The Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University has purchased two outstanding engravings by the Renaissance painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer, the most recent additions to its works on paper collection. Adam and Eve (1504) and The Virgin with Swaddled Child (1520) are the earliest works appearing in the new exhibition Renaissance to Contemporary: Recent Acquisitions in Works on Paper on view now through May 27, 2007. The Adam and Eve is considered by art historians to be especially important because it reflects the German artist’s absorption of the ideals of the Renaissance in Italy where he had journeyed in 1494-95.

Also featured in this exhibition are a lifelike portrait of the Dutch artist Hendrick Goltzius engraved by his follower Jan Muller around 1617 and a 1929 drawing of an erotic combat of horses by the French Surrealist André Masson. Other works on display include a very early drawing (ca. 1915) by the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco and two twenty-first-century working drawings by the American minimalist Sol LeWitt.

All of the drawings, prints and photographs in the exhibition have come to the museum within the last few years, either as gifts or purchases, and together they demonstrate the broad range and increasing quality of the collection.