Van Eyck’s Portrait of an Older Man is a benchmark in the history of northern European draftsmanship. It is the earliest surviving study that can be securely attributed to an individual artist active in northern Europe and the only sheet universally accepted as an autograph drawing by Van Eyck. A pivotal figure in Netherlandish art, Van Eyck is renowned for his virtuosic handling of oil paint and his skill in pictorial illusionism. Made in preparation for a painted portrait (shown below), this drawing illuminates the process of careful observation behind the creation of Van Eyck’s meticulously executed panel.

The artist focused his attention on the man’s face, which he modeled using densely packed parallel lines. He was particularly concerned with the play of light, which animates the sitter’s physiognomy and imbues the likeness with a sculptural quality. While the use of silverpoint and goldpoint—traditional fifteenth-century drawing media—resulted in a monochromatic image, extensive inscriptions to the left of the man’s head vividly describe the color of his eyes, lips (“very whitish purple”), skin tone, hair, and “stubbly beard.” Van Eyck would have referred to these notes when creating the painted portrait.

Although both the drawing and painting were long believed to depict Niccolò Albergati, a Carthusian monk from Bologna, the man’s secular dress and hair argue against such an identification. More likely, the sitter is a scholar whose name is no longer known to us.

Born in Germany and first active as an independent master in Switzerland, Holbein spent the final decade of his life in England, working in the ambit of the Tudor court. He was particularly admired for his skills as a portraitist. This imposing likeness of Charles de Solier—a French nobleman, soldier, and diplomat—exemplifies the multilayered drawing technique that Holbein developed for his portrait studies around this time. The artist used paper prepared with a light-pink ground, approximating his sitter’s skin tone. Subtle modeling in black and colored chalk helped animate the frontal likeness, drawing the viewer’s attention to Solier’s pensive gaze. Perhaps most striking, however, is Holbein’s meticulous rendering of the man’s beard, composed of gray and auburn streaks.

Grünewald conceived this boldly rendered and expressively foreshortened figure as a witness to one of the key New Testament miracles—the Transfiguration. In this biblical event, Christ is enveloped in a halo of light as his divine nature is revealed to a small group of apostles. Here, one of the apostles is depicted as having tumbled to the ground, his body contorted and his arms extended forward, as though to protect himself from the blinding apparition. Grünewald used this study to explore the direction and modulation of light, which illuminates the apostle’s back, creating a stark contrast with the rest of the heavily shaded drapery.

In addition to his activities as a draftsman, engraver, and goldsmith, Graf was a mercenary who participated in military campaigns in Italy and France. Many of his drawings build on these experiences, chronicling the life of soldiers and the vicissitudes of war. In this sheet, a soldier and a woman are seen parting ways. While she firmly grips the front of his cloak, a sword in his left hand connects with her bulging belly, imbuing the drawing with an erotic charge. The scabbard points into the dark landscape at right, indicating the departing soldier’s direction. Although Graf’s highly linear style evokes printmaking, the drawing was not a preparatory study for an engraving. Monogrammed and dated at lower right, it was created as an independent work of art.

In a procession organized in two tiers, a princess on horseback is accompanied by servants and led by a bearded rider who points the way to a younger companion. Courtly cavalcades were popular motifs in fifteenth-century Italy, but women seldom played a leading role in such scenes, and the subject of this intriguing composition remains elusive. The artist drew attention to the now-mysterious princess and the bearded rider through both their placement in the composition and their attentively rendered robes and horses, heightened in white to contrast with the paper’s midtone. The drawing is one of the oldest surviving works on manufactured blue paper.

This finely executed drawing depicts Jupiter, the mythical Roman god, identified by the lightning bolts in his right hand, the eagle appearing over his left shoulder, and the fallen Titan partially visible beneath the god’s ornate robes. Jupiter here symbolically represents his eponymous planet, as the inscription around the five-pointed star at lower center indicates. On the verso of this sheet, the unidentified Burgundian artist portrayed Venus. Further drawings in Dresden by the same hand feature Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, the gods corresponding with the other planets then known. The style of the drawings and the figure types employed suggest a dating of around 1420–30, a notably early date for a drawing of this type.

