Word: albertina
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...case is not uncommon. In addition to large numbers of the UDF leadership, other old guard figures like Albertina Sisiulu, wife of jailed nationalist Walter Sisiulu, are facing treason charges. Nobel Prize-winning Bishop Desmond M. Tutu hit the nail on the head when, in a New York Times report last week, he expressed his fear that by removing activists capable of organizing protest, the regime is running the risk of amorphous chaos in the townships...
...excellent exhibition at the Drawing Center in Soho, of drawings by the Tiepolos, Canova, Pietro Longhi, Canaletto and others lent by the Museo Correr in Venice--to comprehend the general paucity of graphic skills today. The prospect that anyone in the foreseeable future will make drawings to rival these Albertina loans--even the sketchier ones, like Rembrandt's summing-up of a Dutch bridge and canal in a few electric jottings of bister ink--seems remote...
Among the great European collections of the traditional graphic arts, the Albertina's has always had a special place. Its holdings are vast: more than 1.5 million items, ranging from playing cards to Michelangelo drawings. Yet what counts is not their gross but, so to speak, their net: the core of old master drawings and prints assembled, over a lifetime of passionate connoisseurship, by Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen (1738-1822). At a time when any crocodile can become a "major" collector by scrawling a digit and six zeroes on a check for a B+ Van Gogh, it is worth...
...times the outlay on art of the Austrian imperial court itself. During an era when "art investment" was unheard of, this obsessed duke put a quarter of his fortune into collecting. He died at the age of 84--"a thin old man," according to an account cited by Albertina Director Walter Koschatzky, "with tired, sad eyes, who walked through the rooms alone, followed by a little white dog"--with more than 13,000 meticulously chosen and indexed items in his portfolios...
...greatest coup was in 1796, when he received 371 sheets by Durer in a transfer from the imperial court library in Vienna. Not all were genuine, and scores were lost by theft during his lifetime, thanks to a corrupt employee who sold them to dealers, but the Albertina collection today is to Durer what the royal collection at Windsor is to Leonardo...