The Harvard University Art
Museums will present a landmark exhibition exploring Albrecht
Dürer’s (1471–1528) graphic versions of the Passion of Christ.
Durer’s Passions focuses on the narrative of Christ’s last days on
earth as drawn and printed by Dürer in six series throughout his
career. His preoccupation with the Passion of Christ was linked to
his constant self-investigation, both creative and spiritual, and
reflects his response to the social and religious evolution of his era.
Duerer’s Passions will present each series side-by-side to allow a
new visual reading of the works in order to provide a new
understanding and appreciation of an artist who has been
scrutinized by critics and the public alike since he began working.
Encompassing nearly 100 works, Dürer’s Passions will include works
from the Fogg Art Museum’s collections as well as extremely rare
works loaned by the British Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston; and German collections in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Bremen.
Organized by Jordan Kantor, doctoral candidate in the Department
of the History of Art and Architecture, the exhibition will be on view
September 6 through December 3, 2000, in the Busch-Reisinger
Museum, its only venue.
The organization of Dürer’s Passions is the result of an important
collaboration between Kantor and Marjorie B. Cohn, the Fogg Art
Museum’s Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints. As a teaching
institution, we are dedicated to supporting the research and
scholarship of students and providing a platform for new scholarly
voices to emerge, said James Cuno, the Elizabeth and John Moors
Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. The Fogg Art
Museum’s print collection is one of the foremost in the country. To
complement the works from the Fogg’s far-reaching holdings of
works by Dürer and to fully examine the exhibition’s curatorial
premise, loans of extremely rare works from European collections
were necessary. The special appeal for loans for Dürer’s Passions
elicited a positive response among major institutions and private
collections, and these loans were granted because the particular
spiritual and intellectual rationale of the exhibition will provide new
understanding and appreciation of Dürer as well as of this pivotal
moment in Western social, political, and religious history.
The working life of Albrecht Dürer, who was the greatest artistic
figure in Germany before the modern era, spanned the Gothic,
Renaissance, and Reformation periods. Trained as a painter and
printmaker, in his early twenties Dürer became interested in making
prints. Although Dürer traveled to Italy and constantly worked to
integrate Renaissance humanist concepts such as perspective, the
primacy of antiquity, and the study of the nude into his art, he was
principally a religious artist. Dürer worked on the subject of Christ’s
Passion throughout his career, and because these images span his
entire working life, they also provide a window onto his artistic
development as a whole.
Dürer’s lifelong focus on scenes of Christ’s Passion, from his earliest
activity as a journeyman traveling through a still-Gothic Northern
Europe until the last years of his life, when the Protestant
Reformation was engulfing Germany, provide insight on his own
religious temperament, noted Cohn. That he identified with Christ
is explicit in his self-portrait drawing as the Man of Sorrows, and this
is further revealed through his repeated rendering of the Passion in
multiple series. Dürer’s Passions will explore artistic genius and
spirituality as it developed over the course of one lifetime spent at
the historic European crossroads of art and religion.
Dürer’s preoccupation with the Passion of Christ was a personal
quest for the source of his creativity, and it was also a personal
response to the cultural and theological transformation of his
society. In the early 16th century, most European art was linked to
religion, and the Passion was a primary subject. Dürer’s insistent
revisitation of the subject reveals the special attention and
importance he accorded the Passion; however, neither the
Renaissance nor the Reformation is sufficient to explain his
accomplishment, and Dürer’s Passions reveals how the individual
soul and the larger world nourish each other.
Over the course of his career, printmaking became as important a
medium for him as painting and drawing, and he set new technical
and emotive standards for both woodcuts and engravings, infusing
traditional subjects like Christ’s Passion with a new relevance and
immediacy. Working in formats larger than the traditional prints of
his era, Dürer was able to work in greater detail and ultimately
develop a new pictoral vocabulary for the medium, added Kantor.
Dürer’s Passions will be installed to provide a close visual reading of
all of the series. Traditionally, when matted in frames, prints and
drawings are considered in isolation. Dürer’s Passions will present
the prints mounted side by side on the walls like cartoon-strips, to
heighten understanding of the intricate linkages of linear rendering,
pose, expression, and iconographic detail that convey meaning and
set mood from one frame to the next. Because many of his prints
were conceived of for daily prayers, Dürer paid great attention to
how they would work together in sequence, and this presentation
will also allow viewers to see more clearly the overall narrative style
within each series. As these six cycles have not previously been
shown together, this arrangement also provides an important, new
way to look at an artist who has been scrutinized by critics and the
public alike since he began his artistic output.
Also on view will be examples of Dürer’s Passion series bound as
books, their original format, from the Fogg as well as Harvard’s
Houghton Library and other special collections. In addition, drawings
that provide insight into his development of the series will be
exhibited, including seven versions of The Agony in the Garden
(Christ on the Mount of Olives). Prints of The Crucifixion will be
complemented by Dürer’s astounding life-sized, close-up charcoal
drawing of Christ’s head in his death agony, from the collection of
the British Museum, which has never before been lent to any
exhibition, outside Great Britain.
To accompany the exhibition, a scholarly catalogue will be published;
its main essay, by Kantor, will provide new scholarship for the field
through an exploration of Dürer’s aesthetic, spiritual, and stylistic
development and how the artist was integrally linked to a major
moment of his era. Dürer simultaneously grew along with the
dramatic changes engulfing society during his lifetime and
contributed to its development. A public lecture by Elizabeth
Guenther, an authority on Dürer’s narrative style, will be given in
mid-October in conjunction with the exhibition.
IMAGE:
Christ in Limbo (Harrowing of Hell),
1510
Woodcut; 39.6 x 28.4
Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop
M10314
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