“A once-in-a-lifetime event,” proclaimed the media announcements. The hype associated with most modern exhibitions is only rarely matched by the contents and historical merits of the show. Fortunately, Bruegel: The Hand of the Master, displayed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum from 2 October 2018 to 13 January 2019, proved to be a veritable feast for the eyes and the mind. If anything, the exhibition was too popular, as visitors lingered far longer than the museum staff had anticipated and galleries quickly became overcrowded. Yet whether one traveled across town or made a Bruegel pilgrimage from thousands of miles away, the exhibition offered the largest gathering ever (or, at least, in modern times) of his oeuvre.
Artists’ anniversaries have long been convenient catalysts for mounting (and funding) major exhibitions, such as those honoring Rembrandt (1606–69) in 2006 and 2019 or Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450–1516) in 2016. Past Bruegel exhibitions, including the outstanding Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, curated by Manfred Sellink and Nadine Orenstein, held in Rotterdam and New York in 2001, surveyed parts of his oeuvre or related him with his contemporaries. Yet there had never been a comprehensive exhibition that included the majority of his forty or so extant paintings. Their rarity and fragility historically have precluded their travel.
Well before the 450th anniversary of Bruegel's death, in 2019, the Kunsthistorisches Museum seized the opportunity. With funds from the Getty Foundation's Panel Paintings Initiative, the conservation department of the Kunsthistorisches Museum began a thorough scientific examination and treatment of its twelve Bruegels starting in 2012. The detailed results are discussed in the catalogue (see below) and online at Inside Bruegel. The latter offers macrophotography, infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectography, and X-radiography of each picture.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum is the only institution capable of mounting a comprehensive exhibition. Fifteen other museums and one private collector lent their pictures. Conservation considerations precluded showing the four Tüchlein pictures, executed in distemper on linen—now in Brussels, Madrid, and Naples—as well as the Netherlandish Proverbs (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and the recently restored Harvesters (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The show included thirty drawings, about half of the attributed corpus, plus thirty-two of Bruegel's eighty prints. All of these exhibited prints plus three drawings were lent by the Albertina, which mounted its own superb show of Bruegel's graphic arts in 2017.
Bruegel: The Hand of the Master was among the largest exhibitions ever mounted at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. It occupied ten galleries, the entire northeast quarter of the first upper floor. The exhibition followed a loose chronological order complemented, mainly in the side galleries, by highly informative didactic displays. Since Bruegel's early career began by creating landscape drawings and designs for prints commissioned by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp, the first large gallery offered a sea of small sheets of white paper. The first room's centerpiece was The Painter and the Connoisseur (ca. 1566, Albertina). This exquisite drawing was one of a couple of dozen objects on display that lack their own catalogue entries.
Bruegel worked, directly or indirectly, with several different printmakers. Visitors could compare his drawing of Pride (Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, no. 23) with Pieter van der Heyden's engraved version (no. 24), or view his drawings of virtues (nos. 34–38) with Philips Galle's corresponding engravings (nos. 39–45). Even when van der Heyden, Galle, the Doetecum brothers, or Frans Huys faithfully followed Bruegel's designs, the engravers’ personal styles, their distinctive linear treatments, emerge.
The curators grouped paired works throughout the exhibition. In gallery 10, the long left wall displayed four of the five extant paintings of the Seasons (nos. 72–75). Even though three of these pictures reside permanently in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the addition of the Prague Haymaking more fully reveals the subtle visual interplays and color contrasts that Bruegel devised to convey the mood of the different months. The absence of the New York Harvesters, a detail of which adorned a banner visible through the doorway to gallery 15, was keenly felt. One can readily imagine the effect of the six paintings hanging in the dining hall of Nicolaes Jongelinck's country house outside Antwerp. The exhibition brought together the Vienna and Rotterdam versions of the Tower of Babel (1563 and after 1563; nos. 63–64). These hung on adjoining walls rather than side by side, perhaps so that visitors would appreciate the unique characteristics of each. The Winterthur and London Adoration of the Magi paintings (nos. 65–66), dating 1563 and 1564, respectively, reveal how differently Bruegel could stage this theme. Large figures dominate the London panel, whereas one must search for the protagonists in the other picture. The adoration, tucked away in the left corner of this busy Flemish village scene, is almost obscured by the falling snow. Bruegel's Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565; no. 71), in Brussels, was paired with a very early and excellent-quality replica (not in the catalogue) owned by the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Their placement together reveals Bruegel's deft winter evocation as well as the striking skill of the copyist. Scholars have identified about 130 versions of this popular composition.