A much-celebrated example of Florentine draftsmanship of the fifteenth century, Verrocchio’s Madonna with the Brooch demonstrates a range of techniques and artistic interests. The artist first sketched the Virgin and Christ Child in silverpoint, establishing the composition with a light touch and making several small adjustments in the process. Focusing his attention on the Virgin, he used leadpoint to reinforce contours and adjust the figure’s eyes, neck, and brooch. Picking up the brush, Verrocchio then skillfully described the fall of light over the Virgin’s robes, adding brown wash for shadows and opaque white watercolor for highlights. These painterly passages add a convincing sense of plasticity and volume to the more immediate and spontaneous metalpoint sketch.

Remarkable in its fluidity and freedom, this drawing served as a preparatory study for an altarpiece (shown below) commissioned by the brotherhood of Saint Peter Martyr in the northern Italian town of Modena. Correggio began by laying out the basic composition in chalk or charcoal, which he then extensively reworked using brown wash and white heightening. Such bold, painterly use of the drawing media allowed the artist to effectively describe the plasticity and movement of his figures, and to explore the effects of light. The study was acquired by the Kupferstich-Kabinett in 1860 as a complement to the finished painting, which entered the Dresden collection in 1746.

This refined drawing was most likely a preparatory study for Bronzino’s fresco decorations in the private chapel of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo at the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. The artist modeled the child’s face with delicate hatching, which he then rubbed to create finely blended shadows, endowing the study with the smooth surface of polished sculpture. The inclusion of lightly sketched wings indicates that the figure is an angel or a putto, of a similar type to those painted in Eleonora’s chapel. The seemingly abstract vertical lines on the child’s face and chest are remnants of a linear sketch of crossed legs, which relates to another figural motif developed for the chapel commission.

In this early example of the still-life genre, Cranach captured the texture and nuanced color of the partridges’ plumage, ranging from the delicate gray tufts covering the chest to the firmer, darker wing feathers. While the dead birds are rendered against a plain background, the carefully modulated shadows create an illusionistic impression of space. Despite the partridges’ uncanny physicality and the work’s high degree of finish, the drawing was not conceived as an autonomous work of art. Like Young Stag, on view nearby, it belongs to a portfolio of drawings of animals and birds used as models for paintings in the Cranach workshop.

The stag in this drawing is a pricket—a male deer in its second year with short, unbranched antlers. In contrast to Two Dead Partridges, on view nearby, the animal was likely drawn from a live model, which allowed the artist to capture its taut, welldefined muscles and other anatomic features in great detail. The stag’s alert, slightly retreating posture and circumspect facial expression have also been convincingly described. Cranach the Elder and members of his workshop would have referred to such studies when painting their hunt scenes, which were celebrated for their high degree of naturalism. In a tribute written in 1509, humanist Christopher Scheurl claimed that the artist’s painted stags were so realistic that birds fell to the ground when trying to land on the antlers.

The relationship between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire in the Renaissance was marked by military conflict as well as sustained cultural and commercial exchange. Featuring Ottoman ceremonies and monuments, this album attests to the early “Turkish fashion” in Dresden. The volume was created by the court painter Zacharias Wehme on the basis of a now-lost album that David Ungnad, the imperial ambassador in Constantinople, had sent to Dresden just a few years prior. This drawing focuses on the Hagia Sophia—built as a Christian place of worship and converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The left side of the composition includes a flap that, when opened, reveals the tomb of the recently deceased Sultan Selim II.

Native to New Guinea and surrounding islands, birds of paradise—or rather, their dried and dissected skins—first reached mainland Europe in 1522. Collectors admired the birds’ iridescent feathers and were puzzled by what they perceived to be an unusual anatomy. When birds of paradise were dissected and their skins prepared for export to Europe, their feet were usually removed, which led to the false belief that the species was in constant flight. This drawing marvels at the bird’s brilliant plumage, executed in varied shades of brown, black, and white watercolor. It likely depicts the first bird of paradise recorded to have reached the Dresden court at the end of the sixteenth century.

On the eve of his crucifixion, after the Last Supper, Christ visited the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives with the apostles Peter, John, and James. Withdrawing in prayer, Christ asked his companions to watch over him, but while he prayed, the apostles were overcome by sleep. The Master of Frankfurt’s fully realized drawing depicts Christ among the sleeping disciples, with the later saints Jerome and Francis of Assisi, both animated in their devotion, added as flanking figures. The highly finished and elaborately worked sheet carefully combines gradations of wash and white heightening against a gray preparation, lending the scene a subtle nocturnal atmosphere and its figures a volumetric presence.

