Dürer's Echo:
A Contemporary Etcher
Albrecht Dürer excelled at both woodcut and engraving.
We have just seen an example of a contemporary artist who responds to
Dürer as a woodcut artist. Dan Kirchhefer responds just as thoughtfully
to Dürer's intaglio prints (etchings and engravings).
Kirchhefer often pays tribute to the virtuosity of earlier
artists by incorporating elements of their works in his own beautifully
crafted intaglio prints. In reference to Dürer's famous "praying
hands" Kirchhefer admits that "most people know and like the hands.
I've always been fond of the feet and the dogs."
Kirchhefer's
print Sloth, from his series on the seven deadly sins, includes
paraphrases of prints by several artists, including two engravings by
Dürer. The figure of "Melancholy" from Dürer's famous engraving Melencolia
I appears in reverse in the center of Kirchhefer's print. The dog
floating near the upper center of Sloth is taken from a Dürer
engraving, Saint Jerome in His Study. Quotations from Giovanni
Tiepolo and James Ensor also appear in Kirchhefer's print.
Like the works by Huck and Kirchhefer discussed here,
the disparate works in the exhibition seem to have little in common,
but they share an echo of Dürer. Exhibiting these works together
offered some insight into prints as a community of images and underscored
the achievement of one of the medium's great masters working half a
millennium ago.
* * *
Label
copy of the exhibition held at the Spencer Museum of Art, University
of Kansas, Sept. 18 to Nov. 14, 1999.
For further reading
Anzeiger des Germanisches National-Museums 1940 bis
1953: Vom Nachleben Dürers. Beiträge der Epoche von 1530 bis
1650 (Berlin, 1954)
Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Vorbild Dürer.
Kupferstiche und Holzschnitte Albrecht Dürers im Spiegel der europäischen
Druckgraphik des 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1978)
Held, Julius, ed., Dürer Through Other Eyes:
His Graphic Work Mirrored in Copies and Forgeries of Three Centuries
(Williamstown, 1975)
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