The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure, Courtauld Gallery - exhibition review

At the heart of this small show are self-portraits that offer tantalising glimpses of a German artist whose genius was regrettably unfulfilled, says Brian Sewell
7 November 2013

The announcement by the Courtauld Gallery that its autumn exhibition was to be of drawings by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) when he was young had for me a particular poignancy, for on my 13th birthday I was given a facsimile of the self-portrait that he drew when he too was 13, in 1484. It was a subtle rebuke to my vanity, for I thought myself a dab hand with the pen.

This image of a plain boy with plump cheeks and bulging eyes, muffled in a heavy shirt, pointing at the mirror in which he sees himself with analytical concentration, is not included in the exhibition — perhaps it is too precious to travel from Vienna. It is an astonishingly accomplished drawing; half-length and in three-quarter profile, the pose that enables an artist to see his sitter in greatest depth and volume (and soon to be the fashion in the Italian Renaissance portraiture of Leonardo, Raphael and Titian), both are perfectly understood by the precocious boy, the only flaw the too-small hand; the deliberate generalisation of the drapery allows it to act as a support for the head without in any way distracting our concentration from it. If, as is supposed, this self-portrait is a response to one by his father (a goldsmith and thus a draughtsman too), it is an extraordinarily intelligent challenge, both in the reduction and simplification of detail and the understanding of anatomy — a point perfectly demonstrated by the older man’s misunderstanding of the relationship between his right shoulder, neck and head.

Young Dürer’s drawing of himself is generally agreed to be the earliest survival of his draughtsmanship, but to have been so clever and so independent at 13 must suggest years of earlier practice and constant improvement before this masterpiece became the benchmark from which, I am certain, we must look back as well as forward (a drawing of heads, made when he was nine, is recorded but now lost). For me its absence cripples the Courtauld exhibition. This is, as usual, small, and (not as usual) it fails to make its point, for too few of the exhibits are by Dürer (only a dozen sheets are his drawings — though some are drawn on both sides) and too many are his prints and material by other artists; this gives them relevant and interesting context but I would rather have had 50 drawings by the master himself.

Many not exhibited are illustrated in small in the catalogue, which achieves what the exhibition does not, compelling me to preach two heresies — that exhibitions should be conceived not for fellow art historians but for the wider public who must pay for them, and that, in an age when, for sound conservation reasons, it is impossible to borrow essential exhibits, accurate reproductions of the same size should be displayed. Both would have been a great help with the current exhibition, for visitors who cannot afford the catalogue (or the time to read it), who know nothing of Dürer’s copying the prints of his predecessors, who have not had the privilege of blundering around the great public collections of Europe (or even the British Museum), will leave the Courtauld confused.

Born in Nuremberg in 1471, young Albrecht, if not apprenticed to his father, must have been aware of his skills and practice as a goldsmith, before joining the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and training as a painter and printmaker (concluded in November 1489, aged 18). In April 1490 he set off on four years of “wandering” through “Deutschland” — but what was Deutschland then? — the Holy Roman Empire from Lorraine to Saxony and Brandenburg, the Baltic states of the Teutonic knights, the empire of Matthew Corvinus from Bohemia to Transylvania, and the southern Netherlands, recently ceded to the Hapsburgs in 1477? Was it, perhaps, not Germany as we understand it but Holland, for at the time the many spellings of Deutsch applied as much to Holland as any German state, the distinction between Deutsch and Dutch not clear until the 17th century. Wherever he went it cannot have been too remote, for Albrecht’s own record is that his father “sent me away … (and) … summoned me back” after four years. Within those four years we know that he was in Colmar, Basel, Freiburg and Strasburg — very easy walking or boating distance up the valley of the Rhine.

Youth before a potentate, c. 1493
© Oxford, Ashmolean Museum

The period of the drawings in the Courtauld exhibition is 1491 to 1496, the years of his wandering, his marriage to Agnes Frey, their settling either in the house of her father Hans (the usual custom for young couples) or in his father’s house, and the foundation of his reputation as the Apelles of Nuremberg — but only one of the dozen sheets is reliably inscribed with a date, 1493, and the date given to all the others is guesswork. The felicitous and fluent little sketch inscribed “Mein Agnes” (the monogram AD is, as so often, false), probably dates from 1494 when they married in mid-July (the use of mein suggests a fondness that did not last), but its consummate rapidity in such casual and momentary observation is the benchmark against which we must judge another sketch of an unaware sitter, a portrait of Michael Wolgemut snoozing. This is hesitant, uncertain and corrected, much of the hatching random and meaningless; it must surely have been hurriedly snatched in his apprentice years. That the catalogue gives it the date c.1493-4 even suggests uncertainty in the identification as Wolgemut, for he was in Nuremberg and Dürer was on the Lorraine leg of his journeying.

