Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #1 John Updike's "The Thing Itself"

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Beekeepers (c. 1567-68)

I begin and end with Updike. He’s the greatest pleasure-giver of them all. It was through his work that I first discovered, many years ago, the joys of reading exhibition reviews. His three collections of art writings – Just Looking (1989), Still Looking (2007), and Always Looking (2012) – are among my favorite books. To conclude this series, I choose his wonderful “The Thing Itself” (The New York Review of Books, November 29, 2001; included in his 2007 essay collection Due Considerations) as my #1. It’s a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2001 Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. In it, Updike wrote,

What we treasure in Bruegel is his realism – the sense we get that through him we are looking into the sixteenth century more clearly than through any other artist of the time. The taste of actual atmosphere, of a bygone Europe’s climate, in the winter paintings Hunter in the Snow (1565) and Census at Bethlehem (1566) and Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1567); the heavy, itchy heat of summer captured in the drawing Summer (1568), its two principal figures clothed in such respectful detail that peasant costumes could be reconstructed on their model; the moment of Halloween shock preserved in the one surviving woodcut based on a Bruegel drawing, The Wild Man or The Masquerade of Orson and Valentine (1566), a token of the widespread pagan remainders, the bizarre festivals and costumes which enlivened quotidian existence in Europe much as electrically promulgated entertainment does now; the surreal reality of the basket-headed Beekeepers (c. 1567-68); the imposing, intricately rigged ships, some of them with sails filled to bursting, presented in etchings based on vanished Bruegel drawings: of such is Bruegel’s gift to us, the life of his time seized at a coarser, more mundane level than the myth-minded artists of Italy descended to. His drawings are not the main part of his gift, but they are the basis of it, where his eye and hand began, and where they laid claim, through the medium of his prints peddled to an anonymous public, to a new form of patronage.

How I love that “surreal reality of the basket-headed Beekeepers.” It perfectly captures my own Bruegelian way of seeing.