Opening Windows to Slighted Wonders

If the academic field of art history needed an official advocate for the joys of scholarly discipline and arcane research, it could do no better than Lee Hendrix. A Princeton-educated specialist in 16th and 17th century Northern European drawing and graphic arts, Hendrix heads the department of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and she has a rare talent for making her work sound as exciting as unlocking the human genetic code.

Still, those who think they have witnessed Hendrix in full bloom--eyes shining as she exudes enthusiasm about an artistic discovery--haven’t seen anything yet. Her latest project, “Painting on Light: Drawing and Stained Glass in the Age of Durer and Holbein,” a landmark traveling show that opens at the Getty on Tuesday, has propelled the 46-year-old curator to a new high.

“I will go on to do other exhibitions, God willing, but this is the project of a lifetime,” she said in an interview at the museum. “It’s so rewarding to work on great art that has been overlooked, in a field that is almost entirely undiscovered.”

Teaming up with Barbara Butts, a Harvard-educated curator at the St. Louis Art Museum, Hendrix became deeply involved with “an idea whose time had come.” Stained glass is usually considered in terms of medieval cathedrals or contemporary handicrafts, not the pinnacle of Northern European Renaissance art. While modern stained glass is often composed of solid-color pieces joined by leading, individual sections of Renaissance stained glass are typically painted in great detail. And most of the major artists of the German and Swiss Renaissance designed stained glass, which are equivalent to the best paintings and graphic arts of the period, Hendrix said.

“People think of stained glass as mostly colored glass and lead. In this exhibition they will discover objects that are painted with the same amount of skill as you would find in a panel painting or a fresco painting,” Hendrix said. “When Albrecht Durer was a young artist in the 1490s, he created a whole new graphic language--an unprecedented vocabulary with swelling and tapering lines. We associate his extraordinary, forceful work with his great woodcuts like the ‘Apocalypse’ series. What is not really known is that the vocabulary that signaled the beginning of the Swiss and German Renaissance was equally revolutionary in the field of stained glass.”

What’s more, she said, the “tortured faces, forceful poses and deep landscapes” that invested Durer’s better-known work with “a new sense of psychology” are also evident in his designs for glass. As for Hans Holbein the Younger, the other artist highlighted in the show, he is known for portraits of King Henry VIII of England and his court, but he introduced subtle painted qualities to stained glass and contributed an architectural vocabulary and figures of classical grandeur to the medium.

*

The exhibition of about 60 glass panels and 80 preparatory drawings, dating from 1480 to 1530, is primarily drawn from collections in the United States, Germany and Switzerland. But the process of assembling them was far more complicated that it might appear. “It was one long process of discovery,” Hendrix said, launching into an animated account of the show’s conception and evolution.

“Barbara Butts had the idea for a much smaller exhibition of stained glass and related drawings from Nuremberg, strongly focusing on Durer, in 1987 when she was assistant curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but the show fell through for lack of funding,” she said. Meanwhile, the Getty was building its fledgling drawings collection, which now includes one of America’s finest holdings of drawings for stained glass from the Durer and Holbein period. As plans for a new program of loan exhibitions at the Getty Center shaped up, Hendrix began talking to Butts about a joint effort.

“We thought it would be much more interesting if we expanded her idea to Southern Germany and Switzerland, to include Holbein and other wonderful artists of the Durer period,” Hendrix said. “A collaborative venture took off in 1990, and it’s been all these years in the making.”

Many important pieces of stained glass have been lost simply because of its fragility or because of changing taste. In addition, great collections of German glass were decimated during World War II. Making matters even more challenging for the curators, no one had ever compiled a census of drawings made for stained glass or correlated them with the glass panels.

“We did massive research for months and months, trying to canvass all the glass that had survived and to see which panels related to drawings,” Hendrix said. “It was an amazing task because the last overview of the subject was a book written in 1913 in German, and it was based on a collection in Berlin that was 80% destroyed during the war. So we had to go to hundreds of sources.

“After we collected all the drawings and matched them with the stained glass, we spent about three months traveling all over Germany and Switzerland to the tiniest towns, trying to ascertain what survived, where it was and if it could be lent. The ownership of the glass is very complicated; a whole tapestry of people had to weigh in on decisions about whether it could be lent,” she said. “It was such a journey. Three months on three different trips, one of which took us to 14 cities in 28 days. But we had to speak to the lenders, to explain why we needed their objects.”

