Reveal: Three Contemporary Artists Respond to Dürer’s Apocalypse and Goya’s Los Caprichos

  • In these last years of capitalism, when we are living through the collapse of past certainties, their ruins being re-worked...
    Derrick Guild RSA, Magnificent 7 (detail)

    In these last years of capitalism, when we are living through the collapse of past certainties, their ruins being re-worked into whatever algorithmic collage our habits create for us, the idea of images from the past being re-worked is easy to dismiss with cynicism or indifference. Retro is a permanent feature of the present, continually packaged and re-packaged, even as we need ever bigger doses of nostalgia to achieve the same effect. This project, Reveal at the Royal Scottish Academy, has real potential to cleanse jaded visual palettes, if we lend to these artists the time for their images to work.

     

    Rowan Dahl, Alan Grieve and Derrick Guild have in their very different ways responded to original copies of two sets of images that deal with visions of the apocalypse, and the absurdity of the human condition. 

     

    The original copies of Albrecht Dürer’s The Apocalypse, fifteen woodcut prints that first appeared in 1498, and Francisco de Goya’s eighty etchings in Los Caprichos of 1798 form the basis for three individual but linked responses to the remarkable imagery of these masters. In this exhibition, a second edition of Dürer’s book from 1511 and a rare proof copy of Los Caprichos are exhibited together, perhaps for the first time anywhere.
  • Notions of apocalypse are everywhere again, from the battlefields of Ukraine to the warming seas, amplified by a collective doom-scroll...
    Alan Grieve, Goya Yoga

    Notions of apocalypse are everywhere again, from the battlefields of Ukraine to the warming seas, amplified by a collective doom-scroll online. Discussions of the world’s end tended to be the preserve of religious visionaries or marginal eccentrics until a very few years ago, easily dismissed with a half-pitying shake of the head.

     

    However, collectively, as a species, we are beginning to feel genuine fear again of what the immediate future may bring to us. Long conditioned by the ‘big bang’ version of the apocalypse from Hollywood films, or the colder, more understated British projections in Threads (1984) and When the Wind Blows (1986), or we are used to seeing the apocalypse as an event rather than as a process. It is becoming apparent to those of us living through the period where apocalyptic monsters are becoming real again that there will be no one big event; just a slow, remorseless unravelling of all the common bindings we used to take for granted.

     

    This exhibition proposes representing the apocalypse methodically: as a process of work, opening out our perceptions of the apocalypse to analysis; and as an art historical sensibility tempered with a shimmer of the fantastical. The delight lies in the different position occupied by each artist in this unusual interplay of fact and fiction.

     

    Extract from Reveal – A Methodical Apocalypse by Jon Blackwood

  • Rowan Dahl

  • Alan Grieve

  • Derrick Guild RSA

  • Dürer's Apocalypse

    A Masterpiece in the Art of the Woodcut, a Landmark in the History of the Book
    The artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), first published the Apocalypse in 1498. This copy is a second edition, produced thirteen years...
    John of Patmos, Apocalypsis cum figuris [The Book of Revelation with illustrations] Printed in Nuremberg by Hieronymus Höltzel for Albrecht Dürer, at the press of Anton Koberger, 1511.

    The artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), first published the Apocalypse in 1498. This copy is a second edition, produced thirteen years later using the same fifteen original woodblocks. In the 1511 edition Dürer added a new woodcut title-page depicting the Virgin and Child with Saint John, making sixteen illustrations in all. The Apocalypse is considered the first 'artist's book' and one of the most striking and beautiful works ever made. Dürer not only produced the illustrations but conceived and oversaw the entire project.

     

    Both the 1498 and 1511 editions are exceptionally rare. Very few copies survive in their original book form. Individual original prints are not altogether uncommon, often from broken up copies.

     

    The reprint available for sale is taken from this very copy of the 1511 edition.

     

    A long-standing debate surrounds the authorship of the Book of Revelation, the final work in the New Testament. Some biblical scholars question whether John of Patmos, who identifies himself in the text, is the same person as Saint John the Evangelist. Originally written in Greek in about 95 A.D., the text Dürer chose for the 1511 edition is in Latin. For the original 1498 edition he published copies in both Latin and German.

     

    Living in tumultuous times, Dürer and many of his contemporaries worried that the world might come to an end in 1500. (Remember similar fears in 1999?) Thus it was important to anticipate the apocalyptic, phantasmagoric and cataclysmic visions described in the Book of Revelation and prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. It is no accident that Dürer's vividly imaginative conceptions are filled with references to his own time. Figures dress in late 15th-century clothing, while panoramic scenes of towns reflect landscapes of Dürer's contemporary Germany.

     

    Dürer conceived the fifteen dramatic woodcut images that illustrate the biblical text when he was in his mid-twenties, after returning from an influential visit to Italy in 1494-95. Art historians continue to debate whether he carved the pearwood blocks himself or engaged highly skilled woodcutters to do so. Unfortunately, the original woodblocks do not survive. The artist included his now iconic AD monogram on each print, a 'signature' typically excluded from woodcuts and reserved for copperplate engravings.

