Graphic Masters

No one need testify at this point to the genius of Albrecht Durer. The accolades, this time, go to the Busch-Reisinger Museum for arranging a particularly fine exhibition of the graphic work of Durer and his contemporaries. The Harvard museums, especially Fogg, possess an exceptionally fine collection of drawings and prints, and this kind of exhibition is their forte.

The same tacit veneration accorded Durer ought to go to Lucas Cranach, who, for some reason, has been underrated in this country, although there are a number of particularly fine Cranachs here. The Metropolitan Museum's portrait of John, Duke of Saxony, and especially Judgement of Paris are first rate canvasses. Yet, comparatively speaking, Cranach has been passed by.

The exhibition is especially interesting in other respects as well. It falls between two shows at Busch-Reisinger of German art of the twentieth century in Harvard collections, an art which is being shown more and more at the moment. The comparison, in terms of quality, is an unfair one. Picasso's oft misquoted statement of how unimportant he feels next to the Spanish masters of the past, testifies to this. But a comparison of the newly hailed German expressionism with the fifteenth century group is as significant for the resemblances which unite them as for the genius which separates them.

In describing the German expressionism of the twentieth century, the same adjectives keep reappearing. "Incisive" and "bold" are among the milder ones. "Brutal" really ought to be an epithet in art criticism, but in this connection it constantly arises as the laudatory description of a narrative school of art. In comparison, and often, unfortunately, in opposition, the modern art of France is cited as an opposed camp. The debate has been made to resemble an international conflict.

In Durer, however, the issues become clear without confusing the matter with a French school--German school alternative. Nothing cou'd be more Germanic than these fifteenth century prints. Even if Durer and his contemporaries hadn't the horrors of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Third Reich to motivate them, they found substance for equally dramatic expression in the Apocalypse, the Christ passion, or even in a coat of arms of death.

These engravings possess a "brutality," if it can be called that, which surpasses any graphic intensity the contemporary Italians had to offer. But that graphic quality is the servant of a spirituality and poetry which makes the word brutal a sacrilege. Durer is as intellectual as the Expressionists are emotional, as richly controlled as the Expressionists, by and large, are sporadic. Again; the comparison may be unfair; but the teutonic bond between a Dance of Death by the younger Holbein and a twentieth century variation on the same theme is inevitable.

The art of Durer is by no means without emotion, but emotion only in the highest sense of the word, a deeply felt compassion without recourse to sentimentality. Busch-Reisinger, these days, is a good place to rediscover the difference between pathos and bathos in the arts, as well as to see a first rate exhibition.