The 1493 drawing is of two bare male legs in slippers, scrawny, unprepossessing and careless in terms of anatomy, and for no good reason presumed to be Dürer’s; it is the cursory work of moments. A more finished study — of A Wise Virgin — on the sheet’s other side, is presumed to be of the same date, but the penmanship and intellectual attack are so alien that I am inclined to think that when Dürer drew the legs he was re-using the blank side of a considerably earlier drawing that had been discarded. So natural in his self-portrait at 13, how could he have become so unnatural at the end of his apprenticeship — for this Virgin is awkwardly disjointed, the details of her hair and dress counteracting the underlying form — unless, as an apprentice, he was compelled to work in archaic idioms derived from masters more established than himself? Figures of the Virgin and Child on other sheets are obviously based on images conceived by Wolgemut and his contemporary in Colmar, Martin Schongauer, widely influential through his prints; they suggest a near obsession with the complexities of dress and drapery. On one we find a study of a comparatively enormous hand, far more real than any other element, unrelated to the backward-looking artificiality of the composition, yet seeming to hover mysteriously and protectively over the seated Virgin — it too suggests the later re-use of a discarded sheet.

On the reverse of another, The Holy Family is a hasty self-portrait, given the date 1491-92, when Dürer was 20 or 21. It is an honest and immediate rapid sketch, not (as was that at 13) a finished presentation drawing; ugly of feature and profoundly melancholy in mood, staring directly at us, his hand shades his eyes from the strong light that is falling from the left. It was a matter of minutes in the making, and very, very private. In a painting of 1493 (Louvre) he depicted himself as sultrily handsome, if thoughtful and mysterious, and indeed in all his paintings of himself there is (as with the post-Romantic Courbet and Feuerbach) an element of such self-adoration as might compel a man to promote himself as ideally beautiful. Only his drawings tell the truth, none more nakedly than that in Weimar revealing his syphilitic orchitis.

Selfie: Dürer has even been identified as the model for The Wise Virgin
© Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Dürer has even been identified as the model for The Wise Virgin and for the youth in The Young Couple, but I think this improbable, for the physical type also appears as St Sebastian in a large drawing in Frankfurt (not exhibited), and again, rather more stylised, in A Youth with an Executioner, borrowed from the British Museum. About this last lurks a disturbing element of humour: the kneeling youth, naked, is remarkably relaxed, while the stooping executioner places an affectionate hand on the boy’s left shoulder, thrusts his codpiece under the boy’s right arm and, looking directly at the spectator, appears to be about to break into a broad grin. The relationship between these boys in a painter’s workshop posing for an altarpiece and hardly able to contain their laughter is interpreted by the curator as “an intense psychological moment”.

That Dürer portrays himself in the Youth before a Potentate, I am happy to agree, but I cannot see that this awkwardly, even ineptly, constructed composition in widely disparate drawing styles can date from 1493, the year of the beautiful Louvre self-portrait, for, at the same time, to draw so clumsily but paint so well must surely have been impossible. As I sense from his early drawings a genius constrained, his intellectual development frustrated by archaic German tradition and practice, by, indeed, the Gothic North, I interpret this as an allegory of Dürer’s predicament, the young man compelled to bow his knee to established authority, his ambition stifled. If only, at 19, instead of hither and yon in Germany, he had in his four wandering years made for Italy, his potentially international genius might have been fulfilled, but this he did not do until 1505, to sit at the feet of Giovanni Bellini in Venice; by then, however, into his thirties, famous in his native land, his work resolutely German, it was too late for any Italian influence to change his course profoundly.

My advice to the visitor is to enjoy the drawings in this exhibition as best he can, and ignore the scholarship. My advice to the scholars who curated it is, next time, to be sceptical about preceding scholarship, to be prepared to revise and abandon it rather than feel bound to maintain it, to see only what is there and not what the eminent elders of art history have said what is to be seen, to make judgments of quality, and to assist the visitor with reproductions when the necessary real things cannot be had. To have exhibited every drawing by Dürer, whether true or in facsimile, up to 1497, the year in which we are certain of his settlement in Nuremberg, would have been a wonderful achievement. As it is, we must make do with bits and bobs, and compliant scholarship.

The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure is at the Courtauld Gallery, WC2 (020 7848 2526, courtauld.ac.uk) until Jan 12, 2014. Daily 10am-6pm. Admission £6, concessions available. £3 all day Mondays.

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