In August 1941, the Belgian communist François Marie Claessens was arrested in Antwerp. Soon after, he was deported to Neuengamme, along with many of his Belgian comrades, and later to Dachau. He barely survived the inhumane living conditions and brutal interrogations. Yet, in the midst of these horrors, Claessens offered lectures to fellow prisoners – on Belgian art history, Marx’s dialectics, Aquinas’s theology. ‘The truculent paintings of Teniers the Younger replaced the infernal visions we were witnessing – visions which even Hieronymus Bosch had not foreseen’, the French Gaullist Edmond Michelet recalls in his memoir of Dachau. Among the stories Claessens loved to tell was one about the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder who, according to Flemish legend, died of a stroke while observing a landscape upside down.
Though there is no historical evidence for this, the story of Bruegel dying while bent over – head between his legs, in an attempt to render the familiar unfamiliar – captures something profound about the Flemish master’s aesthetic. In a recent volume, On Bruegel, T. J. Clark notes how the concept of ‘estrangement’ has dominated approaches to the painter since Hans Sedlmayr’s influential 1934 essay ‘Bruegel’s Macchia’. In the Austrian formalist’s account, as one views Bruegel’s work ‘the logic of entire portions of a picture breaks down, and the objects represented seem strange, as does the entire picture . . . this process is accompanied by the experiences of shock and disturbance, in sensitive viewers even of anxiety and something approaching fear’. The word for such fear, the ‘key to an understanding’ of Bruegel’s motifs, was ‘estrangement’, and its effect – aided by the depiction of what Sedlmayr referred to as ‘primitives’, ‘the deformed’, ‘the insane’ – was to offer ‘a profoundly pessimistic allegory of the nature of mankind’.
This interpretation was not unrelated to the fact that, at the time, Sedlmayr was an enthusiastic Nazi and had been a member of the NSDAP since 1932. During his tenure as chair of art history at the University of Vienna, he proposed nothing less than the demolition of the city’s Jewish quarter and the deportation of its inhabitants so as to erect a ‘Hitlerstadt’ that he hoped would be the centrepiece of a new Vienna. In spite of this political history, Sedlmayr’s thinking was treated with continued interest in the post-war era. Adorno, for example, found himself ‘paradoxically’ close to some of his observations. Naturally, their historical accounts of modernism were radically different: for Adorno, the rationality of capitalism was central, while Sedlmayr was concerned with man’s estrangement from the divine. This, he believed, could already be observed in Bruegel: his paintings offered a vision of humanity divorced from God.
As Clark writes, such a reading has long informed conceptions of the Flemish master as a ‘cold ethnographic comedian’, an ‘anatomist of lower-class folly’, whose work is ‘at best pessimistic and comically condescending, and at worst detached, moralistic, crisply repressive, coldly calculating’. Clark’s elegant essay provides a sharp rebuttal of this view. Bruegel was not, he argues, a cynical or fatalistic observer. His paintings represent not the condemnation of a fallen world, but of ‘the unappeasable wish for escape’ embodied in the religious ‘fantasy of transcendence’. Clark’s Bruegel rather is a materialist through-and-through – ‘the deepest and most thoroughgoing to have left us a picture of the world’ – whose work should be read as a profound meditation on ‘what the material world consists of, what the human animal is in its simple physical existence, what being fully and exclusively in the material world could be like’.
Even in his most allegorical paintings Bruegel never departs from the world: ‘the earth, the here and now, was his proper realm’. His depiction of Hell in The Triumph of Death (c. 1562), for example, includes an army of skeletons that appear strangely human. Some are bored, others are disguised, stealing gold coins, or playing music. They present different stages of decomposition, blurring the division between the living and the dead. Such a painting eliminates ‘hell’s distance, hell’s otherworldliness’. In Bruegel, ‘all visions of escape and perfectibility are haunted by the worldly realities they pretend to transfigure’ – his work evinces a profound scepticism of the idea that our world might open onto another. What Bruegel provides for Clark is a different way to think about alternatives – a vision that is not the world upside down, or a dream of revolution, but of one where ‘everything’ is ‘capable of becoming something else, but not dramatically, not in some moment of metamorphosis’. In line with post-‘68 critiques of everyday life, Clark finds in Bruegel an idea of politics as creating alternate forms of life. How should we live in society becomes our compass rather than the eschatology of the ‘Great Look Forward’. As he set out in a renowned intervention in NLR, Bruegel provides a model for ‘a left with no future’. ‘What would it be like’ he asks, ‘for left politics not to look forward – to be truly present-centred, non-prophetic, disenchanted, continually “mocking its own presage”?’
