Hans Baldung Grien

Baldung’s sensual Madonnas, lustful witches and macabre scenes show a bizarre originality unmatched in Renaissance Europe. The erotic quality of his works sometimes verges on pornographic, notably in his drawings, and on some level reflects his ambivalent, if not tortured, fascination with female sexuality as well as an interest in witchcraft. Baldung’s compositions are arguably bolder and more inventive than those of courtlier contemporaries such as Lucas Cranach the Elder. In 1936, Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), included Baldung’s mysterious Bewitched Groom and the Witches’ Sabbath in his landmark exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which placed the Dada and Surrealist movement in the context of ‘certain of its pioneers‘—the fantastic and marvelous in European art of the past five centuries. Like Dürer, Baldung’s artistic contribution went beyond that of a painter; he has a particular significance as the inventor of the chiaroscuro woodcut but was also a draughtsman and printmaker of the highest order.