Word: bruegel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Every known Raphael or Bruegel has long since found a permanent home. But there is still a floating supply of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that demonstrate the buyer's sound yet "modern" taste. As a result, there seems no way for such works to go but up. Even the $230,000 paid for a minor Matisse, Fete des Fleurs a Nice, more than doubled the artist's record price of $106,152, set only a year ago. For Impressionists, the trade's present rule of thumb is that what $1 would buy in 1893 would cost...
...heartland of the absurd today, recalling how, three and four centuries ago, the dance of death, along with the ship of fools, was the obsession of so much European painting and writing. For The Triumph of Death, lonesco reaches not only to Albert Camus, but also back to the Bruegel painting that bears the same title and beyond that to Holbein, to the tradition of the 15th century frescoes of Palermo, to medieval mysteries and moralities crudely performed in the streets...
Haymaking, at Prague, continues Bruegel's calendar series into early summer. Here three foreground figures - farm women this time - may be simply three women on the way to the fields (see detail, page 57). But they might also be the Maid, Mother and Crone of mythology. The people carrying baskets of cherries move round and down like planets - or automatons on a town clock. In the distance at right, a sailboat drops downriver toward the gleaming sea (see detail, pages 54-55). "The journey is not ended," a Flemish proverb says, "even after church and tower have been recognized...
...analyze a Bruegel very far. He has arranged things differently. He does invite one to pause long; to bend and peer out at the world again in unaccustomed ways. His art asserts itself by very slow degrees. First comes sensuous enjoyment, for he veils each image in the most extraordinary counterfeits of nature. Second come observation, characterization, storytelling - things to notice, in a word. So much so that each of his pictures takes hours to explore. The third and final stage of studying a Bruegel, though, comes when one turns away. For the painting remains in one's mind...
...What is truth?" The painter, staring, pauses long for his reply. Pieter Bruegel, especially, waits and wonders. There is no hurry; the truth is nothing if not true tomorrow too. He lifts his narrow brush and makes a line. It is a mile-long road that rounds a bend into infinity...