Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games & Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise. . - book review

EDWARD SNOW

Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games

novel York: North Point Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997 248 pp; 1 color ill., 150 b/w ills. $40

ETHAN MATT KAVALER

Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1999 403 pp; 139 b/w ills. $80

in what manner does one confront Bruegel's Children's Games as a work of art? The challenge has rarely been taken up through art historians, who, for the greatest in quantity part, have devoted their energies to identifying the individual games exhibited and to puzzling out their moral significations. An exception to this approach is Hans Sedlmayr's 1934 essay "Bruegel's Macchia," which has lately appeared in English translation. (1) According to Sedlmayr, figures and facts in Children's Games appear as abstracted shapes and patches of color that are not integrated into a spatial setting on the other hand are dispersed over the picture surface in a seemingly random configuration. similar a composition both registers and bring outs an experience of estrangement that the Viennese critic compares to the work of "modern" painters like Giorgio de Chirico. To Sedlmayr, Bruegel's children appear as spotlike figures who bid up the specter of the masses and who, according to Sedlmayr's fascist anthropology, belong to the category of the solitary liminally human. (2)

Edward Snow's Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games (an expanded presentation of a groundbreaking investigation that Snow published in 1983) tenders an important corrective to Sedlmayr's account. (3) Snow insists upon the way in which Bruegel's playing children "come alive": by what means the kinetic energies that animate his carefully individuated figures elicit the viewer's empathetic replys Far from accepting Sedlmayr's description of Children's Games as a picture of atomized forms that are randomly distributed across the picture surface, Snow points to the patterned arrangement of figures, shapes, and colors in Bruegel's composition and the way it is built up without of antithetically paired motifs. Paired figures and figure clumps are clustered and distributed in of the like kind a way as to occasion an stretch outed sequence of dialectical reflections upon such themes as innocence and experience, isolation and sociability, nature and agriculture and so forth. As this prompts Snow is primarily concerned with Bruegel as a thinke r not a maker. In this Snow falls in line with greatest in quantity recent writers, who look to Children's Games primarily as an interpretative challenge. on the other hand unlike earlier commentators who have asserted that the activities depicted in the picture be under the orders of collectively to support an easily enunciated moral argument--whether affirming the innocence of childhood or the shallowness of mankind--Snow makes the case for a more manifold pictorial intention. (4) Snow exhibits how "motifs ... are linked by means of complicated permutations and inversions, not by dint of simple repetition. They imply an authorial sensibility more inclined to make distinctions than to generalize, and to make them more in experiential than in moral terms" (p 69)

Snow makes his case by the agency of analyzing specific examples; his treatment of the central vignette of striplings riding piggyback and playing tug-of-war is characteristic of Snow's powers of evocative description:

Bruegel can transport us across four centuries into the immediate kinesis of the game....The collective muscular potency the players expend seems to energize the image and leap across the belted noose from one contending group to the other. It is as if the game clinchs out the human bond as a synaptic gap. And with this idea active in the image, many other issues of the social material substance come into play: cooperation based upon opposition, the individual's visceral experience versus anonymous collective aim power struggles taking place upon the backs of the laboring classes, linear efficiency bound in circular configurations, and competitors as stabilizing counterparts. A self-contained detail becomes a switching point where all sorts of thematic tracks intersect. (pp 3-4)

Snow asserts that this vignette, centrally placed in Bruegel's composition, labor fors as the "'hub' around which the games in the central foreground turn" (p 98) and that a number of those encircling games may be viewed as variations upon some of the same themes. Other pairs of vignettes counterpoise children with outstretched limbs to children who are drawn in upon themselves; still others counterpoise lads engaged in strenuous, aggressive activities to girls involved in solitary, contemplative pleasures. Snow draws attention to the differences between the activities of children playing in the "city" space at the back of the right side of the painting and those of the children in the "country" space upon the left. Whereas the children in the urban survey "are unwittingly caught in a funneling motion that absorbs individual children and their separate energies into patterns of conformity," the children in the pastoral setting "expres a creaturely at-homeness," in a sustaining order that is in nature, and includ e humans in the same way it does tree and streams" (p 88)