Breugel Comes to Gloucester

I. MUSEUM HOURS

Pieter Breugel, Hunters in the Snow

A few days ago Joy and I went to see “Museum Hours,” a film presentation co-sponsored by the Cape Ann Museum and our wonderful, funky local movie theater, the Cape Ann Community Cinema. There you sit on a sofa with your feet up on a bench or a coffee table, drink a glass of wine if you want one, and soak in the ambience along with a good movie.

And “Museum Hours” is a fascinating film, if sometimes obscure. On film rating web sites, almost all the critics love it, while audience reactions range from ho-hum to “What was that all about?”

Johann, the museum guard

We, however, loved it. Set mostly in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (the German translates as Art History Museum, but it’s referred to in the guide books as the Museum of Fine Arts), the film juxtaposes a chance encounter between Johann, a museum guard 

Anne

and Anne,  a visiting Canadian, in Vienna to tend to a dying relative, with a visual feast of glorious art, combined with strolls and subway rides through Vienna on a few bleak winter days. Anne speaks no German; Johann becomes her translator and guide (hers and ours) to the Museum and to Vienna. Theirs is not a romantic encounter; the romance lies in our immersion in the art.

The grand museum is one of two matching palatial structures facing each other across Vienna’s Ringstrasse (the other is the Natural History Museum), built in the late 19^th Century by Emperor Franz Josef of Austria to exhibit the House of Hapsburg’s enormous art collection. It displays a broad spectrum of art and artifacts, ranging from ancient Egyptian tomb paintings to contemporary artists (a visiting Lucien Freud show is currently on exhibit). 

There is a large collection of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance art, which includes 15 out of 45 known paintings by the Flemish painter Pieter Breugel the Elder (1525? – 1569), occupying a gallery of their own. (One of the compelling episodes in the movie is a guided tour of the Breugel room by a museum docent).

While his Renaissance contemporaries like Rembrandt and Vermeer were making elegant portraits of wealthy benefactors, Bruegel was showing us how the peasants – the 99 per centers of his day – spent their days. 

He painted during a harrowing period in Dutch and Flemish history, when the Netherlands were occupied by Spanish forces, carrying out the “Edict of Blood” prescribing death for Protestants defying the rule of the Catholic Church, issued in 1550 by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and viciously enforced by his son, Philip II.

The Tower of Babel

Breugel did not shy away from depicting this reign of terror, but most of his paintings, even the bloodier ones, also show his fellow men leading and enjoying their mundane lives. His busy canvases are populated by dozens – sometimes hundreds – of ordinary people engaged in work and play – eating, drinking, cooking, playing games, dancing, and making love. There’s even a tiny man (pointed out by the film’s docent) relieving himself on the hillside below the Tower of Babel in the painting by that name.

The Conversion of Paul

The nominal subjects of the paintings – Christ on his way to Calvary, St. Paul undergoing his conversion to Christianity, Saul falling on his sword after his defeat by the Philistines, the foolhardy Icarus splashing into the sea, and other notable figures from scripture and myth – are almost invisible, tiny afterthoughts on the margins of his busy tableaux.

Pieter Breugel is really the star of “Museum Hours.”  The camera dwells lovingly on the details of his paintings, and when Johann and Anne venture out in the evening (their daytime visits are to the hospital where Anne’s cousin is dying), it is to a favorite haunt of Johann's, a lively tavern filled with drinking, dancing and singing. The noisy room is filled with Breugel’s happy peasants.

The Peasant Wedding

The film ends with the camera following an old woman with a cane slowly making her way up a path and disappearing around a corner, while Johann’s voice-over narration sounds very like a museum docent’s description of a scene in the Old Master’s painting.

Opportunities to see “Museum Hours” are dwindling. Though it has won a series of international awards, it has been shown barely 100 times in this country, mostly in one-night stands at art houses and museums, since its release in June 2013. You can find the schedule, along with a film clip, stills, and contact information, at the website. And maybe some day it will be available online and on television. I hope enough people clamor for more so this mesmerizing film can get the audience it deserves.

II. ICARUS AT THE BEACH

The Procession to Calvary

“Museum Hours” is not the only instance where Breugel’s work has inspired later artists. Another recent film, “The Mill and the Cross,” was not only inspired by Breugel’s painting, “The Procession to Calvary”; the film’s grim opening scene is a carefully staged tableau with hundreds of actors posing in the same postures and positions as in the painting, before bloodthirsty Spanish soldiers gallop onto the scene to seize a peasant who gets in their way, lash him to a Catherine Wheel, and raise his dying body high above a hilltop. It’s grim but gripping. (And it was shown at the Cape Ann Community Cinema last year).

But the Breugel work that has surely inspired more derivative art than any other is his “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  (believed to be a copy of the original work, now lost). In the foreground is a busy farmer and his horse, plowing a field, high above an arm of the sea.  Part way down the hill below them a shepherd tends a flock of sheep. On the bay below, a stately warship puts out to sea, and several other ships dot the water. A seaport city sparkles in the distance, and jagged mountain peaks line the distant shore. And, oh yes – there is a tiny splash in the lower right hand corner, where two thrashing legs can be seen still breaking the water. A few feathers flutter in the air above them, but nobody notices.

The Fall of Icarus

In the ancient Greek myth Icarus, you’ll remember, was the son of Daedalus, the gifted craftsman who designed the Labyrinth where King Minos of Crete imprisoned the Minotaur, a savage half-man, half bull. The Minotaur was Minos’ son born of his wife and the “Cretan Bull.”  (What was she thinking)?

Minos kept Daedalus a prisoner on the island because Daedalus had helped Minos’ enemy Theseus kill the Minotaur and escape from the Labyrinth. Minos’ daughter Ariadne helped too.

The inventive Daedalus had an idea: he would build a set of wings, fasten them to his shoulders with beeswax, and escape by flying off the island. He made a set of wings for his son Icarus as well. “Don’t fly too close to the sun,” he warned his headstrong son, or the wax will melt and you’ll fall into the sea.” Well, we all know how that came out. Poor Icarus.

Breugel was far from the only artist inspired by the myth. It appears in  the ceiling of the Rotunda of Apollo at the Louvre, in paintings, etchings and sculpted bas-relief, in poems by W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, and Anne Sexton, and  in psychology and psychiatry.

Here’s Auden’s poem, “Musée des Beaux-Arts:”

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breugel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

A couple of weekends ago, Joy and I were walking on Gloucester’s Good Harbor Beach, a half-mile strand facing  the open Atlantic. We heard a buzzing sound, looked up and saw a red and white parachute floating overhead, with a pilot dangling below it, with a small motor and propeller blade strapped to his back: a “paramotor.” 

Nearby, another “paranaut” spread out his bright yellow parachute on the sand, ran a few steps into the wind, pulled on a starter cord, and took off into the bright blue sky. He circled to the north, and as I attempted to film him with my iPhone video camera, disappeared into the sun.  The red and white parachute flew into view just as my camera’s battery ran out.

It’s “Icarus at the Beach!” exclaimed Joy.

She too wrote a poem about Icarus:

Icarus at the Beach

By Joy Halsted

He stands

poised to rise,

clutching the reins

of the parasail.

Strapped to his back

the propeller whirls and rasps

but the red and yellow sail

refuses to blossom,

lies listless on the sand,

a reluctant dragon.

Wait -

the wind grows stronger,

the indolent creature fills and lifts,

bringing the rider’s leaping form to ride

its  billowing body aloft

to float towards the sun

while below,

the sea is waiting.

©2013 Tom Halsted

Poem “Icarus at the Beach, ©2013, Joy Halsted