‘Dürer and Beyond’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Hans Hoffman’s meticulous gouache of a hedgehog are examples of the bewildering styles and subjects in “Dürer and Beyond.”
By KAREN ROSENBERG
Published: April 19, 2012
The title of a new exhibition, “Dürer and Beyond: Central European Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400-1700,” presents a bit of a conundrum. How do we get beyond Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the ne plus ultra draftsman and all-around Northern Renaissance master, an artist so secure in his greatness that he painted himself as Jesus?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dürer and Beyond “Male Nude Lying on a Table,” an anonymous drawing in this Met show of Holy Roman Empire works.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dürer’s “Self-Portrait and Studies of the Artist’s Hand and a Pillow.”
We don’t, at least not often in this show, which surveys the Met’s holdings of drawings made before 1700 by artists working in the Holy Roman Empire (an area that today encompasses Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and parts of other countries). But the offerings should nevertheless entice viewers to look more closely at the art of Central Europe, which absorbed diverse religious and stylistic influences from Italian, Dutch and Flemish art.
The Met’s curators are certainly giving the region more attention. Most of the drawings on view were acquired fairly recently, over the last two decades. Just outside the exhibition, in the Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Gallery, is a spillover show of related drawings, prints and manuscripts that entered the collection too late to make it into the catalog.
“Dürer and Beyond” was organized by Stijn Alsteens and Freyda Spira, curators in the Met’s drawings and prints department. It includes about 100 drawings, supplemented by prints, illustrated books and decorative objects.
The show sets the stage for Dürer with a drawing by an artist he admired, Martin Schongauer, of a man whose upturned gaze is accentuated by the wide brim of his hat. It’s thought to be a character study, but the features are distinct and specific enough to give it the presence of a portrait.
Strong as this image is, it can’t compete with what is probably the Met’s most outstanding drawing by Dürer: his “Self-Portrait and Studies of the Artist’s Hand and a Pillow” (1493). On this sheet of sketches the young artist furrows his brow and purses his lips in a look of withering intensity; he wears the same expression in a famous early self-portrait painting in the Louvre, for which this drawing is probably a study.
His head is nonetheless overshadowed by a detailed and disproportionately large rendering of his left hand, and by an incongruous study of a squished pillow that occupies the bottom third of the page. Placed where his chest would be, it reads initially as an oversize heart. On the reverse side of the page (which is displayed in a double-sided frame) Dürer drew more pillows: six in all, scrunched and fluffed in various ways, their folds delineated by fishtail-like areas of cross-hatching.
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