Discover the Met's outstanding drawings collection

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Dürer and Beyond. Central European Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400–1700

By Stijn Alsteens and Freyda Spira

 At long last the Metropolitan Museum in New York has arrived at the catalogue of its impressive collection of Germanic drawings of the early modern era.  Not since the careful North American loan exhibition catalogue for Princeton (1982) by Thomas Kaufmann, Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540–1680  has such scholarship been focused on this corpus.  The two Metropolitan curators in charge bring considerable expertise to a hundred works from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Switzerland, highlighted by the cover boy, Albrecht Dürer. 

This collection will never rival the great cabinets of Berlin and Basel, which together provided a great loan exhibition selection to Washington (From Schongauer to Holbein, 1999), nor the Albertina in Vienna, but this formidable permanent collection in North America, previously too little known, now has a permanent catalogue of high-quality research as well as high production values. 

While examples by any artist are fewer in number, highlight drawings abound, including the following: Schongauer, Dürer (five examples, plus the extensive underdrawing of the unfinished Salvator Mundi, c.1505, no. 8), Altdorfer, Huber, Graf, court artists from Munich (Sustris, Candid) and Prague (von Aachen, Heinz), and even later notable emigré artists from the seventeenth century (Knüpfer, Hollar, Sandrart).  There are also good examples by less celebrated artists and a number of remarkably high-quality new discoveries, especially from the later periods.

Organized chronologically in ten sections, the catalogue clusters related works by region and also generously provides comparisons in colour reproductions to situate these drawings within each artist's oeuvre.  A brief introductory essay by Alsteens chronicles the history of the collection.  After a useful map frontispiece, a brief biography prefaces each artist's works.  As one would hope from a scholarly collection catalogue, collectors' marks and watermarks are indicated as well as literature, dimensions, provenance, and any inscriptions; an additional item attends to the chemical content of pigments, where appropriate.  For example, for Dürer's Head of a Young Woman (1522; no. 11) on green prepared paper, the inventory notes ‘black chalk, lead white heightening, on paper prepared with a mixture of malachite and azurite’.

As funding considerations curtail the era of blockbuster exhibitions with lavish loans, museums now are wisely turning inward to provide focus shows that build upon their permanent holdings, and they also are producing these much-needed catalogue volumes of scholarship.  For the Metropolitan and other great museums, the first impulse was to publish paintings, the people's choice and the most familiar works on the walls.  But often the drawings languished in their boxes, much less well known (though the Met has frequent, changing exhibitions of prints and drawings in dedicated galleries for aficionados of graphic works).  Now every serious student and passionate amateur can know about this outstanding collection (stronger and much larger than the Met's small-but-choice German paintings, also being catalogued at the moment). 

And to have such works available in a clear and well-produced published catalogue volume rather than just an online reference means that browsing and discovery can still be pursued between book covers.  Compliments and congratulations to the museum curators and their supportive director!

Dürer and Beyond. Central European Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400–1700  by Stijn Alsteens and Freyda Spira is published by Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and distributed by Yale University Press, 2012. 272 pp. 325 colour and 5 mono illus, $65.00. ISBN 978-0-300-17951-4