Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through June 9, 2013.

Naves writes that "the curatorial point is obvious: Dürer was a phenomenon. Is a phenomenon, if the response of the crowds attending the show is any indication. Huddling around the works, viewers can’t look closely enough at the images—because of their small size, sure, but mostly because of Dürer’s huge talent. Ensconced, as it is, in the East Wing, the section of the museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, the exhibition may (as a friend suggested) prompt doubts about the progress of art: Sixteenth-century Northern Europeans had the meticulous intensity of Dürer; we have to settle for the decorative flourishes of Ellsworth Kelly, the subject of a concurrent exhibition at The National Gallery. An apples and oranges comparison, perhaps, and any museum-goer seeking proof of art’s forward march will inevitably be frustrated. But if Dürer the man is history, then Dürer the artist is forever our contemporary, a figure whose virtuosity—at once both clinical and deeply intimate—withstands anything so mundane as time passing."