One of the show's delights was the opportunity to view several of Bruegel's less familiar pictures. After a thorough restoration a few years ago, the View of the Bay of Naples (ca. 1565; no. 54), in Rome, is now accepted as by Bruegel. The Death of the Virgin (ca. 1563/65; no. 68), at Upton House in Banbury, is among the most exquisite of the artist's grisailles. Its intimate, almost meditative mood reveals the introspective side of Bruegel's art. The painting is dark, so some details were difficult to see given the room's lighting. Fortunately, one could turn to Philips Galle's luminous engraving (1574; no. 69), which Abraham Ortelius commissioned in order to share the composition with his friends. The raw, haunting power of the Prado's Triumph of Death (ca. 1562 or after; no. 60) and the brilliant colors of the Boschian Dulle Griet (1563; no. 61), in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, both recently restored, were among the show's highlights.
The results of the technical examinations of the Vienna Bruegels and other pictures prompted the organizers to include detailed didactic displays in several side galleries. These stressed Bruegel's choice of materials and techniques for his paintings and, to a lesser degree, his drawings. In order to minimize warping, his wooden panels, made using Baltic oak, were split, rather than sawn, at a radial angle from the center to the trunk's outer edge. His panels are surprisingly thin, as demonstrated by Christ Carrying the Cross (1564; no. 67), in gallery 11. This picture was exhibited without a frame and in a glass case set perpendicular to the wall, so it could be examined from all sides. At the right edge, the wood is only 5 mm thick, while, though not evident, it swelled to 13 mm in the panel's center. Bruegel collaborated with a skilled panel maker. This made me wonder whether there are noticeable differences in the panels, as well as their doweling, that he painted in Antwerp and those done in Brussels, where he moved in 1563. Or did he continue buying his panels from Antwerp?
Particularly revealing were the displays that illustrated how Bruegel used his different brushes, a sponge, and his fingers and palm to achieve certain visual effects. Specific hand positions were demonstrated with plaster models holding brushes coupled with enlarged photographs showing, for instance, where Bruegel used the handle of the brush to scrape into wet paint. In the Peasant Wedding (ca. 1567; no. 80), Bruegel employed a sponge to suggest the rough texture of the hay stacked in the barn and the stub of a bristle brush to create the floor's surface. Bruegel's finger and palm prints are evident in the Vienna Tower of Babel. The artist's underdrawings are sometimes visible due to the thinning of the paint, as in the Tower of Babel, or revealed in infrared reflectograms, as in the Hunters in the Snow (1565; no. 75). The diminutive Two Monkeys (1562; no. 59), in Berlin, was the object of a detailed step-by-step reconstruction of how it was painted, including a demonstration of how the wood panel was prepared, analyses of the underdrawing and pigments, and an explanation of the aging of the surface—specifically, of how the multiple layers of varnish turned yellow and grayish with time. Even for some of us who think we know Bruegel's oeuvre intimately, the scientific examinations have produced surprises, such as the painted-over couple making love in the hayloft above the guests in the Peasant Wedding.
Bruegel: The Master exists in two forms. There is the printed catalogue, which contains the curatorial team's brief introduction plus eighty-seven often highly detailed entries and a bibliography. In the text opposite the title page, the reader is informed how to access the e-book version. This includes the catalogue as well as five extended and richly illustrated essays. The quality of the reproductions in the high-resolution version of the e-book, as in the printed catalogue, is superb. Many of Bruegel's paintings that could not be included in the exhibition are illustrated in the catalogue.
