Word: durer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cranach did it, Van Eyck did it, even Hans Pleydenwurff did it. But nobody drew the birds, bees and flowers better than Albrecht Durer, the German master who died in 1528, leaving a legacy of nature illustrations that have been admired (and copied by forgers) for centuries. Albrecht Durer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the Renaissance by Fritz Koreny (New York Graphic Society; 278 pages; $75), compares such renowned works of botanical and zoological observation as Hare and The Large Piece of Turf with their imitations. The result is a scholarly view of authentication problems in 16th century...
...Durer meets Daffy Duck, high fashion flutters beside wildflowers, and movie posters compete with Queen Mary' s dolls' house in a season' s pick that ranges from the opulent to the offbeat...
Johns cites his own early paintings, those of his contemporaries (Barnett Newman, for instance) and those of past masters -- Durer, Grunewald, Picasso. His indirectness and liking for allusion coexist with something akin to physical rage: the body parts in his paintings speak of dismemberment, not mere anatomy. His diagonal cross-hatchings are both subtle and banal, for Johns' scrutiny flickers in a perplexing, teasing way between simple pattern recognition and active, probing attention -- so that something quite unremarkable as an image can swell up into a ravishing pictorial event. Sometimes one is excluded; it is like eavesdropping...
...Weston kept their goal but reversed the approach, bearing down on the details as a new way to make the mundane suggest the divine. At first glance, the scientific exactness of his still lifes makes them look as though they were descended from the nature sketches of Albrecht Durer. But in ambition they were more akin to the work of the European abstractionist painters. Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian wanted not only to wipe clean the slate of Western art but to scrub consciousness itself, clearing it of worldly distractions as a way of opening it up to the beyond. Though...
Berger strengthens his arguments with vivid prose. No windy academic generalities here. He likes sudden beginnings: "The day before yesterday a close friend of mine killed himself by blowing his brains out." He describes Albrecht Durer's view of the Apocalypse as the day when "the sun would go out, and the heavens would be rolled up and put away like a manuscript." He reports that the mosques of Istanbul are "the colour of ripe honeydew melons." He encapsulates a special quality in Bonnard's art by calling it "an art about cultivating one's own garden...