Art Review
The Renaissance Followed Him North
‘Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints,’ at the National Gallery
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 21, 2013
WASHINGTON — Albrecht Dürer had it all: the eye of a Raphael, the brains
of a Leonardo, the looks of a cleaned-up Kurt Cobain. He produced the
earliest known self-portrait drawing in European art when he was 13, and
some of the first stand-alone landscapes. He brought the pliant warmth
of Italian Classical painting to the shivery Gothic north, and
transformed the woodcut medium from semi-folk art to fine art, and very
fine art indeed.
Albertina, Vienna
Albrecht Dürer This exhibition at the National Gallery of Art includes “An Elderly Man of 93 Years,” from 1521.
Albertina, Vienna
In the 1503 watercolor “Virgin and Child With a
Multitude of Animals and Plants,” Dürer seems to depict the world as a
vast petting zoo.
Albertina, Vienna
Albertina, Vienna
Dürer drew his wife, Agnes, as St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary.
Albertina, Vienna
Some of Dürer’s most famous works were studies for paintings, including “Praying Hands."
Before he hit 30, he was the polymath star of what we now call the
Northern European Renaissance. If he was personally vain — in his adult
self-portraits he looks like Jesus — you can’t blame him.
Traditionally, the category of great artist implies great painter, and
Dürer was that, though there’s reason to think that he was at his most
inventive, involved and expansive in his works on paper. Evidence for
that argument is here in Washington, in a startlingly generous
exhibition called “Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina,“ opening at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday.
The show takes Dürer, who was born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1471 and
died there in 1528, from the beginning to the end of his career. Some of
his most famous images — “Praying Hands,” the ineffable watercolor and
gouache painting known as “The Great Piece of Turf” — are among the 100
or so works. Nearly all are from the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the
premier repository of Dürer’s graphic art, though even there they are
rarely displayed in such breadth.
Dürer was the son of a goldsmith, and after some basic schooling — as an
adult he lamented that he had not had more — was expected to join the
family trade. But he soon demonstrated that he was meant for larger
things. Was the teenage self-portrait the tip-off? It certainly could
have been. It is the first thing we see in the show, and it’s
prodigious.
Done in 1484, it is an image, in silverpoint, of a longhaired youth with
baby-fat cheeks and wide-open, mesmerized eyes gazing, almost
certainly, at his reflection. If the young draftsman doesn’t get
everything quite right, he still does a genius job. And a lot of the
Dürer to come is here: the adamant realist, the pictorial dramatist (he
points a finger in a bold, clear-the-path way) and the formal virtuoso,
tackling an unforgiving medium (with silverpoint, if you make a mistake,
you have to start from scratch) and mastering it.
For a while his life followed a standard bourgeois-artist route. He
studied painting, with a sideline in printmaking, a guaranteed
moneymaker. He hit the road for a year to check out the scene in other
art towns, like Basel and Colmar. In 1494 he went home to marry Agnes
Frey, the daughter of a local burgher.
The marriage was arranged by the families, and socially advantageous.
Was it a love match? Hard to say. Dürer ended up writing snide things
about Agnes to friends; there were no children. Still, a quick ink
sketch he did of her just before the wedding feels affectionate. He
depicted her as plain, a gawkily pensive girl with flyaway hair; under
her figure he wrote the simple phrase, “Mein Agnes.”
Yet soon after his marriage, Dürer was traveling again, alone. This time
he headed to Italy via the Alps, sketching plein-air landscapes as he
went. Venice was his goal; he stayed about two years. When he returned
again to Nuremberg, in 1496, he brought Italy, or the experience of
Italian art, with him, and settled down to deal with it, make it his
own.
He had already started copying Italian prints; now he began a process of
adapting Classical motifs to the Gothic conventions. The results, with
their twisted, strenuous grace, aren’t easy to love, but they are
invariably interesting. Like postmodern hybrids, their power lies
exactly in the fact that they seem unsettled, disruptive, on edge.