The solemn Virgin Mary, crowned as the Queen of Heaven, holds both the Christ Child and a columbine, a flower with dove-shaped petals that alludes to the Holy Spirit in the Christian tradition. The drawing’s unusually large scale and the columnar folds covering the Virgin’s elongated legs emphasize the contained verticality of this quiet scene. As a result, the standing Virgin, depicted frontally, gives the impression of a sculptural work enclosed in a niche. The composition relates to paintings by the Early Netherlandish master Hugo van der Goes and his followers. Moreover, the technique—the work is drawn with the tip of a paintbrush, mixing regularized parallel hatching with short comma-like strokes—is one used by the master and his circle.

Landscape first emerged as an independent pictorial subject in prints, drawings, and paintings of the Danube School—a group of artists active in Germany and Austria in the first half of the sixteenth century. Trained in the workshop of his older brother, Albrecht, a central figure among the Danube artists, Erhard Altdorfer was a very early adopter of the genre. This drawing depicts an imaginary landscape with an enormous, highly stylized tree, craggy mountains, and a river, which winds toward a small town in the distance. Altdorfer structured the composition using tightly spaced parallel- and cross-hatching, as well as looser, spiraling lines, which describe the clouds and shrubbery.

Like many other artists active in central and northern Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, Muller had a liking for subjects both erotic and esoteric. This drawing focuses on a littleknown passage from Homer’s Odyssey, featuring the brief and tragic love affair between Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture—known as Ceres in Roman mythology—and the young hero Iasion. Here, the artist depicts the moment when the lovers are discovered by Jupiter. As the canopy hanging over the bed flies open, vivid rays of light, emanating from Jupiter, illuminate their entangled bodies. The figures’ oversize limbs and contorted poses, delineated using pen lines that swell and break with a nervous rhythm, are typical of Muller’s early draftsmanship.

In this drawing, Zeus (known as Jupiter in Roman mythology), disguised as an eagle, abducts Ganymede, a young Greek hero hailing from the city of Troy. Although Ganymede was admired for his unmatched beauty and often depicted in an erotically charged manner, Rembrandt characterizes him as a frightened, unruly toddler who squirms and screams as Zeus carries him away. The artist’s exuberant marks range from bold, zigzagging lines, which delineate the eagle’s body, to the loose swirls on the right side of the composition, which do not seem to serve a specific descriptive function. The drawing was used as a preparatory study for Rembrandt’s painting The Abduction of Ganymede, which is also part of the Dresden collection.

Made three decades after The Abduction of Ganymede, on view nearby, Diana and Actaeon exemplifies the reduced, angular manner of drawing that Rembrandt developed in his late works. At left, Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, is bathing in the company of her nymphs. The group is observed by the young mortal Actaeon, who stands on an elevated bank at right, behind a large tree trunk. As described by the Roman poet Ovid, Diana punishes Actaeon’s voyeurism by transforming him into a stag. In this sheet, Rembrandt simultaneously portrays the moment when the goddess realizes that she has been observed and the subsequent punishment, showing Actaeon as part human and part animal, with his face transformed into a muzzle and antlers sprouting from his head.

This sheet belongs to a group of large-scale, highly finished drawings that Lievens created in the early years of his career. It focuses on the suspenseful banquet that Esther, an Old Testament heroine, prepared for her husband, the Persian king Ahasuerus, and his vizier, Haman. With her gaze fixed on Ahasuerus, Esther gestures emphatically toward Haman, who had been secretly plotting to annihilate the Jewish people. As his vicious plan is being uncovered, Haman crouches in his chair, his face submerged in the shadows. The drama of the event is enhanced by Lievens’s bold use of chiaroscuro effects and his decision to position the figures in the middle ground, with a curtain framing the composition at left, which effectively transforms the scene into a stage.

