CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

The print in the North: the age of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Van Leyden. Selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Exhibition: 7 September 2002 - 23 February 2003

From the museum website

This exhibition features 81 extraordinary engravings, etchings and woodcuts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has one of the finest collections of prints in the world. Made between 1425 and 1550 in Germany and the Netherlands, the prints in The Print in the North are among the most important works of Northern Renaissance art in any medium. The artists represented in the exhibition are among the greatest masters of printmaking, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Martin Schongauer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien and 28 other artists who are credited with developing a craft once practiced only by artisans into a fine art medium.

Most of the prints are small, some measuring only a few inches wide and high. Their subjects vary, from the religious’ Adam and Eve and the Deluge, for example’ to the secular, such as witchcraft and scenes from foreign lands. Ten of the prints in the exhibition are by Dürer, including the 1497-98 woodcut Samson Rending the Lion, which took the art of the woodcut to a new level of technical brilliance, and Melencolia I (1514), Dürer’s masterpiece of engraving. Dürer changed the very idea of printmaking, transforming it into a medium that could contain sophisticated images and meanings. The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the national tour is organized by the American Federation of Arts.

Catalogue

Accompanying The Print in the North is a 60-page reprint of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin of spring 1997, which contains an introductory essay, catalogue entries by the exhibition curators and 70 illustrations.

Other venue

Manchester, The Currier Gallery of Art (March 23 – Jun 17, 2002).