Dürer's youthful figure drawings

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Larry Silver reviews the catalogue of a ‘small but choice exhibition’

The Young Dürer. Drawing the Figure edited by Stephanie Buck and Stephanie Porras

Hard on the heels of ‘The Early Dürer’ (2012), a huge anniversary exhibition in the artist's hometown of Nuremberg, the recent display of experimental figure drawings, reproduced in this catalogue, reminds viewers – with characteristic, exquisite Courtauld selectivity – that less can truly yield more.  It focuses exclusively – and for the first time in an exhibition – on the artist's formative years, the early 1490s, when he first ventured out for his journeyman's exploration to such centres as Basel and Strasbourg, perhaps also to Frankfurt.  Already his fascination with the human body played a central role, and Dürer started with himself.  He also built on recent innovations, along with the talent in his native Franconia, especially two masters who make cameo appearances in the exhibition: Martin Schongauer of Alsace and the anonymous Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, probably from the nearby Middle Rhineland.

The catalogue presents essays by a distinguished international roster: Buck is an accomplished curator of German drawings, and worked on the Courtauld's Lucas Cranach exhibition, Temptation in Eden (2007).  She is complemented by a young American academic, Stephanie Porras (Tulane University), who also worked with the recent Nuremberg team.  They enlisted two distinguished outsiders: David Freedberg of Columbia University and Michael Roth, senior curator of German drawings in Berlin and organizer of the definitive Grünewald drawings exhibition there (2008).  A final essential contribution to Dürer studies is a jointly written technical analysis of Dürer's early ink drawings – a lasting touchstone for scholarship.

Buck's essay introduces the artist and his travels but already discusses the self-studies and the female figures by young Dürer.  Freedberg sensitively focuses on ‘The Artist's Limbs’ and their expressive potential in a variety of poses and gestures.  Porras counters the grain of a celebration of individual genius and personal formation by inspecting what turn out to be a surprising number of copies, still with Dürer's emerging hand but crucial to his learning process.  Roth's essay builds upon that approach and searchingly analyses the successive influences on young Albrecht from Schongauer and the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, but also Andrea Mantegna, as he considers ‘Drawing for a Purpose’.

In characteristic Courtauld fashion, as with the show Buck curated on the theme of Michelangelo's Dream (2010), a single drawing from the permanent collection provides a node for several meaningful comparisons: Dürer's Wise Virgin (1493; no. 1), with a verso of the artist's own leg.  That theme closely links to Schongauer and other German artists in the concluding section of the exhibition, ‘The Wise and the Foolish’.  But it also prompts the first section, ‘Drawing the Figure’, showing how the artist drew repeated themes of body parts (the spur for Freedberg) as well as favoured figures, such as the Virgin and Child, sleepers, or several more finished pairs, courting couples, or a young man and an executioner (British Museum, no. 5). 

Dürer was a learner, responding to the stimuli of others, especially Schongauer, but even from Italian art, chiefly prints.  One might wish for a fuller parallel presentation of the emerging print techniques used by Dürer at the same time, though several comparisons do appear in the catalogue.  The focus here remains fixed on drawings, all of them figures. 

One particularly fine single figure, St. Catherine (c.1495; no. 26) from Cologne, prompts an extended analysis about whether Dürer based this kneeling female on an unidentified Italian model, but this work also shows his command of pose and lighting and reveals his confident mastery and artistic maturation.  The perennial vexed question of whether Dürer actually visited Italy in 1494, as long claimed, was challenged last year in Nuremberg's revisionist re-examination but is not directly addressed in the Courtauld catalogue.

Altogether, this small but choice exhibition was a pleasure for scholars and art-lovers alike.  In the catalogue, curator Stephanie Buck offers a clear focus and a lastingly original body of scholarship, especially of rare technical analysis of drawings.  But any lover of great art-making will admire the developing personal mastery of Albrecht Dürer.

The Young Dürer. Drawing The Figure   edited by Stephanie Buck and  Stephanie Rorras is published by The Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2013. 288 pp., 186 illus.  ISBN 978-1-907372-53-7