During his two visits to Rome, Rubens studied the Laocoön (shown below) more intently than any other ancient statue. The chilling depiction of the anguished Trojan priest, struggling to release himself from the tight coils of the snakes that threaten to suffocate him and his two children, provided the artist with an opportunity to observe a male body engaged in an intense physical struggle. Rubens created a dense, pulsating network of lines, methodically capturing the tense muscles and protruding veins of Laocoön’s torso and right arm in black chalk. The sculpture is observed from below and sideways, exemplifying the artist’s interest in finding unusual and dynamic viewpoints when drawing ancient sculpture.

Born in the Netherlands, Candid spent most of his early life in Florence, where he was active as a painter and tapestry designer. In 1586, he moved to Munich, joining the cohort of international artists working for Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria. This drawing served as a preparatory study for a print commemorating the foremost architectural project in the city at this time—the construction and decoration of Saint Michael’s Church. It reproduces one of the building’s principal façade elements, a large bronze sculpture representing the archangel Michael defeating the devil. Composed of layers of delicate gray wash and dense areas of hatching, the drawing successfully conveys both the sculpture’s intricate surface detail and its overall monumental effect.

This sensitive drawing, which depicts an angel leading the soul of a deceased man to heaven, was made by Tanzio in preparation for his fresco decorations in the Chapel of the Guardian Angel in the Basilica of San Gaudenzio, Novara, completed in 1629. The drawing corresponds closely with two figures painted in the chapel, who glide aloft on clouds at the base of the vault. The angel guides the deceased with his right hand and gestures with his left, directing his charge to look up toward the vault’s apex, where Christ appears. Tanzio’s finished study focuses on this moment of divine revelation, delicately rendering the interplay of light and shadow across the figures.

Characterized by a strong sense of immediacy, this drawing was likely based on a life study. Goltzius outlined the contours of the figure’s headdress and face using swift, sharp strokes of red chalk, and skillfully described the soft surface of the skin by rubbing powdery red pigment with a finger or stump. Despite the drawing’s compelling naturalism, the identity of the subject remains unclear. While scholars have traditionally referred to the figure as an older woman, the thick neck with the Adam’s apple protruding right below the chin, the unruly short hair playfully sticking out from underneath the headdress, and the overall lack of idealization suggest that the subject may be a male figure in a chaperon, a type of headwear popular in the Middle Ages.

Anguissola was born to a noble northern Italian family and, together with her six siblings, received a comprehensive humanistic education and training in the art of painting. Perhaps because her gender precluded her from studying anatomy or working with nude models, she focused on portraiture, often turning to sitters in her familial and social circles. This study, which might be a self-portrait, is an example of the artist’s direct yet sensitive approach to the portrait genre and her assured drawing technique. Although Anguissola’s drawing skill was praised by her contemporaries, extremely few sheets by the artist survive today.

Study with Four Pilgrims and a Cupid relates to Watteau’s painting The Embarkation for Cythera. He first depicted the subject around 1709–12 and returned to it a few years later, producing two variations. In these convivial works, groups of elegantly dressed young people mingle in bucolic settings as they prepare to embark for the Greek island that was, according to classical legend, the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In 1717, the French Academy described Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera as a fête galante, giving a name to the genre that would become the artist’s signature development. In this drawing, Watteau adeptly varied the pressure of the red chalk to define the fashionable characters.

Considered one of the pioneers and most important representatives of Neoclassicism, Anton Raphael Mengs began his training as a child under his father, the Saxon court painter Ismael Mengs. Anton Raphael graduated from this early, intensive tutelage around 1740, when he was twelve years old—the same year that Ismael and his children began a fouryear stay in Italy to continue their artistic education. This remarkable self-portrait, the earliest to survive by Anton Raphael, was drawn in that year, before the family’s move. A testament to the artist’s precocious talent, the drawing sensitively blends the black and red chalk to create a lifelike record of the young Mengs’s features as studied in a mirror.

In this large and commanding self-portrait, Maratti, one of the leading protagonists of the Roman Baroque, represents himself at about the age of sixty, when he was at the height of his artistic influence. In a virtuosic display, the artist elaborated his features and the fall of light with a meticulous network of cross-hatching using a sharp piece of red chalk. The drawing was not made in preparation for a painting but is instead an autonomous work of art, serving as both a record of Maratti’s likeness and a potent demonstration of his artistic abilities.

