Anyone entering Phil Barber’s studio in the belly of the MIA recently might think they had stumbled upon a Habsburgian Montessori class. On the floor were 190 pieces of paper that Barber had cut from the pages of a battered, leather-bound portfolio. Somehow the shapes would fit together to become the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I (above), the colossal print in “The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Masterpieces from Europe’s Greatest Dynasty,” on view at the MIA through May 10.
At top, the almost-pieced-together arch, photographed by curator Rachel McGarry. Above, Phil Barber (right) rounding the corner with the arch, which Kurt Nordwall helps ready for installation. Photograph by Dan Dennehy.
Rarely assembled today, the print is one of the largest ever made and a spectacle of self-promotion. Maximilian, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, was a master of propaganda but short on florins. In 1512 he commissioned Albrecht Dürer, the leading artist of Renaissance Germany, and Johannes Stabius, his court historian, to create a woodcut print that would resemble the monumental stone arch he couldn’t afford to build—some assembly required. Distributed throughout the empire, it was intended to overwhelm the realm with his greatness, not least with portraits of his Habsburg relatives.
The emperor was famously obsessive, and assembling the arch in three short months made Barber exactly the same way. The whole time, he says, his stomach felt the way skin does when a rubber glove is peeled off too fast. Night and day, he says, “the project was a running scroll in my head.”
The MIA’s print is from the fourth edition, published by Adam Bartsch in Vienna in 1799; hardly any of the earliest versions still exist. The museum’s woodcut was only recently acquired, in 2013. Barber was so concerned with cutting the arch’s components cleanly from the portfolio pages that he went through 60 X-Acto blades. Sometimes he changed the blade after just four cuts.
The arch mounted on archival boards. It is one of the largest woodcuts ever made. Photograph by Rachel McGarry.
He stared at it long enough to discover the many delights that artists Dürer, Wolf Traut, Hans Springinklee, and later Albrecht Altdorfer lavished upon the architectural framework. Along with episodes from Maximilian’s life, there are snails, cupids, Sirens, Harpies, herons, ibises, monkeys, goats, griffins, pomegranates, and much more. As a printmaker himself, Barber was most taken by the impossibly crisp, minute lines created by block cutter Hieronymus Andreae and his shop. (The compulsive Maximilian reportedly visited Andreae’s Nuremberg studio to watch him work.)
Barber, the museum’s head framer, first did a trial run using photocopies of the 190 pieces. His only guides were a vague diagram included in the portfolio and pictures of the completed arch in exhibition catalogues. When he was ready to construct the real thing, he laid archival boards on his studio floor and worked from the bottom up. He adhered each piece using Japanese paper hinges and methyl cellulose glue. Just hours before the show’s premiere, he was on a lift in the gallery dabbing loose corners with glue before the plexiglass was nailed in place. “I was just hoping the thing was straight,” he says, “because on the floor you can’t tell.”
Salad days he would rather forget: Barber also assembled Red Grooms’s Dali Salad for Vermillion Editions in 1980. ©Red Grooms / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Twin Cities collectors know Barber as the longtime chief printer at Vermillion Editions. In those years, his most grueling project was assembling 80 copies of Red Grooms’s Dali Salad, whose components, scallions and all, had to be cut from thick vinyl and hot-glued and stapled together. He also had to paint the staples. Maximilian would be pleased to know that his arch triumphed over that project in difficulty.
Finished, the Brobdingnagian woodcut stands 11 feet, 8 inches high—twice as tall as Barber. It took a week before he could visit the arch framed in the gallery. He went toe to toe with it, but he’s still standing. “It was a super-heavyweight bout,” he says. “Fifteen rounds.”