The other Brueghel…
This article first appeared on Apollo magazine's website We often think there is something reassuring, even comforting, about the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Life goes on, in a rather jolly way, oblivious to the great dramas of history, he seems to be telling us. ‘How everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster,’ as W.H. Auden famously observed in his poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts'. We are fond of Bruegel’s paintings, not because they speak to our own age, or pre-figure modern attitudes, but because they are so deeply rooted in their own time. Odd, therefore, that Christie’s should seek to set up a dialogue between Bruegel and the art of today.