Clark’s reading is original and incisive. But does it fully account for the estranging effects of Bruegel’s work articulated by Sedlmayr? Might there be an interpretation that resists Clark’s ‘No Future’ orientation? Two years after Sedlmayr published his essay, Bertolt Brecht, at the time exiled on the Danish island of Fyn, received a large, illustrated book on the Flemish painter. Captivated by Bruegel’s work, Brecht ended up bringing several books about the painter with him as he travelled, first to Sweden and later to California. His reflections, ‘The Alienation Effect in the Elder Bruegel’, were published posthumously in 1956. For Brecht, looking for a judgment of human nature in Bruegel was missing the point. What fascinated him was the unique effect of his compositions – Bruegel’s paintings presented contrasting impressions or contradictions that created a sense of estrangement or alienation in the viewer.
This is particularly evident when Bruegel paints liturgical events as ordinary occurrences. In Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560), Icarus is marginalized to the lower-right hand corner of the canvas, his fall barely noticeable. Instead, the scene is occupied by Flemish peasants going about their labour. Why does no one acknowledge the event? And why, if Icarus fell when the sun was at its zenith, does the painting depict a sunset? The Census at Bethlehem (1566), meanwhile, relocates the Virgin Mary and Joseph to a small Flemish town – Wijnegem – during Bruegel’s era. The anticipated Nativity scene is obscured by a bustle of quotidian activity, while a church stands in the background, as though the villagers are about to witness an event that has already occurred. In Bruegel’s Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1563), his only other depiction of this scene, heavy snowfall covers the entirety of the canvas, imposing a distance from the viewer.
An equivalent effect is produced by Bruegel’s combination of landscapes. A striking example is The Tower of Babel (c. 1563), which he modelled on the Colosseum following his visit to Rome. In the background of the scene, we can notice a Roman aqueduct placed in the middle of a Flemish landscape, populated with recognizably Belgian workers. Brecht highlighted this dissonance in another of Bruegel’s works: ‘When an Alpine massif is placed in the middle of a Flemish landscape, one exposes the other’, making it difficult to simply lose ourselves in the composition. The discrepancies oblige us to take a step back and consider the whole, what Claessens had called the ‘organic unity’ of the painting. As if, what unites the elements of the work is the questions they pose for the viewer. For Brecht, Bruegel’s work asks us to view the world upside down in order to consider it critically.
As Tom Kuhn observes in an essay about his influence on Brecht, Bruegel ‘seems not to have been interested in the representation of the individual or of the psychological’. It is notable that, despite being perfectly capable of capturing individual physiognomy, and unlike most of his contemporaries, Bruegel never painted portraits. In his work, the expressions of figures are often difficult to interpret, or, as in The Beekeepers and the Birdnester (1568) they appear faceless. As if Bruegel wanted to draw our attention away from their interior life. Identification is not what is at stake. ‘We are not expected to stop at that recognition of a contemporary political commentary’ Kuhn insists, ‘nor are we simply invited to empathize with the grief of Christ’s supporters and friends’. Rather, we are compelled to re-focus our attention on the social relations in which the characters are set. For Brecht, Bruegel’s work does not express a condescension towards human beings or a plea for presentism. Instead, he discerned an aesthetic grounded in the social contradictions that shape our world. What if, contra Clark, Bruegel is not telling us how to live within those contradictions, but rendering them conspicuous – an aesthetic that seeks not to reflect, but to help us see where to look if we want to change the world.
Read on: T. J. Clark, ‘For a Left With No Future’, NLR 74.