Musée des Beaux Arts

When I was in Brussels, I paid a visit to one of the most recognisable landmarks that features in W.H. Auden’s poems: the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium and their exhibit of the Old Masters. ‘About suffering they were never wrong,’ or so Auden held regarding the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, that there was something profound and insightful in his depiction of the world’s indifference to tragedy, pain and conflict. As I wandered through the exhibit, I found myself reading this poem as closely as I possibly could, literally putting myself inside the gallery which Auden visited and wrote about in 1939, squinting at the paintings that it describes from a few inches away. I followed the poem’s glance across the masterpieces on display, and it was revealing to imagine what Auden saw, what he choose to depict in his poem and what his gaze overlooked.

What I find interesting about the poem is its subtle use of ekphrasis: the second stanza is an attentive and evocative reading of Bruegel’s Icarus. But the first is a more distant glance across many of Bruegel’s paintings, giving a composite sketch of details from different works rather than a catalogue of individual works. To that end, it is revealing that none of the works are named but merely implied by allusion. The first stanza is, then, a passing glance across pictures at an exhibition, while in the second stanza the gaze of the poem fixes on one work and zooms in to give a richer and more intimate account of a single work.

The Fight between Carnival and Lent

What I found as striking and memorable as the opening line of the poem was the first of the Bruegel masterpieces I cam across, The Fight between Carnival and Lent. This is a copy of a painting held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna. Scholarly opinion usually holds that Auden’s poem refers to two paintings besides from Icarus, The Census at Bethlehem and The Massacre of the Innocents. However, the sense of suffering and indifference towards it that the poem describes is one that is especially pronounced in Carnival and Lent, especially in how stark the contrast is between the emaciated fasters to the right and the fat, indulgent revellers of the Carnival to the left who, as the poem describes, are ‘eating’ or ‘opening a window’ or ‘walking dully along’ (l.4). What I find most evocative about this painting is the way in which suffering is embodied, particularly in the withering, unconscious figure near the corner who is covered in a white sheet.

The Census at Bethlehem, a copy by Pieter Bruegel the Younger

The Census at Bethlehem by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Subsequently, I saw two versions of The Census at Bethlehem, which is Bruegel the Elder’s most copied painting. The first was the copy by Pieter Bruegel the Younger (distinguishable by the hay bales near the lower-left corner and by the precise details of the people skating on the pond on top), and the second the one by Bruegel the Elder. While the biblical story relates to the ‘miraculous birth’, there are other children in the background who are indifferent to the event of such divine and political significance, children who would much rather be ‘skating / On a pond at the edge of the wood’ (ll.7-8). However, one of the paintings temporarily removed from the exhibit (not even the gallery staff could locate it when I enquired) was the Massacre of the Innocents. I was disappointed to not see this because it was an especially powerful work, given how visceral and moving the subject of ‘dreadful martyrdom’.

Kermesse with Theatre and Procession

Yet there was in the midst of these paintings a couple of striking omissions. Displayed between the two versions of Census was a work which is very different from the winter scenes of suffering: Kermesse with Theatre and Procession, a copy of a lost original, is a festive, bright and altogether summery work which depicts a celebration. This hardly reflects the gaze of the poem as it was only acquired by the Gallery in 1960, 21 years after the poem was written. Nevertheless, seeing this painting from another time that confounds the narrative of the Auden poem begs an intriguing question: what other poems does this passing glance overlook? There is Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap. Like many of Bruegel’s works, winter is a prominent season. Nevertheless, its subject is much lighter compared to the other winter paintings, and the children skating here are revellers playing games on the ice rather than naïve, indifferent innocents in the background of a biblical story about a tyrant.

Outdoor Wedding Dance, copy of an original by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Even though the Old Masters may have never been wrong about suffering, that does not mean they did not portray joy or revelry. Two more paintings — The Adoration of the Magi (attributed to Bruegel the Elder by Bruegel the Younger) and Outdoor Wedding Dance (possibly a copy by Bruegel the Younger of a work from a trilogy of peasant weddings by Bruegel the Elder) — were much brighter in their colour palette and more joyous and celebratory in their themes. The poem’s emphasis on suffering, then, is a very selective reading of a handful of Bruegel’s works. Although this may have been an artefact of which works were on display at the gallery, how the exhibit was curated and when the masterpieces were acquired (all posing interesting formal questions about the nature of visual art and the spatial encounter within a gallery), there is also a sense in which the first stanza is less about the paintings on display and more about the narrator’s state of mind as they walk through the exhibit. That Auden was preoccupied by themes of suffering and massacre is unsurprising considering he was visiting the gallery after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and not long before the start of the Second World War.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder (copy of a lost original)

There is a remarkable contrast, then, between the attentive ekphrasis of the second stanza and the fleeting glance of the first: the subject of ekphrasis is a visual work of art that is external to the poem itself, in this case the Icarus painting, which becomes the object of the narrative. That is not to say that the voice is an objective description of the painting: because the encounter with a work of art is an event that is deeply personal, the form of ekphrasis is inherently subjective and perspectival. Nevertheless, such an account of visual art has a speculative quality, of reaching out of the subjectivity of a narrative voice towards a visual object and its implied materiality. This contrasts with the inward-looking reverie of the first stanza, which gives a rough and abstract sketch of some of the figures and themes in the paintings to tell a story within the narrator’s imagination.

Just as how there is some incongruity in the exhibit as I saw it and what the poem describes — some of the artworks were missing, some new ones have been added — the second stanza has a further incongruity in that the Icarus painting was later found to have not been by Bruegel as Auden had known it, but instead was a copy of a lost original. So although I did try and close read the poem within the gallery in which it was written, my reading was nevertheless revisionist, and what I saw was very different. This was an instructive difference, however, as the several decades’ hindsight foregrounded exactly how much of the poem was based on an idiosyncratic impression of Bruegel at a particular moment in history. Far from elucidating or illustrating the poem, my wander through this exhibit complicated many of its insights.

All photographs here are by me, for which I reserve all rights. To see more of my pictures from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, see my album on Flickr.