Double Vision. Albrecht Dürer & William Kentridge, München 2015 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reframing Albrecht Dürer: The Appropriation of Art, 1528–1700
2013
Focusing on the ways his art and persona were valued and criticized by writers, collectors and artists subsequent to his death, this book examines the reception of the works of Albrecht Durer. The author traces carefully how Durer's paintings, prints, drawings and theoretical writings traveled widely, and were appropriated into new contexts and charged with different meanings. The volume includes illustrations of numerous imitative works after Durer.
View of Arco by Albrecht Dürer
2015
Albrecht Dürer's artwork encompasses a vast array of media, including prints, paintings, watercolors, and drawings, as well as various styles, some adopted from other artists and others unique to Dürer. Perhaps the least explored portion of Dürer's art by scholars is his watercolors.
Dürer, self-portraiture and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
2011
In August 1995, Burlington Magazine published an essay by Jane Langley named Pre-Raphaelites or ante-Dürerites? The writing, in spite of its title, seldom mentioned the master printmaker, and focused on Jan van Eyck and his mirror. While the name of the Flemish creator is strong, the weight of Albrecht Dürer’s legacy on nineteenth-century English art is still underrated. For instance, with the help of background information and constant comparison, we can see that the way nineteen-century English artists portrayed themselves owes a lot to the self-discoveries of the German artist. The ideal of an artist as a noble being who is aware of his possibilities, almost god-like and spotless, is repeated in the forms members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood presented themselves through the years.
Between 1514 and 1515, Albrecht Dürer finished forty-five drawings in the margins of a printed book of hours for Emperor Maximilian I. 1 The drawings illustrate the first ten quires of the book; the other quires were completed by a team of talented German artists, among them Lucas Cranach, Hans Burgkmair, Hans Baldung Grien, Jörg Breu, and Albrecht Altdorfer. The quires are now dispersed over collections in Munich and Besançon, with the pages decorated by Dürer all in Munich. They are drawn with pen and ink, not only in black ink but also in red, olive-green, and violet.
At the Threshold of Painting. The Man of Sorrows by Albrecht Dürer
Renaissance Meta-Painting, 2020
In one of the oldest paintings attributed to Dürer, the young artist leads the viewer with 1 strikinglypaintedstreaksoffreshbloodtothethresholdbetweenlifeanddeath(fig.1). The Man of Sorrows, now in the Karlsruhe Kunsthalle, is assumed to have originated in 1493 when he was a painter’s apprentice in Strasbourg – although Martin Schongauer, the master with whom he wanted to apprentice after his time in Colmar, had died just before Dürer’s arrival.2 The painting has been described as exemplary for his future master works.3 Scholarship has identified several potential models that Dürer might have looked to in the creation of this unique work, but the originality of the composition, especially regarding the polyvalence of the chosen space (the cave of his tomb, a potential reference to the side wound, or the threshold between earthly and heavenly realms), and the chosen moment (before or after his resurrection) has not been dealt with adequately. This contribution will first argue that the paradoxical representation of fresh blood traces on Christ’s body and crucifixion wounds is a mode of artistic play that Dürer employed in order to conflate temporal and spatial layers combined in this painting. Dürer uses blood as a ‘marker’ to emphasize the edge: the shift from Christ’s earthly to eternal life, the transition of his body from visible to invisible, and the threshold between the terrestrial cave and the hereafter. The second point reconsiders whether Dürer’s painting was made within the context of his evident strive for ‘naturalistic representation’, as has been demonstrated by Stephanie Buck, Daniel Hess and Stephanie Porras. The panel might also be read as an expression of the artist’s intention to demonstrate the power and limits of mimetic representation of time and space. In my third point, I show how Dürer was actively engaging in artistic exploration of what ‘representation’ could be. Although we have no written statements by the artist from this decade, I am using his later comments on colour as a model how his contemporaries and beholders at the beginning of sixteenth century might have seen, read, and understood Dürer’s double-sided composition. The front showing the Man of Sorrows, along with the interpretation of the back as a colour experiment, places Dürer’s early masterpiece in a wider cultural context of artistic endeavors exploring the threshold between human and divine creation – a cultural context defined by theology, alchemy, and incipient art discourse.
Dürer's Rhinoceros Underway: the Epistemology of the Copy in the Early Modern Print
This essay examines the knowledge-making properties of the copy and the role of stock images in sharpening visual literacy. With its armored plates, horns, profuse speckling, and stark profile, Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut from 1515 visually epitomized the rhinoceros for early modern Europeans who had never seen one, and even those who had. Dürer’s visual presentation of the rhinoceros carried with it a cachet that later copyists saw fit to preserve. As this essay will argue, Dürer’s woodcut ripened in future repackaging through its copies. First, copies confirmed the beast’s actual appearance through multiple citations. Second, perhaps more importantly, copies sensitized viewers who were increasingly able to recognize the animal as it charged into a host of new settings. The rhinoceros connected diverse genres and audiences by means of a recognizable and highly particular image. Outfitted with persuasive rhetorical guarantees, Dürer’s rhinoceros was dressed for any occasion and became a touchstone for how print functioned in early modernity.