Duerer in Our Time

...Art historian Heinrich Woelfflin, though he crit- icized Duerer's surrender to the Ital- ian Renaissance identification of art with science, conceded that the master had a point when he insisted on strict solutions to formal problems: "To him, to represent meant to know...

...He considered anyone who followed a haphazard trial-and-error method just a "wild, unpruned tree...

...They demonstrate how admirably he combined precision of observation with intensity of expression, with a clear grasp of the skin of things, and with profound insight into the intricacies of the human psyche...

...But her brooding is that of the artist...

...It is true that, like da Vinci, he spent years on theoretical speculations— years that could have yielded a few more pictures...

...She is idly holding a pair of dividers, but with little interest...

...Yet he was hardly the "jolly good fellow" some of his more recent biographers have presented...

...But it might well be like continuous feasting, or like un- interrupted worship in a cathedral...

...He talked freely of his afflic- tions and sorrows, of his body's ail- ments...

...Duerer was too great a gen- uine artist to become paralyzed and finally destroyed by knowledge...

...Among his woodcuts are his most gripping works, such as Christ on the Mount of Olives, or the celebrated Four Rid- ers of the Apocalypse...

...His merits as a painter can be fully appreciated only in Nuremberg, where the Germanisches Nationalmu- seum is presenting thirty-two of his fin- est oils, along with hundreds of draw- ings, watercolors, and prints culled from all over Europe...

...But I do not believe that he intended to show himself as a Christ-like figure...

...Indeed, virtually all American muse- ums have paid some tribute to the mas- ter's genius on the quincentenary of his birth...

...But in their attempts to "sell" Duerer to the "now" generation, the arrangers of the Nuremberg festival may have gone too far...

...He did not claim infallibility, but instead asked his audience not to follow him "blind- ly," and to use his teachings only until they found something better: "That must be a strangely dull head which never trusts itself to find out anything fresh, but only travels along the old path, simply following others and not daring to reflect for itself...

...Perhaps we all ought to remain aware of, and be influenced by, out- standing artists like these two every year of our lives...

...His works, including his co- pius literary remains, reveal him as a staunch individualist who treasured his independence, who loathed taking or- ders from anyone, and who steadfast- ly held ideas (artistic, religious, and political) unpopular during his time...

...While it is no substitute for the show in Nuremberg, it presents enough drawings, engravings, etchings, and woodcuts to allow us an adequate assessment of the master's art...

...ALFRED WERNER is the eminent critic and art historian...

...those that have neither draw- ings nor prints to show display fascimile reproductions (often so ex- cellent as to be acceptable substitutes for the originals...

...It had been as- sailed for the maker's alleged arro- gance, and even blasphemy, for it has a vague affinity to the traditional Northern renderings of Christ...

...He fought against a lax practice that, without theoretical basis and without real knowledge of the subject, was guided only by an obscure pictorial impulse...

...For more than two decades, the local authorities have been making strenuous efforts to extirpate every vestige of Nazi poison, and to educate the young in the spirit of the Sixteenth Century humanists, who were Duerer's personal friends, and who had a vision of an ideal fu- ture world based on reason rather than on folly...

...To make things worse, he happened to have been born in a city that became notorious the world over, as the res- idence of the anti-Semitic Julius Streicher, and as the site of the mam- moth Nazi Party Congresses...

...He freely absorbed new stimuli from a visit to the Netherlands...

...To them—neither commissioned nor suggested by somebody else—he could confide all his individual grief or joy, all his fervent religious feelings...

...He never concealed the fact that his Father was only an ordinary goldsmith, who had migrated to Nuremberg from a small Hungarian town, and that his mother, like his wife, was a simple woman...

...But it must also be noted that Duerer did not allow the "scientist" in him to conquer the art- ist...

...Duerer was one of the first 'modern men' among European painters" Duerer begged his readers to bear in mind that, being "unlearned," he would never have undertaken these tasks, had any textbooks been avail- able : "I myself had rather hear and read a learned man and one famous in his art than write of it myself...

