Albrecht Dürer Show Coming to U.S.

"Albrecht Dürer: Art in Transition" at New York's Museum of Biblical Art and two other American locales will have famous prints by the Northern Renaissance artist.

New York's Museum of Biblical Art will present Albrecht Dürer: Art in Transition from July 27 to September 19, 2008. A master of the Northern Renaissance, printmaker, draftsman, painter, designer and art theoretician Dürer (1471-1528), a native of Nuremberg, Germany, expressed himself primarily through his remarkable engravings and woodcuts. Having traveled to Italy twice (1494 to 1495 and 1505 to 1507), he saw great works from classical antiquity as well as his own age. Dürer sought to reconcile the Late Gothic tradition in which he was trained with the innovations in mathematical perspective and color achieved by many of his Italian Renaissance contemporaries. His Four Books of Human Proportion (1528) illustrate the artist's fascination with and understanding of the human body.

Albrecht Dürer: Art in Transition describes the life and times of the artist through prints arranged chronologically. It demonstrates how Dürer managed to elevate the graphic arts into a respected form of visual expression. Drawn entirely from the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany, the exhibition is expected to appear at two other American venues.

The last New York exhibition with any respectable amount of works on paper by the German Renaissance master was The Print in the North: The Age of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.