Twenty years ago, in fulfillment of a different artistic obsession, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and encountered Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Harvesters for the first time. It felt familiar; I had perhaps seen it in an AP European History textbook or some other encyclopedic resource, which included it as an example of a new approach to landscape painting. It arrested me immediately. I had no particular prior knowledge of or interest in its place in the history of European art, but there, large as life, I think I experienced it, if that makes any sense. I had been walking through galleries and galleries of interiors and religious scenes in which the landscape was just a backdrop and all of a sudden there was this slice of life. It’s a painting of a season (one of an original six, five of which survive) in which human activity and the landscape are fundamentally interwoven and, just as importantly, in which the human figures are all individuated and interesting not despite their ordinary peasant occupations but because of them. Now, every time I visit New York, I make time to go sit with it again. A good-quality print hangs in my dining room. I just love it:
I’ve never bothered to learn anything about art, despite spending as many hours as possible in as many art museums as I can contrive to visit. But my fascination with The Harvesters has, in the years since I saw it in that gallery, blossomed into an obsession with seeing as many of the surviving Brueghel canvasses as I can in person. When I passed through Detroit with my middle child, I made a point of visiting the DIA to see The Wedding Dance (“ooh, that one is my favorite,” the docent said as she pointed us down the right hallway). I caught one at the National Gallery in London (though I was so jet-lagged that I barely remember seeing it). Then, this summer, I hit the motherlode: I’d get to see the biggest single collection of Brueghels in the world, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, along with another at the Lobkowicz Museum in Prague, one in the Louvre, and two in the Munich Alte Pinakothek.
It didn’t work out this way in the end. More on that in a minute. But I did get to see Hay-Making, the preceding painting in the seasonal sequence, which has its own room with abundant interpretive material in the Lobkowicz. Pleasant collection that it is, I would not have paid the entrance fee or skipped the other parts of the Prague Castle complex to see it but for the Brueghel. Again, the human detail is quietly overwhelming: each person individuated, far into the distance; some walking alone, others working, some playing a game in the middle distance. And three women walking to or from their work:
.jpg){kind=link}
And I got to see the big batch in Vienna, which includes the other three surviving seasonal paintings as well as the astonishing Tower of Babel (big version) and a lot of other bangers.
You can “read” these paintings in all kinds of ways. For my part, I don’t know if they’re sentimental or critical, Catholic or Protestant or proto-secular or anything else. What shines through, apart from whatever meanings the scenes may have had for the artist or his patrons, is the fascination with the humans as such, not as either ideals or figures of disgust but just as people doing what they do. A friend called him “the original Richard Scarry,” which reminded me of how much I loved his books when I was a kid, and probably for the same reasons. The scenes themselves have no obvious center, but draw the eyes always to the edges, where the action really is. Life is just going on, irrespective of whatever narrative order we want to impose on it. There’s a famous poem about this aspect of his work. In The Procession to Calvary, Christ is barely visible at first glance. Sure enough, he’s there, and right in the center of the scene, but dwarfed by the disorderly mass of humanity out for the execution spectacle. I can’t think of another Via Dolorosa painting remotely like it:
Regardless of the anachronisms and impossible landscape, the painting has a social and psychological realism. The most important event in human history would be just another day for almost everyone involved, a sphere with a center but no circumference. Saul sees a blinding light but the horses have to keep moving; the other Saul commits suicide in the corner while the armies rage on.
Unfortunately for my personal quest, the Louvre did not have its Brueghel on display (at least not if I read the website correctly). And while I was in Munich, I either had COVID or the Alte Pinakothek was closed so I didn’t get to see those two either. This dismayed me, not because I wanted to see those canvasses in particular, but because they are far away and another chance to do it is not guaranteed or even all that likely (to actually see all of those on public display would require not just going to Berlin, London, Madrid, and New York but to Darmstadt and Winterthur).
If the difference between enthusiasm and obsession is that we pursue the latter beyond rational self-interest, this would be an obsession. The long trip we took was not designed to be a Brueghel Safari—I’m not that far gone—but it did take on that quality for me as we went. I’m not really sure why, though it seems that as I plow through middle age, my interests tend either to wither away or to flourish into obsessive pursuits. Maybe the dreadful, growing awareness of all the things I won’t read, learn, do, or see in my life makes the thought of embracing one whole corpus, however small, more urgent and appealing. I can’t really justify any of the choices involved in fulfilling it, but at least with Brueghel it seems fitting. Sometimes a great painting is a perfect image, and sometimes it’s a whole fictive world, a glimpse of the endlessness not just of the landscape but of human life itself, stretching into the distance and past the edges to include the ones who come four and a half centuries later to sit, stare, and be moved.
Robbie Robertson, 1943-2023
One of the best moves in post-1960 popular music was to give new songs a patina of traditionalism. “Folk” music wasn’t really that at all, and a lot of the self-consciously spare and primitive “outlaw country” did not hearken back to an older style but was an essentially new hybrid of rock-and-roll aesthetics and country forms. Why people responded so strongly to this kind of invention of tradition is a mystery to me, but a lot of the repertoire worked and still does.
The Band was a part of this archaic turn, but they did it better and weirder than anyone else. Without knowing much about the course of their career, it struck me that they’d picked the perfect name: they were just the band, for whatever you needed a band to do. At their big farewell concert, they brought on guests to play their guests’ own hits. I’m glad they did, because it yielded some terrific performances (Van Morrison’s “Caravan” is pretty special, and you’d need a heart of stone to get through Dr. John’s “Such a Night” without at least bobbing your head along). They were a splendid ensemble, especially with Levon Helm’s one-of-a-kind drumming, Garth Hudson’s multi-instrumental abilities, and their round-robin vocal leadership. But their own songs have really held up over the decades, and those songs were largely written by Robbie Robertson.1
The chordings are good and the arrangements are often transcendent (listen to “King Harvest Has Surely Come” if you haven’t heard it in a while), but the lyrics are consistently above and outside of the standard for their or any age. The characters have distinctive voices; you can picture them, write a backstory for them. They’re odder than Springsteen’s and more comical and gentle than Dylan’s. “Rocking Chair” is a great one. “Up on Cripple Creek.” I’m especially fond of the studio version of “The Weight” recorded for The Last Waltz with the Staples. They aren’t all winners; back in high school my little brother described the “Last Waltz Theme” instrumental as “clown massacre music.” But there’s something to surprise and delight in a whole lot of their work.
It’s not their greatest song, but the one I’ve played more than any other is “Twilight.” There were particular reasons for my attachment to that song when I learned it in 1997, but it has outlived those reasons. The structure is simple but effective and the monologue is clear and direct. It all adds up to a quietly heartbreaking assessment of love and memory:
Don’t put me in a frame upon the mantle For memories grow dusty, old and gray Don't leave me alone in the twilight 'Cause twilight is the loneliest time of day
There’s an alternative version with somewhat different lyrics that’s almost as good. I don’t think their music was really about holding on to the past, however old-timey it may have sounded. It was always about the day’s twilight, the moment’s loneliness, and the people who come and go through them. In the fight between Carnival and Lent, The Band was explicitly on the side of Carnival. But their half of the world was all real, too.
For that alone I’d be grateful to Robbie Robertson. Rest in peace.
His bandmates long disputed the crediting of the songs, and I don’t know enough about their post-Robertson output to say whether those complaints seem plausible. But as far as I can tell, the claim was more that the songs were collaborations, not that Robertson didn’t write the lyrics.
been meaning to read this and see the improbable motion picture adaptation forever: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1388108.The_Mill_and_the_Cross