Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Draftsman Revealed - Exhibition Reviews

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, May 24-August 5 2001 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of recent origin York, September 25-December 2, 2001

Nadine M Orenstein, ed with contributions by Nadine M Orenstein, Manfred Sellink, Jurgen Muller Michiel C Plomp Martin Royalton-Kisch, and Larry Silver. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh Cat. of recent origin York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; novel Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 335 pp 109 color ills. 168 b/w $6000

Pieter Bruegel the senior is known far and wide for his thirty-five or thus extant paintings. The somnolent field-workers in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Harvest, the dark figures trudging end knee-deep drifts in the huntsmans in the Snow, the ponderous dance of Kermis in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum have not at any time ceased to captivate the countles visitors who throng in front of his panels. His work upon paper, on the other hand, unlike that of Albrecht Durer or Rembrandt, is known primarily to scholars and specialists, and, at least among the curators, level that group has been largely bifurcated according to medium, depending upon whether one's specialty is prints or drawings. The exhibition Pieter Bruegel the earlier born subtitled Master Draughtsman at its first venue in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and, more accurately, Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum, gave us our first direct the eye at virtually all the works upon paper at once. It exhibited an extraordinary curatorial accomplishment by the agency of Nadine M. Or enstein, associate curator of prints at the Metropolitan, and Manfred Sellink, former chief curator of prints and drawings at the Boijmans. To my knowledge there has not at any time been an exhibition of virtually all the known drawings and prints of an artist of Bruegel's stature. The sum of two units curators managed to engineer the loan of all on the contrary a handful of the drawings--showing each pivotal work either in Rotterdam or of recent origin York--as well as, whenever possible, pristine impressions of nearly all the known prints after Bruegel's designs. (1) Consequently the display was relatively large for a monographic exhibition, with fifty-five drawings attributed to Bruegel and sixty-two prints after his designs. Significantly, above half of the extant drawings had been execut for those prints. The remaining drawings, finished compositions, not sketches, had provided the original impetus for the exhibition.

The late Hans Mielke, curator at the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, had drawn out made a special study of the independent drawings, for the most part landscapes penned early in Bruegel's career. In 1975 below the direction of Matthias Winner, the Kupferstichkabinett mountained an exceptional exhibition of above three hundred drawings spanning the 16th hundred from Hieronymus Bosch to the so-called Bruegel revival. Shortly afterward Mielke began a novel project. He published a series of articles and then, in 1996 a fresh catalogue raisonne that would substantially alter the artistic profile of Bruegel as a draftsman. He reduc Bruegel's extant oeuvre by dint of more than half, replacing the 154 of the previous catalogue raisonne by the agency of Ludwig Munz with just 68 sheets. Convincingly, he reattributed a series of approximately twenty small domestic landscapes to Jacob Savery, a relatively unknown artist active in Haarlem and Amsterdam in the last decade of the 16th hundred this despite the fact that a number of them were ostensibly signed through Bruege l and dated between 1559 and 1560 His discovery that the watermark upon the Pierpont Morgan Library's Mountain Landscape with a River, Village and Castle--one of the greatest in quantity ambitious sheets attributed to Bruegel--was not place before 1585-88, some twenty years after Bruegel's death, appeared irrefutable, although, since the drawing had been a favorite of many, it was not a popular decision. He argued that three sheets of mountainous vistas in the Courtauld Institute's Seilern collection were not Bruegel's studies for a series of mixed etchings and engravings known as the Large Landscapes, published by the agency of Hieronymus Cock about 1556, on the contrary instead drawings made after motifs place in these prints. Finally, in the 1996 catalogue raisonne Mielke added 14 drawings to this same cluster and tentatively ascribed them to the artist to whom he had given the Morgan sheet, Jacob Savery's younger brother Roelant. (2)

Orenstein and Sellink first conceived the new exhibition as a monographic presentation of Mielke's Bruegel offering art historians and the general public alike a of gold opportunity to come to bourns with the most recent delineation of the seemingly at any time shifting artistic personality of Pieter Bruegel the senior Adding the prints, it must have looked could only expand our understanding of this artistic personality. While questions would inevitably remain unresolv infallibly some measure of artistic coherence would spring from viewing virtually the entire graphic oeuvre previously known to all on the other hand a handful of specialists alone in grainy black-and-white reproductions. The inclusion of the newly reattributed compositions, as well as representative examples of works previously given to Bruegel of that kind as the village scenes penn through the Master of Small Landscapes, would then labor for as a foil for this newly delineated Bruegel