The individual entries provide basic factual information, transcription and translation of any inscriptions, provenance, and summary bibliography. The accompanying discussions typically address the relevant debates about style, dating, iconography, and related issues. In general, the authors have avoided the more speculative scholarly theories, such as those concerning the extent of Bruegel's humanistic knowledge or his religious and political leanings. Instead they stress object materiality, the artist's creative practices, and the stylistic relationships within his oeuvre. Manfred Sellink makes the case for accepting The Drunk Cast into the Pigsty (1557; private collection; no. 22) as an authentic, if retouched, Bruegel painting. The artist's signature, visible only with the aid of infrared reflectography and a microscope, matches that of his drawings of the same year. This roundel relates closely with Johannes Wierix's engraving (1568) after Bruegel's composition and the artist's Twelve Proverbs (1558) paintings, in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, in Antwerp.
Sabine Pénot and Elke Oberthaler's collaborative entries for the Kunsthistorisches Museum's own paintings are particularly informative. Their text for the Seasons (1565; nos. 72–75, pp. 214–41), which includes the Prague Haymaking, is masterful. They stress the autonomy Bruegel gave to each painting through its varied horizon lines, distinctive colors, and the “tempo of the seasons as established by nature” (215). Each picture, including the missing New York Harvesters, is evocatively described. Their discussions of Bruegel's use of underdrawings and his painting techniques add valuable new information while encouraging us to look ever more closely at the surface and the minutiae of each picture. Bruegel must have created detailed preparatory drawings for the six paintings. Unfortunately, not a single design for any of his paintings has survived. His underdrawings for this series are freely done, with only the larger elements sketched in. He frequently made changes, such as omitting underdrawn buildings and figures or, in the Return of the Herd, adjusting the positions of the cows and their horns. Pénot and Oberthaler note that the loose painterly execution of the Gloomy Day and the Return of the Herd have much in common, while the Hunters in the Snow is painted much more smoothly and opaquely.
The e-book's five essays nicely enrich our understanding of the artist and the exhibition's goals. In “Leading the Eye and Staging the Composition: Some Remarks on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Compositional Techniques,” Manfred Sellink delves into the artist's ingenious arrangements, including the methods he employed for attracting and then directing the viewer's eyes. He points out how Bruegel used repoussoir trees, winding rivers, and strategically positioned figures as well as a mixture of looseness and precision to make the traditional tripartite landscape spatial divisions less obvious. The rhythmically swaying backsides of cows in the Return of the Herd draw one down into the village. Sellink explains the different techniques Bruegel used to produce coherent and highly believable compositions.
Sabine Pénot's “The Rediscovery of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Pioneers of Bruegel Scholarship in Belgium and Vienna” considers early historiography. Bruegel's art was not particularly fashionable in the eighteenth century or in most of the nineteenth, due to period tastes, the lack of access to his original paintings, and confusion about how to distinguish his pictures from those by his two sons. Even when the Kunsthistorisches Museum opened, around 1891, his paintings were not displayed together and were set among ninety pictures in gallery 11. Pénot traces the gradual rediscovery of Bruegel. He was the terminus, or final artist, in the famous 1902 Les Primitifs Flamands exhibition in Bruges. Belgian nationalism and the holdings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Albertina spurred scholarship in both countries. The essay provides a useful overview of the different trends, such as the reduction in the number of paintings attributed to Bruegel and efforts to contextualize the artist among Antwerp's humanists and merchants. I would have liked to learn more about the specific contributions of Gustav Glück, who created the first Bruegel room at the museum, as well as Max Dvořák, on the Austrian side, and René van Bastelaer and Georges Hulin de Loo, among the Belgian scholars.
