W.hat can an artist like Albrecht Dürer who died almost five hundred years ago still offer something new? Actually, this text shouldn’t even begin in London, but in Concord, Massachusetts. A few years ago there was a budget dissolution there that unearthed something that is now preparing to become one of the most expensive old master drawings in art history. But more on that later. Because of course there are good reasons to start in London. This is where the drawing is shown for the first time. Just in time for the opening of the great Dürer exhibition in the National Gallery. Not in this big exhibition, however, but a ten-minute walk further, in a small, but traditional art shop.
The presumably sparse visitors to London in these travel-hostile times should not miss the recently opened National Gallery show. And not even if you only saw the sensational exhibition “Dürer was here” (FAZ of July 24th) in Aachen’s Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum a few months ago. Because “Dürer’s Journeys” is their resumption, but the conservation requirements for the many subtle drawings and prints alone have ensured that the selection of works in London has been changed by two-thirds. In total, this German-British joint project brought together more than 250 works from all over the world, but around a hundred of them each had to be limited to one of the two locations. So it’s a very different presentation in London than in Aachen.
For better or for worse. The much larger number of Dürer paintings compared to Aachen (eleven instead of four) is good. The fame of the National Gallery ensured that the Prado released its iconic male portrait from 1521 for London, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum “Christ among the scribes” from 1506 and the American National Gallery even the Haller Madonna from 1498. An unnamed private collection preferred, contrary to the original announcement, to give its version of Dürer’s small-format Kreuzweg composition from 1527, which has so far only been preserved in two contemporary copies (Bergamo and Dresden), exclusively to London, where the other two pictures are missing ( and thus also the basis of comparison for the somewhat full-bodied attribution). The pandemic-related postponements of the two-part exhibition project provided the excuse for this: the opening in Aachen should have already opened in the previous year, on the five hundredth anniversary of the beginning of Dürer’s trip to the Netherlands, including his several months’ stay in Antwerp in 1520/21. London would then have followed suit last spring.
What makes the heart of the exhibition
This sequence of the two stations is not convincing, however, because Aachen chose a narrowly defined topic with the period of the one-year trip to the Netherlands, which was made clear by a highly concentrated selection of Dürer’s works from the years 1520/21 – and grandiose expanded directly by Dürer influenced art of the time, so that one can speak of an Antwerp laboratory of the Renaissance, which was shown at work in Aachen: a specialist view of the greatest charm. The National Gallery, on the other hand, has expanded this essence and thus also watered it down: on all Dürer trips from the academic years in Alsace and Basel to the two stays in Italy to the Dutch episode. The general comes after the specific. But you have to make concessions to an English audience.
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