Wants: paste it or waste it
Art and architectural historian Alfie Robinson writes a guest letter
Woodcut fragments after Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer pasted together by an unknown interloper. Available from Antiquariat Peter Kiefer, Pforzheim, Germany (est. €300)
This rather large print by Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer has almost nothing in it. At 44.5 x 60.5 cm, it’s just an empty scene containing an unhinged melange of steps, tiles and truncated columns. The yellowing of the paper in one part and its brightness in another is a clue to the fact that something’s wrong here.
This print is the product of paper surgery. Different bits of a very famous, huge woodcut print (made for the megalomaniacal Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I) have been cut together. We will never know who by: the interloper with a knife didn’t sign their name. The mosaic that makes little pictorial or architectural sense. The dark tiled corridor is cranked up into a ramp to nowhere. But just behind it is a patch of grass and the open sky.
You might say this anticipates the famous impossible-printmaker M.C. Escher. But for me there’s something altogether blanker and more disturbing, albeit gently disturbing, about this cannibalised print. To me it recalls the Gen-Z obsession with ‘Backrooms’, or the slightly earlier craze for ‘vapourwave’ images. The latter was a re-imagining of 1990s postmodern album covers, furniture design, and so on; you can refer to the locus classicus of ‘vapourwave’, ‘Floral Shoppe’, here. But though it was fond of hot pink, the postmodern period also ate up the imagery of this print: the Renaissance. Hence, a classical bust and a perfectly gridded floor can be transformed from 1510 to 1994 by the addition of neon green.
There we have it: a slice (of slices) of Albrecht Dürer, the renaissance German artist, for the Millennial generation. It’s even rather affordable thanks to its mutilated state, with an estimate of just €300 (plus buyer’s premium and relevant taxes). The irony is that this print is even rarer than the original triumphal arches that are now in public museums.
This print is unique. There is nothing else like it in the world, because no knife and glue has been put to the image in quite this way before or after. This is the real joy of printmaking: it’s not modern mass media. As a result, it occasionally spawns oddities like this one.
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Alfie Robinson an art and architectural historian. He is currently based at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome where he is a pre-doctoral fellow. His research deals with looting in the early modern period.
This fragmentary woodcut print, on several pieces of paper, glued together is available from Antiquariat Peter Kiefer, Pforzheim, Germany, as part of this week’s Auction 143, Bücher & Antiquitäten Alte und Moderne Kunst.