BOOKS & ARTS
Exhibitions
All together now
Martin Gayford
Bruegel
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna,
until 13 January 2019
‘About suffering’, W.H. Auden memorably
argued in his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’,
the old masters ‘were never wrong’. Great
and terrible events — martyrdoms and
nativities — took place amid everyday life,
while other people were eating, opening a
window or ‘just walking dully along’. As an
example, Auden took ‘The Fall of Icarus’
by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As it happens,
Auden himself was wrong there, because
the work he cited is no long thought to be
by the painter after all.
This picture is not, therefore, included
in the exhibition Bruegel at the Kunsthis-
torisches Museum, Vienna. However, the
fact that Icarus has now been consigned to
the vague penumbra of ‘after’ and ‘circle of’
is a detail. On the essential point, Auden was
absolutely correct. You see it time after time
in this marvellous array of paintings. Time
and again, Bruegel hides away the scene
that you might have imagined was the whole
point of his picture.
Thus, in his ‘Conversion of Saul’ (1567)
the future St Paul is not front and cen-
tral, the hero of the story, as he is in, say,
Raphael’s or Michelangelo’s version of the
event. He has been thrown to the earth by
a heavenly apparition — but in the mid-
dle distance. It takes a moment before you
discover him: a little sprawling figure sur-rounded by a whole army column of horse-
men and lancers marching over a high
mountain pass with a steep drop down to
the plains below.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum has
12 paintings by Bruegel in its own collec-
tion — out of a total of only about 40 — to
which in the exhibition are added numer-
ous loans including prints and drawings.
The result does not quite reassemble every
remaining work, but it is as close as we are
ever going to get, and is most unlikely to
happen again remotely soon, if ever.
The exhibition reunites four of the six
panels of the ‘Seasons’ that Bruegel paint-
ed in 1565. ‘Hunters in the Snow’, the mid-winter scene, is one of the best-known
images in art history; ‘Return of the Herd’
and ‘Gloomy Day’, devoted to late autumn
and the dismal period of February and
March respectively, are not far behind in
celebrity. These are currently joined by the
‘Haymakers’ from Prague. (The high sum-
mer scene, ‘Harvesters’, is unfortunately
too fragile to travel from New York, while
the sixth panel, dealing with spring, disap-
peared very early on.) Even so, to see these
four great paintings lined up on a wall is
reason enough to get on a plane to Austria.
And there’s a huge amount more.
Bruegel’s career was relatively brief —
his major paintings all date from the decade
between the late 1550s and 1569, when he
died, and his surviving oils are correspond-
ingly few. The effect of showing most of his
masterpieces together is overwhelmingly
rich. That’s because there’s so much in each.
In ‘Christ carrying the Cross’ (1564) the
Saviour is almost lost in the crowd packed
with onlookers, travellers, soldiers, fights,
children. The rolling, verdant landscape is
punctuated with the sinister wheels, erect-
ed on poles, on which criminals were left
to die, their limbs broken (there are many
more of these in Bruegel’s ‘Triumph of
Death’ from Madrid, the most terrifying
image, to my mind, in the history of art).The show is as close as we’ll get to
reassembling every remaining Bruegel
and is unlikely ever to happen again‘Children’s Games’, 1560, by Pieter Bruegel the ElderKUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM VIENNA, PICTURE GALLERY © KHM-MUSEUMSVERBAND