A group of monks, identified by their habits, pore over an open book; uneven light flickers across the scene, deftly rendered with brush and wash. The relationship and significance of the older man and younger woman standing together behind the main group, seemingly uninterested in seeing the volume, are ambiguous. The caricature-like faces and coarse delight of the three monks in the foreground imply that their book is not devotional and announce the drawing’s satirical nature. This sheet comes from one of several private albums that Goya compiled throughout his career. As in many of his published prints, the imagery in these drawings is replete with social criticism directed at the clergy, among others.

This album, containing dozens of portraits by several artists of rulers and noblemen from the Mughal Empire and the Deccan, was in the possession of the Dresden court by the end of the seventeenth century. Following a traditional representational style, these two portraits show Muhammad ‘Ādil Shāh, Sultan of Bijapur, at right, and Ikhlās Khān, his military commander and influential minister, at left. Often copied from earlier depictions, the subjects of the album’s portraits are identified by specific physical characteristics and attributes such as attire and weapons, though the artists expressed their individuality by introducing subtle variations. In the right-hand portrait, the unknown artist’s creativity and skill are especially evident in the depiction of the transparent muslin skirt.

This boldly colored depiction of two groups of women rowing ceremonial boats before a palace garden backed by mountains belongs to a genre known as xingle xt (行乐图, pictures of life at leisure). The idyllic scene was executed using the exacting Gongbi technique (工笔, Careful Brush Technique), combining meticulous brushwork, bold colors, and jiehua, the precise rendering of architecture with a traditional ruler called a jiechi (界尺). This late Ming dynasty watercolor is one of nine related landscapes in Dresden that descend from the collection of Nicolaas Witsen (1641–1717), a mayor of Amsterdam and collector of Asian art. The Kupferstich-Kabinett acquired several Chinese and Indian works from the sale of Witsen’s estate in 1728.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the architectural and cultural landscape of Dresden underwent a radical transformation. Focused on making the city into a major European capital, the Saxon rulers commissioned ambitious architectural projects and assembled a remarkable number of foreign artists at the court. Bellotto arrived in Dresden in 1747, bringing with him the Venetian tradition of vedute, or highly detailed topographical views. In this work, the viewer gazes from the right bank of the Elbe River toward the Augustus Bridge and the Old Town. The Dresden Castle, where the Kupferstich-Kabinett is located today, can be seen on the far right of the image, behind the newly built Dresden Cathedral. The only print included in the exhibition, this view conveys the splendor of Dresden during the decades shortly after the official establishment of the Kupferstich-Kabinett.

After training as an engraver in his native Switzerland and working in Paris, Zingg moved in 1766 to Dresden, where he joined the faculty of the newly established Academy of Fine Arts. Combining topographical accuracy with a penchant for the picturesque, and taking inspiration from the local environment, his drawings paved the way for the Romantic landscape tradition that developed in Dresden in the nineteenth century. This large sheet depicts the Keppmühle—a charming mill that was one of the most popular excursion sites for Dresdeners at the time. The landscape is rendered in Zingg’s characteristically ornamental style, with extensive application of sepia washes and skilled use of the white of the paper, creating an enchanting impression of illumination.

This large sepia study attentively renders a constellation of boulders, stones, and pebbles scattered on a beach. Infused with quiet melancholy and devoid of signs of human presence, the work explores atmospheric conditions and the effects of light. It is difficult to know whether the luminous celestial body at the center of the composition is supposed to represent the moon or the sun. In either case, Friedrich’s predominant concern is depicting the moment of transition between night and day, darkness and light.

Rügen—a large island in the Baltic Sea, off the coast of Germany—was an important destination for Friedrich. The drawings he made during his numerous trips to the area focus on dramatic chalk cliffs and rugged, stony beaches, capturing the island’s austere, windswept character. In this sheet, the artist reduced the Rügen landscape to its most essential features, relying on clear, precise contours and sparingly applied washes. Friedrich frequently used the landscape motifs he developed in such works as the basis for highly finished sepia drawings, such as Stony Beach at Moonrise (Stony Beach with Setting Sun), on view nearby. In order to transfer his compositions to other formats, Friedrich often squared his sketches, as is the case here.

