Exhibition: Dürer's Indecision: The North-South Dichotomy in the prints of Albrecht Dürer (15 Oct-19 Dec 2004)
History of Art’s James Elkins curated this exhibition for UCC's Lewis Glucksman Art Gallery. The exhibition ran from 15 October to 19 December 2004 and was realised in conjunction with the Chester Beatty Library,
It has been recognised since the 19th century that Albrecht Dürer's art vacillated between his native German style and a more Italian manner. One of the 20th century's greatest art historians, Erwin Panofsky, wrote a book proposing that Dürer was caught on the horns of a dilemma, because he could never find a way to blend the techniques he acquired on his trips to Italy with the skills he had learned as a student in Germany. Panofsky thought that the choice was an “innate” division in Dürer's own mind, and that it produced a curiously divided art, never wholly at home either north or south of the
This division has also been taken as a characteristic of German art in general, which could then be said to have no character of its own, but to borrow, magpie-fashion, from the art of other countries. The question was widely debated among German scholars in the first half of the 20th century. It surfaced again in another form in Svetlana Alpers's work, beginning in the 1980s: Alpers proposes all of art history is built around the Italian model, making it difficult to really “see” art made north of the
This issue, sometimes called the North-South dichotomy, is of pressing interest not just to Dürer scholars, but to everyone interested in the history of art. Do some nations have their own style, while others are fundamentally divided among foreign influences? There is no solution to this problem, but it can be observed in its original form in Dürer's prints, as he struggles to reconcile the irreconcilable styles of North and South.
The questions in this exhibition are open-ended. They lead to large, unanswered questions:
- Are there nations that do not have styles of their own?
- Are there nations whose styles are collages of other nations' styles?
- What is a national style?
Questions like these are notoriously hard to talk about sensibly. And yet what could be more important, given the increasing ties among EU nations, and the globalisation of all of art?