Alice Hoppe-Harnoncourt's “Antwerp—Brussels—Prague—Vienna: On the Tracks of the Vienna Bruegels” painstakingly charts the provenances of the Kunsthistorisches Museum's twelve paintings as well as others that once belonged to the imperial collection. For instance, the Tower of Babel, in Rotterdam, the Dulle Griet, in Antwerp, and the Land of Cockaigne, in Munich (Alte Pinakothek), as well as several documented but now lost paintings listed as by Bruegel, were plundered by Swedish troops from Prague in 1648. The Adoration of the Magi, in London, left the imperial collection sometime after 1850, only to be offered, unsuccessfully, for sale to the Vienna museum in 1893, before being acquired by the National Gallery in 1920. Hoppe-Harnoncourt's superb essay, which includes a discussion of how the paintings were exhibited in the Kunsthistorisches Museum at different times since 1891, offers an invaluable chapter in the history of taste.
As Ron Spronk notes in his “On Pieter Bruegel's Creative Process,” sixteen other Bruegel paintings beyond those in Vienna have been subjected to technical analysis. Together, these provide extensive evidence of the artist's working methods. Given that only three figure drawings survive, Spronk wonders whether Bruegel made full-scale cartoons that were pricked for transfer. Joos van Cleve, among others, did this. The practice also recalls that used for transferring large tapestry cartoons, such as those prepared by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Bruegel's teacher. This might explain how Pieter Bruegel the Younger and, to a lesser degree, Jan Brueghel could make replicas of their father's paintings, when the originals were inaccessible to them. Spronk, who has worked intensively on the scientific analysis of paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, compares Bruegel's dry underdrawings with the earlier master's more fluid medium. The underdrawings reveal too that Bruegel planned out his compositions more fully than Bosch.
The longest and most revelatory essay is Elke Oberthaler's “Materials and Techniques: Observations on Pieter Bruegel's Working Methods as Seen in the Vienna Paintings.” Some of her team's finding are surprising. Of the museum's pictures, only Christ Carrying the Cross retains its original dimensions and the unaltered thickness of the five horizontal doweled planks on which it is painted. Only five pictures still have their original formats. Others were cut down to conform to later installations and framings, as seen in her figures 5–10 and 67a–d. Until 1720, the Tower of Babel was originally 4 cm higher and about 8 cm wider on the right side. The Birdnester lost about 10 cm on its right side. Dendrochronology reveals that all four panels used for the Battle of Carnival and Lent came from the same oak tree. Of the four planks used for the Return of the Herd, just the two middle ones were cut from the same tree. In the case of the Tower of Babel, all four panels derive from different trees, with the oldest growth ring dating to 1201. Oberthaler carefully explains Bruegel's use of ground layers, underdrawings, which vary considerably from picture to picture, and the current visibility of underdrawings due to paints becoming more transparent with age. She discusses Bruegel's painting sequence—e.g., setting in the background first—and how he creates spatial depth. Oberthaler analyzes his pigments and color choices. Bruegel's use of smalt means the once bright blue dresses of the Virgin Mary in Christ Carrying the Cross and the foregrounded woman in the Peasant Dance are now discolored and gray looking. Bruegel's application of paint, summarily presented in the didactic display in gallery 15, was exceptionally skillful and varied. The essay charts the past restoration histories and the methods used in the 2012–18 conservation campaign. Oberthaler concludes that overall, the twelve paintings are in excellent shape and are now properly documented.
Bruegel: The Hand of the Master was indeed a unique opportunity for the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The chance to see so many of Bruegel's paintings, drawings, and prints together permits one to appreciate his inventiveness, his sheer technical brilliance, and, for me, his humanity. It is hard not to think, “Damn, he is good” when standing before the luminously painted Magpie on the Gallows (1568; no. 87), lent by the Hessisches Landesmuseum, in Darmstadt. The catalogue and e-book provide an outstanding basis for future scholarship. For anyone who missed the show but is curious about Bruegel the painter, I recommend visiting www.insidebruegel.net, clicking on the macrophotographs of Christ Carrying the Cross, and exploring this (or any of the other paintings) closely.
In Memory of Walter S. Gibson (1932–2018).
