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. But the recently opened exhibition at Christie’s Mayfair – The Bad Shepherd: The Brueghel Dynasty in Conversation with Contemporary Art – does exactly what it says on the tin. And contrary to my expectations, it is largely a success, offering some novel juxtapositions that illuminate both sides in the encounter.

This success is partly due to the curators avoiding laboured arguments about influence, modernity or the universal values of art; they leave it to the works on display, and the visual correspondence between them, to do most of the talking.