Before, During & After the Fall: Dürer at MOBIA

The German painter, printmaker, draftsman, graphic designer, typographer, and art theorist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was unhappily married. Erwin Panofsky, in his unsurpassed monograph on the artist, reminds us that this fact, though it may seem trivial, illuminates Dürer’s importance to the Northern Renaissance.Dürer’s wife, “Agnes Frey,” Panofsky writes, “thought that the man she had married was a painter in the late medieval sense, an honest craftsman who produced pictures as a tailor made coats and suits.” What she got instead was a husband who “discovered that art was both a divine gift and an intellectual achievement requiring humanistic learning, a knowledge of mathematics, and the general attainments of a ‘liberal culture’ … [Dürer] loved the company of scholars and scientists, associated with bishops, patricians, noblemen, and princes on terms of almost perfect equality … She could not understand,” Panofsky continues, “why [Dürer] went off to discuss mythology or mathematics with his learned friends, and why he spent hours on end composing treatises on the theory of human proportions or descriptive geometry instead of doing what she would call practical work.”Extremely prolific, like his contemporaries Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, Dürer produced nothing that would fall into the lowly realm of merely “practical.” And the exhibition “Albrecht Dürer: Art in Transition,” which opens Saturday at the Museum of Biblical Art — indeed, nearly every picture in the show — is worth a thousand failed marriages.The retrospective exhibit, a stupendous gathering of 106 of the artist’s prints, drawn exclusively from the formidable collection of Dürer graphics at the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany, explores only one facet of Dürer’s genius — printmaking. And it is a knockout.Dürer not only revolutionized the art of his time, but also the very era in which he lived. He brought the South to the North, and the North to the South — and beyond. A native of Nuremberg, Dürer made extended visits to Italy to gather what he could from Italian Renaissance masters. He was the first German artist to shift High Gothic, Northern angularity to the Southern lightness, assuredness, fluidity, classicism, and humanism of the Italian Renaissance. He studied languages, perspective, geometry, science, and theology — all in the service of art. He can be said to have planted the first seeds for the invention of the camera (in one of his prints proving the legitimacy of perspective) and to have invented the modern notion of the psychological self-portrait (explored most famously, more than a century later, by Rembrandt), in which the artist trains his introspective, humble eye on the subject of himself with the same sense of awe, scrutiny, and discovery that he would devote to a sacred figure such as the Buddha or Christ. And, as he was a follower of Luther, Dürer’s printed images helped to disseminate the teachings of the Reformation.Printmaking was in Dürer’s soil — in his blood. Fifteenth-century Germany was an innovative center of book- and printmaking. One needs only to think of the genius, among so many, of Guttenberg and of Germany’s most esteemed printer, Anton Koberger — godfather to Dürer. (A Koberger Bible is included in MOBIA’s show.) Dürer, who apprenticed to the woodcut artist Michael Wolgemuth, can be credited with single-handedly revolutionizing printmaking, especially woodcuts, which he elevated from a popular craft to an art. His influence as a printmaker, which spread throughout Germany and the Low Countries, and on into Italy, France, Russia, Spain, and Persia, not only made him rich and successful but also the first world-famous artist.New Yorkers are rarely at a loss for Dürer prints (the Met usually has something on offer), but we never get to see this many of the artist’s astonishing images in one setting. “Art in Transition,” organized in Germany by Mechthild Haas, and in New York by MOBIA’s Paul Tabor, is installed chronologically and by theme. Part of the pleasure of experiencing a large gathering, such as this, is seeing Dürer’s range in black-and-white; seeing how many unbelievable blacks and grays he can concoct; seeing how many qualities — marble, sky, fur, feather, leaf, fruit, bark, male and female flesh — all within a single print, with which he can imbue the white of the page.Dürer is such a great draftsman and colorist that his black-and-white prints have more light, more color, than many artists’ full-color compositions. Dürer understands that line is emotive; that it can vibrate and quiver; feel liquid, velvety smooth, and coarse, even scratchy. Like Leonardo and Titian, he understands that contours must energize their surroundings, and vice versa. And like Michelangelo and Raphael, he understands that power is a matter of inventiveness and clarity. Although Dürer went through the usual artistic education, from apprentice to master painter, Panofsky reminds us that his most important education (at least on par with his familiarity with Rogier van der Weyden and the van Eycks), may have been that of his early apprenticeship to his father, a goldsmith, through which the young Dürer mastered the art of engraving with the burin.