Object number2024.46.4

After Dürer

Date2009

Artist Chris Marker (French, 1921 - 2012)

CultureFrench

MediumPhotogravure etching

EditionEdition 15 of 15

DimensionsImage: 12 x 8 1/2 in. (30.5 x 21.6 cm)
Plate: 12 3/8 x 8 3/4 in. (31.4 x 22.2 cm)
Sheet: 18 x 14 in. (45.7 x 35.6 cm)

Credit LineGift of Bill Horrigan

On View

Not on view

Period21st c

Classification(s)

SignedOn recto, signed lower right margin in pencil.

InscribedOn recto, by artist, lower left margin in pencil: 15/15.

Vassar Exhibitions

Chronostasia: Select Acquisitions 2020–2025

Label TextWe do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. —Chris Marker Chris Marker’s photogravures obscure Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I and Knight, Death, and the Devil beneath veils of grey tonality. The canonical sixteenth-century engravings emerge as spectral palimpsests, their forms barely legible. Rather than reproduce, Marker degrades. Working in his final years, Marker moved from the digital manipulation that defined his multimedia memoir Immemory (1997), to photogravure’s chemical processes. The medium’s physical transfer, etching, biting, and printing copper plates, carries forward Dürer’s lines only as dissolution. Where Dürer elevated engraving through precision, Marker lets the image falter. The institutional resonance deepens: the Loeb holds original Dürer impressions of both prints, acquired in 1941 through the Felix Warburg bequest. Warburg collected with discernment, focusing on technically refined works by celebrated artists, his Dürer prints exemplifying Northern Renaissance engraving at its most complex. Marker’s photogravures render these same prints unstable, caught between recognition and erasure.

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email loebcollections@vassar.edu