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, one of the most important works of medieval literature, was first translated into German at the turn of the nineteenth century. It immediately became a rich source of inspiration for Romantic artists; Koch alone produced over two hundred drawings and a large number of prints illustrating the text. In this sheet, the artist focused on the tale of Francesca and Paolo, who fall in love upon reading the story of the legendary knight Lancelot. While the couple is gently embracing in Francesca’s bedchamber at right, the left side of the composition is dedicated to the enraged, seething figure of Gianciotto— Francesca’s husband and Paolo’s brother—who has just discovered the illicit affair.

In his self-portrait of 1817, Rehbenitz describes his intense gaze with precise and controlled draftsmanship. Feathery networks of graphite lines carefully establish the shadows over his face; the highly finished study is exactingly rendered throughout, apart from the loose curls at left, which remain as more animated traces of the artist’s hand at work. Rehbenitz produced this signed and dated drawing a year after moving to Rome from Vienna, where he had been studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. In Rome, Rehbenitz joined the circle of German artists known as the Nazarenes, forming a Protestant faction of the group with Friedrich Olivier and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, whose work is on view nearby.

In this drawing, Horny treats the delicate lily branch as a monumental form. Placed against a vivid green-blue background, the flower fills almost the entire space of the sheet. Through the combination of pen and ink, graphite, and translucent watercolor, the topography of individual petals is carefully described. The dark background, composed of richly layered washes, further enhances the lily’s palpable three-dimensionality. Although the drawing would seem to be an end in itself, it is connected to the artist’s work on the ceiling decoration of the Dante Hall at the Casino Massimo in Rome.

On a forested hill overlooking the Villa Piccolomini near Frascati, two young men in Renaissance-style dress break from their pastoral concert as two women approach. Though the characters that populate Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s scene are imaginary, the detailed landscape punctuated by brightly lit trees, skillfully described using the reserve of the sheet, derives from firsthand study. During the artist’s extensive travels in Italy from 1818 to 1827, he produced over one hundred landscape drawings, which were later bound in an album. Reflecting on these Italian works in 1867, Schnorr von Carolsfeld reminisced about the “ten exceedingly happy days” he spent in the countryside around the Villa Piccolomini, where he made this drawing.

A key figure among German artists who lived and worked in Rome in the early nineteenth century, Schnorr von Carolsfeld received his initial training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. This tender depiction of the ten-year-old Maria Heller dates to the end of his stay in that city. The artist captured the young girl as she slept, with her head and shoulder resting on a large pillow, and her feet protruding from underneath a light blanket. Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s use of crisp contours, sparing application of washes and hatching, and brilliant exploitation of the white of the paper itself result in an airy, ethereal image.

Made during Richter’s three-year stay in Italy, this drawing captures the vast, scenic landscape of the Roman countryside. The undulating hills extend rhythmically into the distance; they are composed of interchanging areas of gray and brownish washes, and sections of paper left blank. In the foreground, pious countrypeople are making their way to a small chapel located in a shaded valley at left. Unlike most of the landscape, the figures are rendered in outline only. While this gives the drawing an unfinished appearance, the artist likely left this area deliberately unworked to emphasize the impression of a radiant, sun-drenched Italian landscape.

Oehme’s vibrant watercolor shows a view of the mountainous Rigi area of Switzerland, which he visited in August 1825 on his return home to Dresden after a three-year stay in Italy. The artist used clear contours to define the unfolding mountain ridges, which are stacked in colored tiers, thereby communicating an expansive recession away from the viewer toward distant snowcapped peaks. The sheet is part of a group of watercolors and paintings based on the sketches that Oehme made during the trip. The finished works focus on the austerity and vastness of the Alpine terrain, omitting all references to the tourism industry that flourished in the region at the time.

These expressively charged studies stem from a trip that Menzel made to Italy in 1881. Rather than visit more popular destinations like Florence or Rome, the artist traveled to Verona, where he filled sketchbooks with firsthand studies of the characters and bustle of the city’s main market. Back in Berlin, Menzel used this visual repository as the basis for more elaborate drawings such as this one, made in preparation for his painting Piazza d’Erbe in Verona. The sheet is a superb example of Menzel’s mature style and his virtuosic control of the pencil, with which he was able to alternate fluently between broad, dynamic contour and refined details, confidently smudging the soft graphite to establish finely graded shadows.

