Although firmly rooted within the traditions of European culture, America is regarded by many here and abroad as the denouement in the decline of Western civilization. What we know of history is in large measures due to the artistic legacy bequeathed us in the visual art forms of architecture, sculpture, painting, and drawing, for apart from the central role of the plastic arts in recording events, they invariably reflect the age in which they are created.
Such is the relevance of the fading appreciation for the classical ideal, that expression of divinity in human form which speaks to us today as clearly as to Plato then about the quest for perfection. Two exhibitions recently on view around America offered a striking juxtaposition of exactly how far we of today have descended from the aesthetic achievements of only several centuries back, and in contrast signify the immense gap between what was once required of art and what now passes for it.
One of the world's finest and most comprehensive archives of Old Master drawings. Vienna's Albertina Collection, was in 1985 loaned to two of America's leading museums, first the National Gallery in Washington, and then The J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. The traveling exhibition, one of highlights of the year for art historians, was undertaken in honor of 200 years of diplomatic relations between Austria and America.
The collection was formed through a lifetime of enlightened research and dedicated acquisition by a gifted connoisseur, Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen (1738-1822), who married Empress Maria Theresa's favorite daughter, the Archduchess Marie-Christine. Albert had been born the son of August II, Elector of Saxony, and of the Archduchess Maria Josepha, daughter of the Emperor Joseph I. Following his marriage, he was appointed Governor of Hungary (readers will recall that the "dual-headed" eagle represented the two kingdoms of Austria and Hungary, known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the descendant of the Holy Roman Empire) then Governor General of the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), and then, as a result of the French Revolution, he moved back to Vienna with his fabulous collection, and installed it, his wife, and himself in the superb Albertina Palace. Today the archive contains no less than 1,500,000 drawings, etchings, and engravings, purchased by the couple during their diplomatic tours. During World War II, the entire collection was stored in salt mines near Hallein.
Between 1766 and 1822 Duke Albert and his enormously wealthy wife set about finding and buying the best Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo drawings of the Italian, French, German, Dutch, and Flemish Schools. The result is the preeminent extant collection of Durer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Tiepolo, Watteau, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck drawings. As individual pieces de resistance, each is remarkable, whether a sweeping vista by Clude, or an affectionate caricature by Bruegel, or a voluptuous damsel by Parmigianino. As a single holding of masterworks, the selection of seventy-eight sent from Vienna is dazzling.
The other show in question opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, from which it traveled during the year to museums in Berkeley, Minneapolis, and Washington. It concluded its tour earlier this year in one of the District of Columbia's most distinguished halls, the Corcoran Gallery of Arts, having been viewed first in the fall of 1984 in Philadelphia's
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