...In the Third Reich, he was made to serve as an example of "true Germanness," and was turned into a stick with which to beat the "degenerate artists" of this century...

...Does she expose the sterility of all intellectual endeavor...

...Throughout his career of more than thirty years he struggled to es- tablish a canon of form, and to re- construct three-dimensional bodies on a two-dimensional plane...

...There are only two or three impor- tant paintings by Duerer in the United States...

...But it is true that a revision of the artist's image was overdue, along with a re-interpretation and re-evaluation of his work...

...Yet, writing his theoretical treatises, he demonstrated a humility for which one will look in vain in similar works by his Twentieth Century colleagues...

...His Eve, painted in 1507, is described by the public re- lations staff as "quite a sexy piece...

...A statement as impertinent as Picasso's, "I do not seek, I find," could not have come from Duerer...

...Miraculously, he raised himself from the status of a humble medieval artisan to that of a patrician, on an equal foot- ing with persons of erudition, wealth, and power...

...Duerer also appears to have identified himself, in the fourth famous print, with Saint Jerome, the Christian schol- ar who secludes himself to make con- templation possible, the hermit who loves the quiet of his own study, into which warm muted light pours through the windows...

...Too often, just one aspect of his work—its meticulous realism—has been extolled, without any reference to Duerer's concomitant curiosity about all phenomena of nature, a trait clos- er to the Renaissance spirit than to the medieval Gothic tradition into which he was born...

...He who works according to geometry and reveals the underlying truth makes the whole world believe in what he does," he wrote to justify his sincere belief that a mathematical rule for beauty could be found...

...The major thrust of this work is rather the artist's revolutionary notion of himself as an individual and his status as an artist...

...He had a "dark" side, as his own confessions of uncertainty reveal...

...Duerer was not one to accept de- feat...

...In a sense, Duerer was one of the first "modern men" among European painters...

...This richly dressed, well-coif fured aristocrat—as he appears in the Pinakothek picture— was also the designer of that telling charcoal drawing which shows death as a crowned skeleton on a bony nag, and bears the notation, "Memento Mei" (remember me...

...Duerer's most intimate, most per- sonal works are his spontaneous draw- ings...

...In Venice, he had first sensed what it meant to be a "gentle- man...

...Scat- tered around her are other tools of the scientist...

...If scholars re- viewed the selection today, it is likely that they would concur in the choice of Duerer as one of the world's half- dozen greatest artists...

...This is in keeping with the new spir- it reigning in the city that was sub- jected to devastating aerial bombard- ments in World War II...

...Why the pomp and circumstance of all these anniversaries...

...He was not going to repeat the mistakes of those before him who had worked without a rational, theoretical foundation...

...I rather think that, far from being an admis- sion of futility, of defeat, the picture is the outcome of some personal crisis in the artist's life, an example of that "black bile" so frequent in men of genius...

...A quick and superficial survey of Duerer's work may yield the impression that he was too clear, toe measured, too premeditated, even toe "sunny," to suit the troubled men and women of our restless age...

...These are, of course, errors in taste...

...But did the mature Duerer's "total clarification of form as the first prin- ciple of art" cause the loss of "imme- diacy of vision," as Woelfflin has sug- gested...

...Why the sud- den eruptions of a year-long excite- ment over a long deceased genius...

...For no cogent reasons, he is being heralded as "Ger- many's first hippie...

...Contrary to general belief, suf- rering and death are the most frequent ;hemes in his total work...

...The grand-seigneur who had been admired by such masters as old Giovanni Bel- lini and young Raphael Sanzio was engagingly aware of his limitations...

...From his sec- ond sojourn in Italy he returned only reluctantly to his native city, a place rather slow to acknowledge his unu- sual distinctions and one where he felt himself to be a parasite because he did not produce exactly what was expected of an artist...

...There is, indeed, something Faustian about Duerer's life-long struggle, against all odds, to find the perfect human shape, by means of a pure, unalterable formula, and, beyond it, his consuming passion to grasp the entire visible universe...

