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 19th
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 |
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.
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