Word: durers
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...Russian field engineer named Victor Baldin was poking through the cellars of Karnzow Castle, just north of Berlin, where he and other Soviet Army officers were billeted. By the dim light of a candle, he found several bulging portfolios of drawings and watercolors. Their names leaped out at him: Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Amazed at the discovery, Baldin begged his officers for transport space to carry this abandoned trove back to the Soviet Union-to no avail. There was no room on the trucks, and the brigade was pulling out in the morning...
...anything else, by the wall labels he rashly insisted on appending to his work. All that these revealed was the vice of the autodidact-a mania for cultural name dropping. They read like Woody Allen. Thus Baseball, 1983-84, came garnished with references to Red Smith, Bill James, Velazquez, Durer, Max Brod, Satchel Paige and, of course, Kafka; while The Sensualist, 1973-84, was prefaced by quotes from Picasso ("My one and only master!") and Matisse ("It is undoubtedly to Matisse that I owe the most"). Then Kitaj: "Cazanne is my favourite painter too ... Maybe that's why he draws...
...Girl with Roses, 1947-48, a portrait of his first wife, Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, were done under the spell of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) portraiture of the 1920s -- painters like Otto Dix or Christian Schad. Actually the basis was much earlier: Albrecht Durer, whose fixedly staring, ultradetailed watercolors set Freud's first standards about the inspection of faces and bodies...
...sharpest and least prudish image of homosexual desire in all Renaissance art. The mountainous folds of skirt in Mantegna's engraving of the Virgin and Child, arguably the most beautiful print made by any Italian during the Renaissance and only to be rivaled by Durer, support a protective gesture of inexpressible tenderness, in which the Madonna seems to be drawing her son back into the cave of her own body...
...nothing happens along the way. Mostly he traces, from slides projected on the canvas. And he traces very badly, which lends his quotations from Old Master paintings -- thick on the ground in this show -- an irresistibly comic air. If you are going to "appropriate" an image from Durer or Gericault or Tiepolo or even some routine seicento tapestry, and do it by hand, nobody expects you to draw as well as your sources; but it helps if you can at least draw well enough to make the source clear, and Salle can hardly even do that...