and engravings are religious illustrations with a few Greco-Roman mythological scenes thrown in to acknowledge the southern Renaissance.…there’s really very little here that is other than a commercial product made for a target audience (he is preaching to the converted.) …which partially explains why I do not like prints. (They’re contrived.) The expressiveness and the symbolic  experience of these works come from our previous understanding of the moral of the tale depicted, our ability to translate the meanings of the symbols surrounding the subject, and our predisposal to continue to support religious iconography…to conform to the status quo. As I am not religious, as I am not a Christian, I am not inclined to be so tolerant especially as I am aware that it was the target audience for Durer’s work that within one hundred years turned neighbor against neighbor, Christian against Christian, who clashed in violent civil war and devastated the countryside and decimated the population.

When Durer gives up the pursuit of the ideal and just draws what he sees, one line after the other, he creates beautiful drawings of hands, including the well known Praying Hands, feet, and portraits of old men …his portraits of old women are less successful. Of the old men the portrait of the 93 year old man from the Netherlands, Plate 105. is one of his great masterpieces…better even than the painting which followed.

But at all times throughout his career he was most at ease and at his best in recording nature …landscapes, rugged mountains, and the flora and fauna of home and the lands he visited. And among his masterpieces are The Young Hare, The Oxen’s muzzle, (neither of which are included in this exhibition), and The Great Piece of Turf, which is shown. Aside from being a tour de force of brush mastery the Great Turf is likely one of the few great works which blend water color and gouache. And having it at eye level, one is able to analyze the composition, deconstruct it, and study how the two media, which can often be a problematic combination, are so beautifully blended that neither the one nor the other is obvious, are used to create a sense of deep picture space.

All considered this exhibition is a virtuosic display of draftsmanship. If I had any misgivings they began to surface when I studied a work such as the etching, 1514, The Desperate Man. (here one of only two, I believe, works in the new etching process at that time). This is one of the few works lacking a clear cut religious or Mythic reference, (Knight, Death, and Devil is almost as ambiguous but is ultimately merely Medieval.) In fact, we are uncertain what is depicted and what is meant…it almost seems to be the image of a dream world. (It might simply be a series of exercises in the new medium combined on the same plate.) But it is also readily apparent that in its technique, its composition, its finish and its ambiguity it bears a great similarity to Picasso’s Minotauromachie.

Why are there not more works like this one in this exhibition? Did Durer not make them? Did he only concern himself with the straight forward here and now? If we ask ourselves about his contemporaries or what had come before this we are reminded of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch. Then suddenly a whole world teaming with life and animation rouses itself in our memories…I remember seeing last January a Peter Bruegel pen and ink drawing at the Frick Museum, Kermis at Hoboken, 1559, from the Courtauld Collection, in which almost one hundred figures in every imaginable human involvement fill a page to overflowing with their exuberance. Looking back at the Great Piece of Turf I tried to imagine what Bruegel would have done with it …the flies and bees and frogs and toads and snails and snakes and worms that would have found a paradise in this moist square of sod. Imagine the fun in its death and decay that Bosch would have shown us. And I wondered why Durer …left them out? For all its virtuosity, suddenly I missed them.

Because he died young, at 58, there are none of those late works in which a well seasoned older artist slashes paint across a canvas in a shorthand gesture that conveys a world of meaning…there are no late Rembrandt self portraits, no Capriccios or Dreams of Life.

In the end this exhibition raises a question the answer to which would seem to be obvious but is not, especially as this is shown in the East Building, the National Gallery’s home for modern art: What is the value of an exhibition such as this? The obvious answer is that it is of interest to art historians, collectors, connoisseurs and the general public. It might also be of interest to artists although I am not sure in what respect that would be true. It was Picasso who said I don’t draw what I see I draw what I know. And since the day when Agnes Martin took a ruler and a pencil and made of straight line from the top to the bottom of a well prepared canvas and said “this is it, this is all there is left to do” …where does an artist go from there, from here…from anywhere…what is the future of drawing? Does this exhibition give us a clue? No, it does not. Downstairs we see some colored squares by Ellsworth Kelly and the papiers colles of Matisse and while that might give us a suggestion it also tells us that that too has been done and that unlike Durer, we no longer have the freedom to draw like others or to use the ready subject matter of others or even to reference others. Arthur Dove saw this as a liberating moment wherein one was free to draw from his imagination. But how many artists really have interesting minds?

I enjoyed this exhibition tremendously. I attended the Sunday lecture; I had lunch and then saw the exhibition. I returned Monday morning at ten and saw it a second time for several uncrowded hours. On Tuesday evening when I returned home from the trip to Washington my preordered copy of the catalogue was at my door. I read it cover to cover. I continue to be of the opinion that the desire to draw and to paint is as inherently human as is the desire to sing and to dance, and I have come to the conclusion that this exhibition is not heuristic. Now I am even more emboldened to repeat my question: despite the fact that I enjoyed all of this, what is the value of an exhibition like this? It doesn’t suggest the way forward and, if we like to draw….

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/durerinfo.shtm