ART REVIEW : A Fine Line, Sans Famous Labels

George Goldner, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s funny, articulate drawings curator, has a refreshingly unsnooty bias. “I’m extremely proud of the major artists we’ve been able to collect, but I often wish we could show drawings without labels . . . then viewers could appreciate the art for itself without famous art names to lull, distract or threaten them,” he says.

In that spirit “German and Swiss Drawings” (through May 21) is short on coffee-table art-book masters and long on very fine drawings by prominent artists working in the German-speaking areas of Europe in the late 15th to mid-16th centuries.

The collection ranges from finished works to jewelry design, to studies for etchings, to sketches for stained-glass windows, reminding a painting-prejudiced 20th Century that artistic output from the period was varied and--especially in the north--commingled with craft.

The late 1400s and 1500s marked the height of the Italian Renaissance with all its classicized and analytical idealism. These works emphasize that a separate, uniquely northern impulse existed. Using pen and ink, gouache, point of brush, chalk and wash, artists render religious and domestic scenes, portraits, beautiful Audubon-ish animal studies, even landscapes, each sharing the eccentric naturalism and nervous vitality that has marked Germanic art from the earliest illuminations at Reims.

The foremost German draftsman, Albrecht Durer, is sampled in “Study of the Good Thief,” an expressive little drawing that uses tight cross-hatchings in brown ink to craft the lumpy, utterly human anatomy and psychic agitation of the thief crucified with Jesus. Durer was among the few Germans thoroughly schooled in Italian art and we see this in “Stag Beetle.” Rendered in deepest emerald watercolor and gouache, capturing minute detail from the bug’s bristly appendages to its crisp encased body and the perspectival shadows it casts on the all-white ground, the work is gorgeous.

The German Danube School produced the most formally and expressively animated works of the region. The show includes painter Albrecht Altdorfer’s excellent (and only known) stained-glass design, “Christ Carrying the Cross,” and Wolf Huber’s visionary, show-stealing “The Conversion of St. Paul.”

From the area we now call Switzerland, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch used the finest black line, dramatic white and gilt highlights to limn a mob of gymnastic, hideous tormentors marauding an anguished Christ and turning staid biblical iconography into palpable violence. Just to prove Goldner’s well-taken point that generalizations are delimiting when it comes to enjoying these wonderful works, around the same time Deutsch’s well-known compatriot, Hans Holbein the Younger, produced “Portrait of a Cleric or Scholar” depicting the quintessential humanist, drafted with all the metered elegance the Renaissance stood for.