In 1844, several thousand weavers in the central European region of Silesia revolted against exploitative working conditions and decreasing wages. Kollwitz’s Weavers’ Revolt, a series of six prints completed in 1897, draws on these historic events but places them in a contemporary context. A preparatory study for the final image in the series, this drawing depicts the tragic consequences of the unrest. At left, men carry a corpse into a dark parlor, to be laid down next to the two dead bodies already there; a woman sits beside them, grieving. Although the revolt itself is left out of the image, the white gunpowder haze, which drifts into the interior space through the broken window, suggests that the fighting is ongoing.

Between 1888, when she began her art studies in Munich, and her death in 1945, Kollwitz made scores of self-portraits in which she interrogated her appearance and her state of mind in a direct and uncompromising way. Although the deep rings surrounding her eyes and the gray hair can be interpreted as signs of aging, the artist was only forty-four years old when she made this work. The likeness is rendered predominantly in black chalk, with touches of violet accentuating her cheekbones and forehead. Covered in dense hatching, the left side of the artist’s face dissolves into the darkness and merges with the rapidly sketched background.

Klimt’s portrait of a young woman in strict profile is striking for both its economy of means and stark visual contrasts. The artist mostly eschewed modeling, delineating the young woman’s features with concise contours. He first drew the nude figure before adding the more abstractly rendered dress, under which the lighter, initial graphite lines can still be seen. Klimt retraced and reinforced the young woman’s chin and neck with a more incisive line set against hatching in the negative space, placing her face in sharper relief. The artist also exploited the juxtaposition of darker graphite with the white of the sheet to brilliant effect, accentuating the form of her lips, lowered eyelid, and arched eyebrow.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s expressive study captures the deep concentration of a musician at work. The drawing was made during an informal performance by Misia Natanson, a talented pianist and patron of the arts. Toulouse-Lautrec depicted Natanson on several occasions in different media, including a painted portrait that the artist named after Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens. In her autobiography, Natanson recalled that Toulouse- Lautrec “had fallen in love with Beethoven’s musical piece. I had to play it for him constantly because he claimed to draw his inspiration from it.”

In 1926, Mondrian was asked to design the interior of the Damenzimmer (ladies’ salon) in the house of the Dresden art collector Ida Bienert, a driving force for modernism in the city. Although the commission was never realized, the artist’s visionary design is preserved in this master plan, which combines the floor layout, wall sections, and ceiling view. To produce the plan, Mondrian extended the principles of Neo-Plasticism—an aesthetic theory that eschewed naturalistic representation in favor of straight lines, rectangular shapes, and primary colors—into the three-dimensional interior space. The resultant design is composed of clearly outlined and meticulously arranged fields of color. Mondrian attached great importance to the furnishings of the room, which were incorporated into the plan and strongly stylized.

Between 1930 and 1937, Glöckner produced more than 150 panels known collectively as his “Tafelwerk.” Made on a stiff board composed of layers of cardboard repeatedly dipped in a hot glue solution, these sturdy, double-sided works can be understood as sculptural objects. While the artist was aware of the contemporary Constructivist movement, he worked in Dresden largely in isolation and developed his compositions independently. This panel was made toward the beginning of this intensely creative period. Glöckner implemented a systematic compositional approach, manipulating his geometric shapes so that corresponding fields of color on the recto and verso have the same surface area.

A leading figure among the Austrian artists of his generation, Kokoschka rejected the idealized academic approach to the female body in favor of capturing the uninhibited poses and expressive movements of his models. In this early work, the sparse, angular quality of the artist’s line emphasizes the contorted pose of the standing girl. She is portrayed with her eyes closed and her head turned over her left shoulder, bending and flexing her outsize fingers. Her kneeling companion fastens the standing girl’s skirt, gazing toward but not directly at the viewer. The intimate, introspective atmosphere that permeates this sheet connects it with drawings and prints that Kokoschka was making for the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops) at this time.

During the era of Nazi rule, Mueller was proclaimed to be a “degenerate” artist, and many works by him were removed from German art institutions. Acquired by the Kupferstich-Kabinett shortly after the end of World War II, this drawing attests to the museum’s attempt to fill in the gaps that had opened in its collection as a result of the Nazi seizures. The vividly colored work depicts three female bathers in a verdant landscape, rendered in Mueller’s intentionally schematic and two-dimensional style. It exemplifies the artist’s lifelong interest in idyllic pastoral settings, where the perfect unity of humanity and nature could be achieved.