*

The curators’ research also led Hendrix to important works much closer to home. “One of the greatest stained-glass panels of the German Renaissance is here in Los Angeles, at the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale,” she said, referring to a vividly colored window after Durer, depicting St. Andrew and Pope Sixtus II.

Designed for the private chapel of a Nuremberg patrician, Dr. Sixtus Tucher, it was removed in 1833 when the building was destroyed, and it changed hands several times, eventually landing in the collection of William Randolph Hearst, and then Forest Lawn. At the Getty, the window is reunited with “The Annunciation,” designed for the same chapel and now in the collection of the Tucher family museum in Nuremberg.

Yet another bit of the journey took Hendrix to San Diego. “There are very few stained panels that can be related to stained-glass drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger,” she said. “One of his most famous series, in Basel [Switzerland] at the Kunst Museum, tells the story of the passion of Christ. And lo and behold, where are the related glass panels? The San Diego Museum of Art. So we find that in our own little area of Southern California, we have some of the great masterpieces in all of America in this field.”

*

The curators knew that large-scale works attached to buildings couldn’t travel to the exhibition, which will appear at the St. Louis Art Museum from Nov. 4 to Jan. 7, 2001. Nonetheless, they got nearly everything they requested from village churches, cloisters, homes, castles, museums, schools and, in one case, a thermal bath near Zurich.

“It was miraculous,” Hendrix said of their success. “We started out slightly pessimistic. But one by one, people were so surprised that they would just say yes. A lot of the glass was in storage, but the Getty and the St. Louis Art Museum have paid for restorations, so we hope the pieces can now go back on view beautifully restored.”

Walking through the Getty’s temporary exhibition galleries, where the works were being installed, Hendrix said the show “starts with a bang, with the great panel after Durer in our own backyard, Glendale; and ends with a bang with two other masterpieces in our own backyard, San Diego.” Between those local anchors is a wide range of drawings and illuminated glass panels that portray everything from the expected religious scenes to “A Wild Man Brandishing an Uprooted Tree Trunk” by Holbein and a group of portly cooks at work in a kitchen by Jorg Breu the Elder.

“We think of stained glass as a medieval art form, only having to do with religious subject matter, but this was the period of the Reformation,” Hendrix said. “Big commissions for church glass were dwindling, but there was a proliferation of secular architecture. Having a series of glass windows made for your house was the fashion and a sign of prosperity, so the subject matter just goes crazy.

“There are cycles on the labors and pastimes of the month, which would be installed in 12 windows of your big dining room or the main room of your house. There are hunting scenes, knights jousting and cycles on the influence of the planets, because it was still completely believed that the planet under which you were born formed your personality. The so-called mechanical arts, the trades, are also depicted.”

The exhibition presents two kinds of windows, one composed of leaded, colored glass, the other painted in a relatively limited palette on a single panel of clear glass.

“These were popular for small windows, and you can see that they are absolute jewels,” Hendrix said. “They are a kind of a drawing on glass, very linear in their effect. You are meant to look at them and love them up close in an intimate, domestic setting.”

*

One reason that stained glass has been overlooked by art historians is that it was created in a two-part process by an artist who did a drawing but then turned it over to a glass painter. Scholars have finally accepted that Durer did not carve his own woodblocks, but the idea that a masterpiece must be created by a single artist persists. “I hope that this exhibition will increase appreciation for the collaborative nature of stained glass and that we can rid ourselves of the prejudice that it all has to be by one hand,” Hendrix said.

“Painting on Light” marks Hendrix’s 16th year at the Getty. A native of Memphis who confesses having “a love-hate relationship with the South,” she did undergraduate work at Vanderbilt University from 1971 to 1975, then studied art history at the Free University in Amsterdam for two years. She earned her doctorate at Princeton University in 1984, when she came to the Getty as the department of drawings’ first intern.

Hendrix wrote her dissertation on “Joris Hoefnagel and ‘The Four Elements’: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Painting,” using the Dutch artist’s “Model Book of Calligraphy,” an illustrated manuscript on natural history in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. At the time, it was the only copy of the book in an American museum. But in 1985 a little-known copy in a private collection came up for auction and the Getty bought it. Like many aspects of her stained-glass project, the acquisition by her new employer was “a miracle,” Hendrix said. “You can never script life. If you are led by art, you go on a journey that you can never anticipate.”

*

“PAINTING ON LIGHT: DRAWINGS AND STAINED GLASS IN THE AGE OF DURER AND HOLBEIN,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive. Dates: Opens Tuesday. Through Sept. 24. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission: Free. Parking reservations required. Phone: (310) 440-7300.