In this business, it's always best not to throw your superlatives around promiscuously. You want to keep them in reserve, so that when the occasion comes to let them loose, they'll be taken seriously. The occasion comes with "Landmarks in Print Collecting," the well-nigh perfect exhibit of almost 100 works from the British Museum that just opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
From first print to last, this is a selection of extraordinary works from one of the greatest collections of prints and drawings in the world, now numbering more than 2 million items.
It is not every day, for instance, that we get to see even one impression of Rembrandt's famous print of the Crucifixion called "The Three Crosses." Here we get to see two impressions side by side, one from the third state (or stage of development), of 1653, and the other from the fourth state, of about 1661.
In the later version, the image has been heavily reworked by the artist; there are changes in many of the figures, and the light that bathes most of the scene in the earlier version has been changed to a darkness that covers most of the picture except for the very center around the figure of Christ. Seeing these side by side, one can sense Rembrandt's concept of the work growing more dramatic. In the later version, it is as if the light fades as Christ dies and will go out altogether when he draws his last breath.
As with these two images, the entire show has been selected with great care. It reflects changing tastes in print collecting and the interests of the particular collectors to whom these works at one time belonged. But those aspects of the subject are dealt with at more length in the catalog; the show itself will have widest appeal as a collection of great works from five centuries of printmaking and including some of the foremost artists of their times, from Durer and Rembrandt to Manet and Munch.
There are exquisitely detailed engravings and etchings of insects and shells from the mid-17th century, and there's a constructivist abstraction by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, created in 1923, that would fit right into the modernist exhibit elsewhere in the museum.
Durer is represented by one of his earliest woodcuts, "The Martyrdom of St. Catherine" (about 1498) and another woodcut of more than a decade later, "The Mass of St. Gregory" (1511). As the catalog entries point out, the later work is more subtle and finished in its handling of the medium. But the earlier one, no doubt partly because of the subject matter, exhibits greater intensity of feeling.