In an engraving called “The Sea Monster,” from around 1498, a nude
woman, looking distressed, reclines on the back of a Triton who appears
to be carrying her away. The story’s not clear; Dürer may have cooked it
up just to do a nude. In any case, his attention seems drawn equally,
if not more, by the background, a tree-garnished northern landscape of
mountains and fortress-towns, realistically detailed down to each leaf
and stone. Once our eyes go there, they tend to stay there, absorbed in
nature, leaving the lady and her monster behind, odd Mediterranean
strays in an alpensee.
Over all, the first third or so of the show feels disjunctive in this
way. It’s a tour through the mechanics of an ambitious career in
formation, as Dürer unsmoothly cuts and pastes images, shakes up mediums
and illustrates theories about perspective and portion. Sometimes the
pedagogue wins out, as in dry diagrams of body types. Sometimes,
fabulously, the sensualist-realist prevails.
In the 1503 watercolor “Virgin and Child With a Multitude of Animals and
Plants,” he turns the world into a vast petting zoo. In the “Great
Piece of Turf,” from the same year, he gives an insect’s-eye view of a
clump of grass that is also a mini-Eden, atremble with succulent life.
After his second stay in Venice, from 1505 to 1507, the hard-to-mesh
parts in his art came together, particularly in his studies for
paintings: images of heads, draped cloth and expressive hands — as often
as not his own — drawn in dark ink and light wash on colored paper.
Forms he might once have treated as cranky, Germanic grotesques — an
aged apostle’s head, for example — now have a highly polished,
sculptural sheen. He was at the peak of his powers, riding the crest of
his fame, when, in 1512, he landed a powerful patron in Emperor
Maximilian I, who asked Dürer to paint his portrait. A superb
bust-length chalk drawing in the show is a souvenir of the commission.
What Dürer was angling for was a lifetime imperial pension, and he got
one, though at the price of taking on hackwork. Along with other court
artists, he was ordered to design an array of ceremonial stage props to
enhance the emperor’s status visually. Most of this stuff — chariots,
arches, froufrou armor — was just shiny, expensive junk, and a waste of
creative energy. Dürer probably came to think so when, in 1519,
Maximilian died, and to the artist’s shock, the pension was revoked. But
by then Dürer had already been going through something, a psychological
or spiritual crisis, or a series of them. Traces are there in the art.
In 1513 his mother, to whom he was deeply attached, sickened and died a
painful death, and Dürer produced three of his most densely detailed and
symbolically fraught images, the woodcuts titled “Knight, Death and the
Devil,” “St. Jerome in His Study” and “Melancolia I.” Seen side by side
on a gallery wall, they’re the optical equivalent of stages of
mourning, from stoicism, to denial to nightmarish despair.
Existentially unnerved, the artist also began to dwell on the figure of
Martin Luther, expressing an interest in painting him. Dürer ultimately
may not have left Roman Catholicism behind, but his faith was shaken. He
kept producing religious images, though some of the latest pieces in
the exhibition, which has been organized by Andrew Robison, senior
curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery, are of secular
or quasi-secular subjects.
In 1520, feeling financially stretched, Dürer traveled to the
Netherlands and Cologne to hawk his prints, sketching, as always, as he
went. He drew a view of Antwerp harbor with a few faultless pen strokes
in otherwise empty space. In a zoo in Ghent, he saw his first live lions
and drew them too, swiftly, softly, in silverpoint, the medium of his
youth.
On this trip, for a change, Agnes, by now a stout matron, came with him.
He sketched her in casual half-length. Wearing a bulky bonnet with a
scarflike chin strap, she is shown glancing off to one side, as if
appraising everything around her, heavy-featured, cool-eyed, unromantic,
skeptical, a Nuremberg hausfrau. Yet he had depicted her a few years
earlier in a very different way, in a study for a painting called “The
Virgin and Child With Saint Anne,” now in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In that drawing, she is Anne, mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus. She
wears the same bulging headpiece, but now it tightly encloses her face,
coming down to her eyebrows, covering her chin, so that just her mouth,
slightly smiling, and her eyes, one focused forward, the other drifting
off, are visible. Set against a black ground, she’s a monument,
marble-carved, and a spiritual force; and she’s Agnes, his Agnes, the
grounded, stay-at-home spouse of a brilliant international star and, you
suspect, a source of the realness behind his shine.
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