Musee Des Beaux Arts

When I was young, I stumbled across a copy of an obscure print by Bruegel called "The Artist and the Connoisseur."  I can't remember now the context of the discovery, which class I was in or what it was that would have brought me to Bruegel, but I remember vividly how captivated I was by the moment of the transaction between artist and audience captured by him.  I had to be about 13 or 14 (I was at St. Joe's at the time), and it was probably a random musing as I dug around in a book unrelated to what it was I was supposed to be studying; yes, pre-Internet, but still distracted.  Anyway, I re-stumbled into the print when I was teaching at Garrison almost a decade ago as I was preparing for a discussion on W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" and the connection between poetry and painting.  It was like bumping into an old friend.  I printed off a copy and laminated it (SOPA? PIPA?).  That same laminated copy is on my bulletin board behind me as I type here at Friends.

It's one of those go-to sources that I've used on multiple occasions, and I get tremendous mileage out of the print's connection to questions like how do we engage art, how do we see more than what is sitting on the surface, what is the relationship between the artist, art object, and the audience (my 3 As)?  Most recently, I unpinned the print and introduced it to my Philosophy and Literature students; we're closing the semester with a unit on aesthetics, and I thought it would be nice to end with a little fun.  Students had read Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" and Kant's "The Critique of Judgement," so it gave us the opportunity to talk about an artistic representation of Addison's Chinese and English gardens (the artist's untamed hair and the connoisseur's carefully controlled coif) and Kant's need for "disinterested" aesthetic judgements (the connoisseur looks a little too eager as he reaches in to his purse), amongst other things.  Needless to say, I've looked at this print many times over the years; I know it pretty well, I'd even say intimately.  So it was nice yesterday to have a student (EM) draw out something I'd never contemplated before.  As he talked about the composition of the piece and how Bruegel draws us in to the figures' eyes then out to the unseen painting being crafted by the artist, he mentioned how the heads of the two figures could quite easily be swapped.  Although the artist's face is more in portrait and the connoisseur's in profile, the corresponding body positions are reversed.  "It shows the interchangeability of critic and artist, how their relationship is closer than we might think, maybe intimates a dependency."  After the class I took a pair of scissors to a copy of the print, and he was right on the mark; the swapped heads match perfectly.  It's nice to have the familiar refreshed, even if it did require major surgery.  A head transplant is hardly outpatient stuff.

But talking of Auden, I was driving in to school today, mulling over plans for the morning sitting at the light at the top of Forest Park (the dodgy end) when I was reminded about suffering and the Old Masters.  A woman in a minivan had entered the gas station at the light, advanced her vehicle to the far pump before backing up to the near pump.  It was a busy morning and the gas station was quite full, so there was no way for anyone to get around her minivan.  Two other vehicles had entered the gas station behind minivan woman and those drivers seemed to assume, naturally enough, that she would advance to the far pump, especially after her initial maneuver.  Of course, the resulting bemusement evolved to frustration when she ignored requests to move forward, and that in turn evolved into anger and blaring horns as she calmly got out of her car and pumped her gas.  The second of the two vehicles was not quite "in" the gas station, so when the lights changed, frustration and anger spread to adjoining streets from drivers who could get nowhere until minivan woman finished pumping her gas.  There was quite a disturbance.  Not quite the fall of Icarus, I know, and all this played out in the few bored seconds I spent waiting for the light to change, observing with casual indifference on the unblocked side of the street.  But my light had changed, I had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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 Breughel’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.