Early European art was a consuming interest of both Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, an interest reflected in the remarkable number and quality of drawings they owned from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In addition to an important group of early German drawings, the collection includes a "Saint Paul" from a series associated with Jan van Eyck and the famous" Scupstoel" from the circle of Rogier van der Weyden, the only design for a decorative sculpture to survive from the fifteenth century. The great artists of the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Claude Lorrain, and Rembrandt among them, are also represented, Rembrandt by seven drawings, including the large study of Leonardo's "Last Supper" that would stay in his mind all through his career, whenever he depicted groups of figures conversing with each other. Drawings by Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honore Fragonard, and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin are among the many from eighteenth-century France.

This volume is the ninth to be published in a projected series of sixteen that will catalogue the entire Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. It discusses all 140 drawings at length, placing each in its art historical setting and complementing the discussion with comparative illustrations of related works."

Jurgen Messensee (*1936 in Vienna), one the leading artists of his generation, occupies an important position in the fields of painting and drawing in Austria. Nature is the model for Messensee's work, in particular the human figure, which he dissolves into emblematic forms with an expressive gesture. His works can essentially be regarded as coded appropriations of nature in which manifest symbols such as female swimmers, mouths, or catamarans-distinguishing features of his oeuvre. In recent years Messensee has been supplementing his drawings and paintings with the jet print, greatly enlarging his own drawings and then painting them. In this process, the artist is interested in shifting and manipulating perception: what is real, and what is fiction? This publication presents the various stages of his oeuvre, and texts by Ingried Brugger and Florian Steininger probe its depths.Exhibition schedule: Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna, September 4-October 6, 2013