Emblems of a Lost Tradition

By ROBERT HUGHES

There are some shows at which the critic can only stand and point, feeling superfluous. One of these is entering the last month of its run at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City: "Old Master Drawings from the Albertina." It has already been seen at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and on May 26 its contents return to their ancestral roost in Vienna, unlikely ever to be seen again on this side of the Atlantic.

Intimate in scale and address, consisting of a mere 75 items (augmented by 14 of the Morgan Library's own drawings), this is not the kind of exhibition to bring hoarsely clamoring crowds to the gates of Ticketron. Nor can it, by itself, restore to us the sense of the masterpiece (and of the skills that underlie its production) that has been imperiled by post-Tut museum hype. But of those 75 loans at the Morgan, perhaps 40 really are masterpieces in their genre, and the rest are of unassailably high quality. It is rare to see such a concentrated show.

Moreover, its timing is perfect. The American art audience is coming to realize what a vacuum has been created by the collapse of drawing instruction in the art schools. One has only to visit the Morgan--or a lesser but still excellent exhibition at the Drawing Center in Soho, of drawings by the Tiepolos, Canova, Pietro Longhi, Canaletto and others lent by the Museo Correr in Venice--to comprehend the general paucity of graphic skills today. The prospect that anyone in the foreseeable future will make drawings to rival these Albertina loans--even the sketchier ones, like Rembrandt's summing-up of a Dutch bridge and canal in a few electric jottings of bister ink--seems remote.

One of the very greatest drawings on the Morgan's walls is Rubens' portrait of his sister-in-law Susanna Fourment, a likeness breathed onto the paper with lyric, impalpable precision in three schematic chalks (white, black and sanguine), conveying the fullest sense of Rubens' appetite for character studies delicately balanced between intimacy and formality. Viewing such work, one realizes that there is no Rubens (or Durer, or Mantegna, or Watteau) of / the late 20th century; what we see here are emblems of a tradition that ended, except for footnotes, with Picasso.

Among the great European collections of the traditional graphic arts, the Albertina's has always had a special place. Its holdings are vast: more than 1.5 million items, ranging from playing cards to Michelangelo drawings. Yet what counts is not their gross but, so to speak, their net: the core of old master drawings and prints assembled, over a lifetime of passionate connoisseurship, by Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen (1738-1822). At a time when any crocodile can become a "major" collector by scrawling a digit and six zeroes on a check for a B+ Van Gogh, it is worth recalling what Albert and his wife Marie Christine achieved. Until they began collecting in 1773, under the tutelage of the Austrian ambassador to Venice, drawings and prints had been regarded mainly as curiosities or reference objects and were seldom collected in a systematic way. Albert was the first to focus methodically on drawings as an index to the development of artists, while dividing his collection chronologically and by schools; though not a writer, he was one of the fathers of art history.

Great collections feed on disasters that shake leaves from other trees: wars, revolutions, depressions, bankruptcies. Albert's time was full of them, and he missed no chances. When the Austrian Prince de Ligne, who had the most renowned group of French drawings in Europe, was killed in the war against France, Albert bought the cream of his collection; he acquired another unrivaled group of drawings from Count Moriz von Fries when the count's bank failed in 1819; for 30 years he had agents scouring estates from Rome to London. In 20 years, 1792-1811, he spent more than 1.25 million florins on drawings and prints, ten times the outlay on art of the Austrian imperial court itself. During an era when "art investment" was unheard of, this obsessed duke put a quarter of his fortune into collecting. He died at the age of 84--"a thin old man," according to an account cited by Albertina Director Walter Koschatzky, "with tired, sad eyes, who walked through the rooms alone, followed by a little white dog"--with more than 13,000 meticulously chosen and indexed items in his portfolios.

His greatest coup was in 1796, when he received 371 sheets by Durer in a transfer from the imperial court library in Vienna. Not all were genuine, and scores were lost by theft during his lifetime, thanks to a corrupt employee who sold them to dealers, but the Albertina collection today is to Durer what the royal collection at Windsor is to Leonardo.

The Durer loans to this show include his most famous drawing, the Praying Hands, and another study for the same lost altarpiece, a Head of an Apostle (1508), which, Koschatzky notes, is "among the best examples of the art of drawing." This is an understatement, if anything. It takes the eye a while to realize that each line in this drawing, though given the incisiveness and spring of a mark etched with a point, seemingly carved into the paper, is in fact done with the tip of a brush; the delicate gradations of cross-hatching, which do not merely record patches of light and shadow but carry the eye around the forms with irresistible energy, represent an extraordinary alliance of analytic thought and manual control. Not all the drawings in the show are on this inspired level (how could they be?), but even from this tiny sampling, one can see what the heights of connoisseurship can sometimes contain.