“Art in Transition” includes all of the most famous prints by Dürer, the engravings “Melancholia I” (1514), “St. Jerome in His Study” (1514), “The Knight, Death, and the Devil” (1513), and “Adam and Eve” (1504); and the woodcuts “The Rhinoceros” (1515), “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (1498), and “Christ Bearing the Cross, Large Passion, 7” (1498-99), just to name a few. The show also includes series of the “engraved” and the “small” “Passion of Christ,” “The Life of the Virgin,” “Madonna and the Holy Family,” and “The Life of Jesus,” as well as images of saints, portraits, genre scenes, and mythology. And it features the eight woodblocks “The Great Triumphal Chariot” (1522), which Dürer created for Emperor Maximilian while he served as court artist.The show opens with “Adam and Eve,” or “The Fall of Man,” a print that is often interpreted, or summed up, as symbolizing the four ages and temperaments of man and depicting the calm before the storm in the idyllic Garden of Eden, as well as representing Dürer’s challenge that he, a Northerner, can draw the classical nude as well as any Italian. Certainly, it is these things. But it is so much more. Dürer understands that life is not made up of snapshots. No event is one-dimensional. Life is a layering of cause and effect; actions and reactions; emotions, interpretations, and misinterpretations. Here Dürer does not represent merely the moment before the Fall. He gives us the complete relationship between Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and God. He fully explores before, during, and after.“Adam and Eve” is about the loss of innocence and the birth of free will, life, and eroticism. It is an exploration of betrayal, defiance, humanism, and growth, as well as the birth of awareness, beauty, and possibility. The print is electric and erotic. It seduces us on many levels — from the luminous, luxuriant qualities of flesh and fruit to those of male and female. Through it, we engage with Adam and Eve’s struggle. We walk through the Garden. We become suddenly aware — all over again. We explore the stages of loss, awakening, conflict, and maturity.In this miraculous print, perhaps the first truly feminist portrayal of Eve, the Fall has not only already begun; Dürer introduces us to the Expulsion and the lovers’ coupling, treating the themes with empathy and compassion. Pictorially — geometrically — speaking, “Adam and Eve” is about a rectangular world shattered by the diagonal. Events naturally unfold. Everyone is complicit and conflicted. No one is to blame. The Tree of Knowledge has already come between them; and the Tree of Life has veered out of the Garden. Their world is getting smaller, closing in (or perhaps they are outgrowing their childhood home), as their sense of self and their nudity are unveiled.The two lovers have already crossed over. The storm is under way. Fruit ripens. Hips cock. Bodies swell, open, and sway. Adam’s “apple” lodges uncomfortably in his throat. And the cat waits patiently for the mouse. Adam steps toward and reaches for Eve; Eve teases. She tests the fruit’s readiness and, with her left hand (intimate and hidden), fingers — tests the waters of — the world outside the frame.While I was in the show, looking at Dürer’s “Melancholia I,” Ms. Haas pointed out that new scholarship has suggested that the print represents the theme of chastity. My reaction was: “Yes; why not? Of course.”Nearly every one of Dürer’s prints — certainly one as magical as “Melancholia I” — explores the full realm of human experience. “Art in Transition” is not only about a time when a single artist changed the world. Dürer’s humanist prints, the secular as well as the sacred, help us to explore our own transitions — help us to explore what it means to be human.Saturday through September 21 (1865 Broadway at 61st Street, 212-408-1500).

Before, During & After the Fall: Dürer at MOBIA

Before, During & After the Fall: Dürer at MOBIA

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