In contrast to his friend Otto Mueller, who often portrayed female nudes in arcadian landscapes (as in the drawing on view nearby), Kirchner placed two bathers within the distinctly urban setting of an artist’s studio. At the center of the sheet, a model washes herself in a small flat-bottomed tub. At left, a turbaned figure drapes a towel around the shoulders of the second woman, who appears to have just stepped out of the bath. Angular lines and broken contours are surprisingly effective in describing the sensual physicality of Kirchner’s models. The hastily drawn object on a pedestal at right can be identified as Dancer with Necklace—a small wooden sculpture that the artist completed around the time this drawing was made.

In this drawing, Dix portrays himself as a modern dandy in the middle of a bustling nightclub or brothel. His likeness is elegant and self-confident, with his brow furrowed and arms akimbo. A fashionably dressed couple dances behind him at left; at right, a jazz musician plays at a drum set. The complex image depicts the thrills and temptations of metropolitan life in the Weimar Republic shortly after World War I. The work’s title announces Dix’s departure from conventional aesthetic ideals, positioning his personal vision of beauty somewhere between the grotesque and the classical. The drawing served as a preparatory study for a large-scale oil painting now in the collection of the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, Germany.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Dix voluntarily joined the German army as a machine gunner, fighting on both the eastern and western fronts. In works produced during the 1920s, the artist grappled with his wartime experiences and, in his own words, aimed to “depict the war objectively, without trying to arouse pity, without all the propaganda.” This sheet portrays two veterans in uniform with severe facial injuries inflicted by artillery shells. Rendered in watercolor washes that are almost disturbing in their vibrancy—from blue-purple bruises covering the soldiers’ faces to yellow and red scabs forming over their wounds—it emphasizes the immense human suffering resulting from military conflict.

In this self-portrait of 1963, a detached Tübke sits with his arms crossed over his chest in front of a pale-blue background. The artist densely worked his facial features with short, controlled hatching using a graphite pencil. He employed a sparser approach when sketching his shirt, which he modeled with mostly longer, lighter strokes. The coloristic emphasis on his small cap is balanced only by the pink accents on the lower portion of his sleeves. The portrait-bust format, the artist’s pose, and the mannered right hand with knotted knuckles are all self-conscious evocations of Renaissance prototypes. Tübke repeatedly explored self-portraiture throughout his career, creating some 140 such works.

The Dresden-born Penck was often in conflict with the GDR authorities because of his association with nonconformist and dissident artists, and his rejection of Socialist Realism—the state-sanctioned art form. Prevented from studying at the art academies in Dresden and East Berlin, Penck developed a highly idiosyncratic visual language composed of simplified forms and figures. Drawing played an important part in his artistic process from the beginning. The archaic, austere, sculptural image captured in this early sheet reflects the artist’s desire to treat the profile of a girl as a universal form. Although no official funds could be used to acquire Penck’s art, the Kupferstich-Kabinett managed to amass one of the largest public collections of his works on paper.

Cybernetic Reflection is among Claus’s early “speech sheets.” Combining writing and drawing, these works allowed the artist to explore the relationship between language and visual expression. To make the drawing, Claus used his right hand to cover one side of a semitransparent piece of tracing paper with tiny lines of partially legible text. On the other side, working with his left hand, he created a complex network of dots and lines. While the artist associated his right hand with rationality, he believed that the use of the clumsier left hand allowed him to access the unconscious or not-yet-conscious parts of his mind. The resultant image resembles a spider, with delicate scribbles radiating outward like threads of a spiderweb.

Altenbourg spent his life in creative seclusion, living far away from the artistic centers of East Germany and withdrawn from the political affairs of the GDR. Composed of precisely placed and layered minute marks, fine textures, lush colors, and tightly woven shapes, this monumental work exemplifies the artist’s meditative, prolonged drawing process. As he often did, Altenbourg purposefully left the subject matter ambiguous. Hui and phui, mentioned in the title, might refer to the German saying “beauty above, ugliness below” (oben hui, unten pfui), thus implying a tension between admiration and disgust.