Bruegel in Vienna: Life, Death, Snow and Leapfrog

All human life is here -- and death too. The reaper is coming to get you. In Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Triumph of Death, there is no hope. From the king in the bottom left-hand corner, to the mother and child, the pilgrim, the soldiers, even the lovers on the bottom right: They're all doomed. A man dressed in red, his mouth agape, tries to draw his sword to fight back, but it looks to be stuck in its scabbard. Armies of skeletons are on the march. Resistance is useless.

There's so much detail in Bruegel's apocalyptic vision in paint that you could spend a long time trying to take it all in. And there are a couple of dozen paintings on this scale in the Bruegel exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, as well as intriguing drawings and engravings -- the first ever comprehensive show about the greatest Netherlandish painter of the 16th century, so give yourself a few hours; this is not a show to be rushed.

The Triumph of Death has travelled from Madrid to the KHM, which has the world's pre-eminent Bruegel collection, and they've been able to bring together two thirds of his extant paintings, but you will be left wanting more, because there are a couple of biggies that haven't come to the party.

Why are we here? Well, it's the 450th anniversary of Bruegel's death in 2019 - one of the few facts we know about his life. But we do know that this painter of peasant weddings, Towers of Babel and the seasons of the year was much esteemed in his time. When the collection of the Archbishop of Mechelen was looted, Cardinal Perrenot de Granvelle was told that "you cannot expect to recover pieces by Bruegel unless you pay dearly for them."

And so it continues. The Wedding Dance, now in the Detroit Institute of Arts, was valued at $200 million in 2013. Alas, it hasn't crossed the Atlantic.

Breugel took a witty view of his patrons. Here are The Painter and the Connoisseur. Full of melancholy and insight, the artist contemplates the creative activity of his work. The comparatively superficial purchaser understands nothing. On the other hand, he is reaching into his purse....

The curators take us slowly through Bruegel's early work, informed by a trip to Italy, and much of that comes in the form of drawings and prints. These need to be seen up close, and this is the sort of show where you can find yourself spending some time manoeuvring for position in front of artworks to get a better view. When suddenly your attention is drawn to some small detail you hadn't noticed, that makes the effort worthwhile.

Joshua Reynolds wasn't particularly impressed by Bruegel's skills in the "mecanical art of making a picture" but he loved his inventiveness and flow of ideas. In the engraving Big Fish Eat Little Fish, a huge fish is sliced open to illustrate the proverb, as the motif is repeated throughout the image and a father in a rowing boat in the foreground explains all to his son.

But Bruegel was also starting to work on a bigger scale, producing a series of groundbreaking Large Landscape engravings in 1555/56, and demonstrating his ability to depict sweeping scenes without losing intriguing details. This was the technique he would hone into his most important work, the six panels of the Seasons, 10 years later. This is where landscape painting stops being about religious scenes. and starts being about real life.

And so there they are, a little earlier in the show than you might have expected, and of course not all of them, because Spring was probably lost during the 17th century. Three are in Vienna anyway. Late summer, in the form of The Harvesters from the Met in New York, hasn't made the trip, which is a bit of a disappointment (details are reproduced on a large scale in a side room), but at least we do have one of the missing links: The Haymaking from Prague Castle.

It's early summer, and three women with their tools are heading to the fields to help; one stares straight out at us. They pass peasants taking baskets of fruit and vegetables to the village, some carried on their heads, others on a sled. In the bottom left-hand corner, a man sharpens his scythe. There is hardly a cloud in the sky.

What a contrast to the first painting in the series, The Gloomy Day, depicting the start of spring. The snow is still melting in the mountains and ships capsize in the stormy waters of the estuary behind the village. After The Haymaking, it's on to early autumn and The Return of the Herd from pasture in the hills. The grape harvest is under way too, and with dark clouds approaching on the right, gallows can be seen in the middle ground.

But the greatest of these four paintings is surely that of the Hunters in the Snow, returning along with their tired dogs with a meagre bounty. At the tavern on the left, the one with the sign hanging half off, they're about to scorch the skin of a slaughtered pig. There's skating on the ice, but that's because the fields are frozen and can't be worked. Bruegel takes us from cornucopia to dearth in a few images. 

So yes, all human life is here, and subjects no one had tackled in art before, at least not on this scale. In Children's Games, the kids have taken over town -- about 230 of them. The encyclopedic view stretches from king of the castle over on the left through leapfrog to activities that look a little bit more boisterous, if not dangerous.

Alas (again), Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs from Berlin hasn't made it to Vienna. Maybe it's just as well. You could spend an hour in front of that one, deciphering the 100 depictions. But it's understandable, because many of these panel paintings are extremely fragile, quite apart from their value. 

There are unexpected delights, though. The Death of the Virgin is an incredible chiaroscuro grisaille from the National Trust's Upton House, near Banbury. The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow was, perhaps, the very first painting in which falling snow was depicted. And, beautifully presented, Bruegel's drawings and engravings for the series The Seven Virtues and The Seven Deadly Sins, the latter very Bosch-like, as are indeed The Triumph of Death and the enigmatic Dulle Griet, or Mad Meg, in which the armour-clad heroine carries away plunder from the gaping mouth of Hell. 

There's a lot more still to come. The show reunites two versions of Bruegel's Tower of Babel. The one normally in Rotterdam is a much bigger, brooding presence over the city below, when you consider the scale used. But it's the Vienna version displayed alongside that seems to better portray the folly of the enterprise, with its confused interior and the distraction of King Nimrod's site visit in the foreground. 

The final room is devoted to Bruegel's depictions of country folk, the first such monumental representations in Western art. If you follow the catalogue numbers, you'll end up with the mysterious and threatening-looking drawing, The Beekeepers, as the final artwork. But you'll really want to end with a knees-up and booze-up, surely? So save for last the Peasant Dance and of course the Peasant Wedding, perhaps the Bruegel that encapsulates Bruegel. 

Beer and porridge are on the menu as the bride sits contentedly below her paper crown. See the bagpiper? He used to have a rather large codpiece, but at some stage it got overpainted. And apparently there was a couple up to something in the hayloft who got retouched. Well, you know what weddings can get like. All human life is here. 

So, the $200 million question: Is this exhibition worth a trip to Vienna? Absolutely, especially with the other great art you can see in the city (there's the terrific Schiele show on at the Leopold Museum, for example). It's perhaps not quite the absolute blockbuster that the KHM has made out, given the absence of some of Bruegel's most famous paintings (also missing: the original Massacre of the Innocents from the Royal Collection). But a show of Bruegel's complete works was never going to happen, and you'll never get a better chance than this to appreciate and learn about so much of his output up close.

Practicalities

Bruegel is on until January 13 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The exhibition is open daily from 1000 to 1800, and until 2100 on Thursdays. Full-price tickets are available for specific time slots (and don't leave it too late in the day, because there's a lot to see) for 20 euros, or you can get a ticket allowing you to go in at any time for 30 euros. Both types are bookable online here.  

The KHM is just off the Ringstrasse boulevard that encircles Vienna's city centre, not far from the Hofburg palace or the opera house. Volkstheater is the nearest Underground station, and numerous trams run nearby.

Images

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, probably after 1562, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. © Museo Nacional del Prado
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Painter and the Connoisseur, c. 1566, Albertina, Vienna. © The Albertina Museum Vienna
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Haymaking, 1565, Lobkowicz Palace, Prague Castle. © The Lobkowicz Collections
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow, 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. © KHM-Museumsverband
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games, 1560, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. © KHM-Museumsverband
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. © KHM-Museumsverband

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Peasant Wedding, c. 1567, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. © KHM-Museumsverband