LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY.- The Speed Art Museum presents ’Masterworks from the Albertina,’ on view through May 12, 2002. Drawn from the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria, one of the world’s oldest and most important collections of Master drawings and prints, the exhibition includes 102 works of art by such masters as Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and other Italian, French, Dutch, German and Austrian artists. Works included are from the High Renaissance through Rococo periods.



The exhibition demonstrates the breadth and uncomparable quality of the Albertina’s collection. Representing the German School are three drawings from the priceless Dürer folios: Study with Three Hands, 1494-95; Head of an Angel, 1506; and Virgin Mary, Anne and Christ Child, 1511. These precise and highly rendered studies are typical of the artist’s most important work. The Dutch School includes Farmhouse with a Canal, 1650-51 and Landscape with Windmill, 1650/51, both drawings by Rembrandt, and Ludolf Backhuysen’s dramatic Ship on a Stormy Sea. Also included are such Flemish masterworks as Peter Paul Rubens’ Rubens’ Son Nicholas with a Cap of1626/27 and his Study with Hands and Head of Woman and Man. Highlighted in the rich works of the Italian School are some of the greatest artists of all times. The High Renaissance master Michelangelo Buonarotti is represented by Three Standing Male Figures, about 1496, and The Dead Christ Supported by Mary, about 1530. Raphael is also well represented in this exhibition by Study of Heads and Two Women with Children, a study for a fresco in the Stanza dell‘Incendio at the Vatican in Rome.



The diverse styles of the French School, ranging from the classicists of the 17th-century to the Rococo period artists of the 18th-century, are also represented in the exhibition. Claude Lorrain’s Thicket with Cliffs is a magnificent work in brown ink, which creates with very frugal means the impression of trees and a cliff with a cave. Nicolas Poussin’s Tiberian Landscape with the Ponte Molle of1626 emphasizes more permanent structures both in the landscape itself and in the philosophical underpinnings of his art. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Roman Park with Cypresses (1774), has a feathery and romantic quality and emphasizes the leisured classes going about their daily routine, a hallmark of the Rococo.



Continuing the Speed’s mission of bringing great art and people together, Masterworks from the Albertina allows visitors an intimate look at the Old Masters’ imagination and creative process at work. The exhibition is organized by the Albertina and ArtReach International.