Prints Shine at Fogg Museum’s Public Reopening: What to Look for on Your Fall Visit to Harvard’s Galleries
Harvard University’s Fogg Museum was the last museum I visited before institutions dolefully closed their doors in March 2020. Had I known, I would have stayed longer.
The museum welcomes visitors back with two new special exhibitions, “States of Play: Prints from Rembrandt to Delsarte” and “A Colloquium in the Visual Arts.” A third, “Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970,” opens September 17.
“States of Play” offers viewers the chance to untangle the recondite particulars of printmaking terminology and techniques. Highlights include a group of prints by Picasso featuring the portrait of Jacqueline Roque (the artist’s second and final wife). The series illustrates the linocut method from start to finish; at each stage, the surface of a single linoleum block is carved and inked with a new color. The nine prints culminate in a surrealist style tableau complete with Miró-like masses of amorphic primary colors and severe black lines. A series of curved strokes climb the print’s left edge like the bloated abdomen of a striated caterpillar.
It is in the neighboring “Colloquium in the Visual Arts,” however, where visitors can find one of art history’s greatest prints — Albrecht Dürer’s Four Riders of the Apocalypse, 1497. Housed in the museum’s Teaching Gallery, the exhibition’s accompanying wall text informs viewers that the space currently displays objects at the center of Harvard’s Humanities 20, an undergraduate “introduction to the study of the humanities through major works of art and architecture from around the world.” Lucky kids.
Of course, I too studied Dürer’s legendary woodcut as a bright-eyed freshman in my own art history survey course. My experience, however, suffered from never actually seeing the work in person. Yes, my professors proclaimed Dürer’s importance. Yes, they acknowledged his finesse as a printmaker and emphasized the huge impact image dissemination had on European society at the end of the 15th century. But my God, how much is lost between the real thing and a mediated image filtered through an outdated projector.
The 11 x 15-inch print is astonishingly detailed — I spent minutes examining the toenails on the gruesomely skeletal foot of the horseman in the foreground. More than the ability to witness such detail in person however, I was struck by the sheer energy Dürer managed to infuse within the work, all through the exacting placement of fine lines. It is the nature of woodcutting — a relief process in which the printed image is created by cutting away volumes and preserving outlines — that figures often feel rigidly two-dimensional. The vigor of Dürer’s characters is almost upsettingly palpable. Indeed, my heart rate increased as my eyes absorbed the scene’s frantic energy. The horsemen thunder across the page, their overlapping forms propelled forward by a background of thin horizontal lines; the most distant rider draws an arrow that points the way. The largest and most central figure lifts behind him a set of swinging scales, the instrument of judgement in humanity’s final days. There is certainly chaos, but no confusion: we are meant to be scared.
The aforementioned wall text states that “each week, students will immerse themselves in the cultural and imaginary world of a single artwork.” It’s a good reminder that the art of looking requires patience and focus. And that a truly exceptional artwork, of which this exhibition has many, can easily sustain one’s interest for an entire week, if not a lifetime.
