Exquisite Old Master Works in a Most Surprising Setting

This is Thomas Kinkade country. The land is flat and dry, the thermometer climbs past the century mark. But Marie Antoinette-style fantasies of a bucolic life adorn candy-colored billboards on the highway leading into town, in pictures mass-produced in the workshops of Kinkade, the self-proclaimed “Painter of Light.” Stop by the franchise gallery in a local mall and see.

At the moment, though, Fresno can claim a different, more compelling artistic distinction. It is the best place in the United States right now to see European Old Master drawings and prints. A touring exhibition of sheets by Michelangelo, Durer, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin and 66 other artists is at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art, History and Science, through Aug. 3. Among them are unsurpassed works of graphic art offering deep satisfactions.

Take the three ink drawings by German Renaissance whiz Albrecht Durer. One is a sheet of three studies of a hand, gesticulating in various ways, dated around 1494 or 1495. With the palm facing forward, one hand points its index finger upward. Another pinches a flower’s delicate stem between thumb and forefinger. A third inserts a thumb between fingers curled into a fist, making a famously rude gesture.

A heavenly benediction, a courtship gesture and a curse. Like semaphore signals, the hands perform a sign language, based on prototypes widely used in the Middle Ages.

Yet the drawings are not the least bit medieval in feeling. Redolent of probing curiosity, they’re too specific, too idiosyncratic, too flat-out personal for that.

Each sketch shows a left hand intensely observed. The contours are meticulous. The careful hatching of lines creates subtle light and shade to suggest veins beneath skin or a cuff turned back at the wrist, the better to expose the gesture.

The quickness and surety of the ink line demonstrate the astounding aesthetic possibilities contained within the human hand. As much as the gestures performed in the pictures, Durer’s drawn marks are “hand signals” themselves.

Looking at the sheet, you’re suddenly struck by an otherwise obvious fact: Durer was drawing with his right hand while scrutinizing his own left hand. He is observing himself as an artistic subject, as surely as if he were painting one of the full-scale oil self-portraits that distinguish his remarkable career. This small but riveting sheet of paper records an intimate fragment of an epochal transition in Western art and society. A medieval prototype segues into a personal utterance of humanist self-regard.

And there are 79 more drawings and 22 more prints in this terrific exhibition.

Nearby, a later Durer drawing (1506) is less spontaneous, more finished but no less astounding than the artist’s captivating hand-jive. Made in preparation for an altarpiece commissioned by a group of Germans residing in Venice, who were eager to give their countryman a chance to show his stuff amid the manifold splendors of the Italian port city, it shows the head of an angel.

Durer used pen and black ink with white highlighting on blue paper, in the traditional Venetian manner. Seen from below in three-quarter view, the lovely head framed by cascading curls of hair turns atop a long, swan-like neck. Its contours are drawn with the black ink, while the white records the play of light.

Two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of the sheet, and equidistant from the sides, Durer placed the dark pupil of the angel’s right eye, which forms the compositional center of the drawing. It’s the pivot around which everything else turns. The eye establishes a mystical core that corresponds with the human instrument of visual perception.

Two more Durer drawings are on view--one a study of heads and feet, drawn on the reverse of the sheet with the three hands; the other a dense preliminary design for a woodcut showing the Holy Family. This abundance of Durers might give a clue as to the source of the exhibition. “Masterworks From the Albertina” comes to Fresno from Vienna’s Graphische Sammlung Albertina. That museum, with nearly 65,000 drawings and about 1 million prints, is arguably Europe’s greatest collection of works on paper.

Durer, represented in the holdings by 130 prints and drawings, is a centerpiece. His watercolor study of a fat rabbit is perhaps the most famous drawing in the immense collection, while I would be happy to nominate his monumental study of a plant-strewn clump of dirt for consideration as the Greatest European Drawing Ever Made. (Entire galaxies seem to thrive within this teeming bit of earth.) The bunny and the clump are not in Fresno--who’d let them leave Vienna?--but much else of great note certainly is.

Since 1985, the Albertina has circulated half a dozen exhibitions from its collection to the United States. The first was a survey of Old Master drawing seen at Washington’s National Gallery of Art.

Subsequent shows looked at particular subjects (landscapes during Rembrandt’s time), periods (the Italian Renaissance and Baroque eras) or artists (Oskar Kokoschka). Typically they were seen at major institutions, such as New York’s Pierpont Morgan Library, Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum or, in 1993, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The present survey, organized by the touring service ArtReach International, is the first to travel to small museums outside large metropolitan centers. Fresno is the final stop on a short tour that began in Pittsburgh in January and proceeded to Louisville, Ky., in the spring. In 1999 the Albertina began an extensive renovation of its building, a former Hapsburg palace on the old ramparts of the city, which provided the occasion for the touring show. The museum will reopen in March.

The exhibition means to evoke the original guiding principle of the Albertina’s collection, which was formally launched in 1776 (on the Fourth of July, no less). Enlightenment principles of edification and moral purpose, rather than idle amusement, would guide the assembly of works. Duke Albert von Sachsen-Teschen, who had married the favorite daughter of the immensely wealthy Austrian empress Maria Theresia, enlisted the aid of an Italian connoisseur to launch the project. Three years later Count Durazzo turned over 1,000 drawings and a statement of principle to the happy duke and duchess.

So the exhibition looks at European art in the 300 years before the collection’s birth, and it’s arranged in the traditional Enlightenment manner of “national schools”--Italian, German, French, Flemish and Dutch. History meets politics in the drawing room of connoisseurship.

The drapery studies by Michelangelo show him making drawing central to the education of a Renaissance artist, where the fluid graphic medium could record the unfolding process of artistic thought--and thus signify art as something more than skillful craft. A late red-chalk study of the dead Christ, whose attribution to Michelangelo is uncertain, shows thought transformed into atmospheric mysticism.

Peter Paul Rubens’ rambunctious drawing of his young son, Nicholas, was surely done for the artist’s personal pleasure--a snapshot before the camera. Andrea Del Sarto’s tender head of a bald old man has empty eye sockets and a purposefully unfinished chin, yielding a spare intimation of a death’s-head skull.

Nicholas Poussin’s structured woodland landscape looks like a Post-Impressionist Cezanne--albeit circa 1629. Veiled eroticism drives Francois Boucher’s sweet chalk study of a young woman who clasps her hands above a swollen vessel.

Chief among the show’s prints is Rembrandt’s justly famous etching, the “Hundred Guilder Print,” so called for the astounding price it fetched upon completion in 1649. Rembrandt marshals three dozen characters, not to mention a camel and a dog, to simultaneously tell multiple tales from the gospel of Matthew in one big, lush, theatrical pageant.

There’s also a dark hair-raising wood engraving of the witches’ Sabbath by Hans Baldung Grien and spooky, hand-colored landscape etchings by Albrecht Altdorfer. Trees, mountains and fields here assume an evocative character previously reserved for people.

There are also terrific examples by less well-known (and even unknown) artists. Giulio Romano’s hunting scene uses the lateral force of the jampacked composition to elicit the violent fury of animal flesh being torn apart. An exquisite chalk and colored pencil portrait of a young German man in a red cap is so refined it’s surprising its author remains unidentified.

And, yes, there are some pedestrian drawings too. No matter. The wintry ice skaters by Abraham Rutgers and the biblical bombast of Franz Anton Maulbertsch are pleasant enough, but they also provide context. They demonstrate how commonplace drawing once was as a medium for artists.

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“Masterworks From the Albertina,” Fresno Metropolitan Museum, 1515 Van Ness Ave., (559) 441-1444, through Aug. 3. Closed Mondays.