     

    In these fifteen highly innovative full-page images, Dürer raised the well-established craft of the woodcut to the level of fine art. Artists ever since the 1498 publication of the Apocalypse have sought to equal in originality and skill these images. Few have succeeded.

     

    When the world did not come to an end in 1500, Dürer continued his ever more successful career as an artist and bookmaker. After returning from a second Italian tour, he reissued the Apocalypse along with two newly published works, both illustrated with woodcuts in the same large format: the Great Passion (12 prints) and the Life of the Virgin (20 prints). Dürer's 'Grosse Bücher' of 1511 is rarely still found bound together. Nevertheless, this remains the most authentic and desirable way to find the 1511 Apocalypse. The present copy may have been separated from its two companion works when the volume was rebound in London in the early 19th century.

     

    In the final page of the text of each of the Apocalypse and the other two 'Grosse Bücher', Dürer identified himself as the artist and project manager and asserted his right, under the protection of Emperor Maximillian, to the property, warning others against unlawful reproduction.

     

    The chain of the identities of previous owners, while broken in places, nevertheless offers details about the locations and insights into the status of the work for more than half a millennium. In the bottom corner of the thirteenth image there is an early 16th-century inscription associating this copy with the Carthusian monastery of Valle di Pesio (south of Turin), an establishment founded in 1173 and suppressed during the Napoleonic wars in 1802. Subsequently, this copy was in the possession of the wealthy Niccolini family of Florence. Their ownership stamp 'PN' (referring either to Pietro Niccolini (1573- 1651) or his 'Palazzo Niccolini') is on the title-page. The volume made its way to London in the first part of the 19th century, possibly when the Niccolini family fell on hard times during the Napoleonic Wars and sold their collections. There it was rebound and sold. In the late 19th century, it came into the possession of Junius S. Morgan (1867- 1932), nephew of the legendary financier and collector J. P. Morgan. Junius gave this 'spare' copy to his Princeton University roommate, later giving his unparalleled Dürer collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When the 'roommate' died in 1940, it was bequeathed to his heirs and subsequently sold in 2007 to the present owner. At this time the book came to Scotland.

     

    The volume is opened to the third and arguably most famous of all Dürer's woodcuts, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Note the close relationship between the biblical text and the artist's imagery:

     

    And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and its rider had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer. When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, 'Come!' And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that men should slay one another; and he was given a great sword. When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, 'Come!' And I saw, and behold, a black horse, and its rider had a balance in his hand; ... When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, 'Come!' And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given great power over a fourth of the earth; to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.

    Book of Revelation, Chapter 6, verses 1-8

     

    Courtesy of Blackie House Library and Museum

  • Los Caprichos of Goya

    The Greatest Graphic Artist Since Dürer and Rembrandt
    Goya (1746-1828) published this radical and magnificent group of eighty etchings during a relatively brief moment when a liberalizing change...
    Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos; Plate 43, ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’, Madrid, 1799

    Goya (1746-1828) published this radical and magnificent group of eighty etchings during a relatively brief moment when a liberalizing change in the political climate of Spain opened the possibility for the artist to express bitingly satirical concepts in public. Not long after publication in February 1799, however, Goya had to withdraw copies from the market, such was the adverse reaction among his contemporaries.

     

    What is a ‘capricho’? According to the last century’s most esteemed Goya scholars (Gassier and Wilson), the genre for Goya ‘is always synonymous with liberty, fantasy, and the private world of his thoughts and feelings’. ‘Caprichos’ are a direct and personal expression of ‘what he felt and saw’ in all its truthful grotesqueness. Goya himself remarked that the concept was bound up with ‘fantasy and invention’. A few decades later the French writer Baudelaire described this new individualistic dimension of Goya’s art as ‘credible monstrosity’.

     

    In these eighty prints Goya’s imaginative world of dreams, caricatures and fantasies (erotic or otherwise), combine to create a new art. Goya was in his early fifties when he conceived Los Caprichos. Having suffered a life-threatening illness some six years prior, he was virtually deaf. As a consequence he became more introspective and his work more intense. In this series of prints, nothing and no one is preserved from satire and cynicism: the Church, the aristocracy, the political establishment, the institution of marriage, the legal and medical professions. He also attacks more abstract concepts such as superstition, deceit and self-deception. The real and the imaginary encounter each other in a mysterious drama that unfolds through the pages of the book.

  • Goya would go on to produce other radical graphic productions, among them the Disasters of War, a work which was not published until several years after this death.

     

    This is a rare ‘trial proof’ copy, an early impression remarkable for its freshness and sharp, subtle detail. It provides evidence of alterations; Goya subsequently made no fewer than twenty-three plates in the course of the production process.

     

    The copy on display belonged to Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919), the English ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ painter and a significant collector of art and rare books. Parts of his collection were bequeathed to British museums, while much of Fairfax Murray’s Old Master drawings and books were sold to J. P. Morgan in 1910. A year before his death in 1919, there was an auction of choice items at which time this copy was acquired for a Scottish collector whose family still retain it.

     

    The volume is opened to Plate 43, ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’, a kind of self-portrait of the artist.

     

    Lent from a Private Collection