Albretcht Durer in Boston

Durer and His Time, is an exhibition of German drawing now on display at the Museum of Fine Arts through April 17. The exhibition spans the golden age of German draftsmenship, from 1470 to 1530--an age in which Durer was the central figure. Numbered among the works of Schongauer, the Cranachs, the Holbeins, Grunewald, and other of Durer's forerunners, contemporaries, and followers, are 40 drawings by Durer himself.

Line fascinated the German artists within the Late Gothic tradition. Their love for its abstract and intricate nature is clearly brought out in the Boston Museum's extraordinary exhibition of Durer and his Time. But above all, this show brings out Durer's supreme position among German draughtsmen of the fifteenth century. He was the man who tried to bridge the gap between Late Gothic linear expression and the compositional stability of the Renaissance.

The Late Gothic tradition in Germany was the native inspiration that animated the work of Durer and his contemporaries. Artists working in this style employed interlacing forms and flattened planes, decorative detail, and agitated pen strokes, and displayed strong emotional expression with an interest in man's world in its natural state. More than any other this last characteristic, which we call naturalism, distinguishes the Late Gothic spirit from the idealism of Renaissance art.

The Bust of an Old Man by Durer's predecessor, Martin Schongauer, is a pronounced example of the human quality which we associate with Gothic naturalism Schongauer's work provided Durer with an example of naturalism which united the Flemish realistic tradition with the grace and inventiveness of Gothic drawing. Durer's early work, influenced by this example, abounds in ideas, emotional expression, and vivid Gothic naturalism.

The naturalistic interest in detail often becomes an emphasis upon the particular as opposed to the general. In Durer's Samson Conquering the Philistines, as in many Gothic inspired drawings, the strong emotionalism, the decorative detail, and the interlacing forms combine with some conscious symbolism to transform the highly realistic detail into a mystical iconography.

Durer also applied his genius as a draughtsman and his innate sense of order to the achievements of the Italian Renaissance masters. He comprehended their rational approach and soon mastered their clarity and formal expression. While investigating the problems of perspective and the antique canons of proportion, Durer tried to instill his Germanic naturalism with a disciplined Renaissance structure. Yet even in his most formalized, classical drawings there remains a constant struggle between reason and intuition, between generalizing formalism and particularizing realism.

The Female Nude with a Shield is the of his most refined classical drawings. In it he devotes an almost scientific attention to perspective and the antique ideas of proportion. Furthermore, the representation of a nude figure is, in itself, a Renaissance rather than a medieval form. But while the format is classical, the figure he renders is far from an idealized human body. The features of the figure are awkward, bordering on the grotesque, and the line he uses to describe the anatomical details is strong and expressive. Both of these qualities earmark the drawing's Gothic spirit.

Durer was coping with a transition between the German Middle Ages and a Renaissance in the North. Although he grew more classical and refined in his manner of expression, he remained, throughout his career, Gothic in spirit.

One of the intentions of this exhibition is to show how some of Durer's contemporaries and followers reacted to this period of artistic transition. The show's four drawings by Grunewald, working within the Late Gothic style, sacrifice the cold solidity of form, which was part of the Renaissance style, to intense emotional expressionism. Lucas Cranach the elder (see his Lucretia as shown here) employed serpentine line and drew expressionistic figures until he came under the influence of Durer's restrained style. He later abandoned his intimate detail for an economic and abstract style, although suggestions of restless Gothic form sneak into Cranach's work as they do into Durer's.

Hans Holbein the elder drew sensitive linear portraits which were largely within the Medieval tradition though, at times, he too felt the pressure of Renaissance idealism. The younger Holbein, (see figure 1) representing a new generation drew the idealized figures and solid forms of the Renaissance with little nostalgia for the spirit of the Middle Ages (see his Two Lansquenets Boring an Escutcheon).

Due to the newspaper strike, this exhibition of Durer and his Time has not received the publicity it deserves. Unfortunately, many Bostonians will miss the show. These 150 drawings, on loan from Berlin's Staatliche Museum, are the creme off the top of one of the world's finest collections of German drawing. Furthermore, the selection and hanging are a model of curatorial skill. Their arrangement successfully emphaisizes the traditions these artists worked within and their influences upon each other