...There is 10 reason to doubt the veracity of his lecrologist who testified that he was "a nan at once great, good, and human," nor the statement that "the sweetness" of his speech was "so great that one wished it would never end...

...Celebrations of anniversaries may seem silly to a philosopher, but they can lead to unforgettable culture-enhanc- ing events—as is, for instance, the cur- rent "Duerer in America" loan ex- hibition at Washington's National Gal- lery of Art (which displays all thirty- six known drawings by Duerer held in North American collections, as well as more than two hundred of his prints...

...After dec- ades of struggle, he felt forced to con- fess, "What beauty is, I do not know," and to add, in the spirit of the devout Christian he was—whatever misgivings he may have harbored about the ne- cessities of the organized church—"God knoweth what is the perfect figure of a man...

...This year's festival was stripped of all un- critical idolatry and of all chauvinist overtones that characterized the earlier Duerer exhibitions...

...The theoretician who wrote this also engraved Milancolia, a. better self-por- trait, perhaps, than the Pinakothek panel, though the figure in the print is a female...

...Duerer, after all, poured the distillation of his genius into his creations in black and white rather than into his oils...

...None of this is false modesty, but rather the result of the superior wis- dom that few attain...

...Yet even a show as limited in scope as the one in Washington demonstrates that there was no lack of impulsiveness, spontane- ity, and fervor in the master...

...This year the world has paid re- spect to the memory of Albrecht Duerer (1471-1528), the German art- ist who was born five centuries ago...

...Duerer's "excessive industry" was not motivated by the desire to make more and more money, but by the eagerness for self-improvement, at all costs...

...His indebtedness to Italian Ren- aissance art is well known...

...Proud the man may have been, but hardly arrogant...

...In this country, Duerer is one of the few old masters whose name is known to everyone above high-school age The portrait medallions over the main portal to New York's Metropolitan Museum, commemorating six supreme geniuses in the field of fine art, include him, along with Michelangelo, Rapha- el, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, and the architect Bramante...

...When we are praised, we turn up our noses and believe it all," he wrote to his confidant, the Nuremberg human- ist, Willibald Pirckheimer, "but per- haps a master-mocker is laughing at us behind our backs...

...The Germans are having problems with their Duerer...

...Except for Michelangelo, he is bet- ter known to us as a person than any of lis colleagues in this period, not only hrough his own writings, but also be- cause some of his most literate con- emporaries eulogized him...

...Duerer was the first German to be self-consciously an artist, instead of contenting himself with the traditional role of "an honest craftsman who pro- duces pictures as a tailor makes coats and suits"—to quote from the late Er- win Panofsky's Life and Art of Al- brecht Duerer, now available as a Princeton University Press paperback...

...By the same token, Duerer's patent concern for geometry, his frequent use of rulei and compass, and his quest for a math- ematical formula for beauty should en- dear him to present-day artists and art- lovers fascinated by science and tech- nology...

...If Melancolia is a self-portrait of sorts, so is the un- daunted knight in the famous engrav- ing who, encountering Death and the Devil, must make his own decisions...

...They range from a self-portrait, done by the precocious boy at thirteen, to magnificent sketches for his last oil, The Four Apostles (now in Munich...

...having completed his studies, he did not keep his findings to himself, but wished posterity to prof- it from his research...

...He made fa- natical attempts to reduce the human form to theorems...

...Ample proof for this has been of- fered by the special "Duerer in Amer- ica" exhibition at our National Gallery in Washington...

...A statement by Sir Kenneth Clark about Leonardo might be applied to Duerer: he knew so much about things because he drew so well, and not the other way around...

...Duerer in Our Time ALFRED WERNER Two years ago it was Rembrandt...

...His most recent book is "Chagall: Watercolors and Gouaches...

...Visitors to Nuremberg have been able to examine his image of himself in his self-portrait, borrowed from Munich's celebrated Pinakothek...