Word: bruegel
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...embracing land. In fact, these pictures seem to pull the sky around one like a canopy. One's gaze penetrates the concrete actuality, mere paint on planks, to enter space more vast than any gallery. Yet the space is not merely visual but emotional. Like T. S. Eliot, Bruegel seems to ask whether it would be worthwhile...
What means Hunters in the Snow, for example? Sigmund Freud once remarked that every dream is a kind of picture puzzle. Bruegel liked puzzles too. More so than answers. A sort of bemusement, not too hopeful, may be the best mood in which to reach for what he meant...
...hope appears to balance, blindfold and invisible, upon a shaky raft. Something of that sort, surely, is implied by the accumulation of incidents in Bruegel's Dark Day. But there is realism in it too. That foreground bank of earth, where the peasants work, somehow seems much earthier than any other in world...
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...