Pieter Brueghel was a master of the 'peasant genre'. In the above painting, there is a prominent peasant ploughing his land, at a teetering height over the bay below. Thinly sliced portions of soil fold back softly and unnoticed as the horse and farmer move on -- an everyperson, so to speak, when practically every person was poor or close to it. The eye follows him. The view, below him, is of a shepherd with his flock; some of the sheep hold precariously on to the brink of the land they are standing on. Below, the emerald bay is fantastic and unreal; a ship stands with full sails (preparing to embark on another “urgent, voluntary errand”, as Auden would have it). There is an air of busy-ness, yes, but also a slightly cartoon-ish drawing style as well as mood and drama to the work. (Ever heard of the cartoonist Robert Crumb? A critic once said Crumb was the Brueghel of our time. Interestingly, Brueghel was considered something of the Hieronymus Bosch of his time. Bosch and Brueghel both dabbled in the grotesque and exaggerated, as does Crumb.)
Detail from "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch
"1977" by R. Crumb
Without knowing much about him, I saw Crumb's movie “Crumb”, by Terry Zwigoff, a few years ago.
The movie follows Crumb around, and nowhere is it more apparent how both tortured and talented Crumb is then when he visits his brothers, the inspirational Charles, and Maxon. At some point in the movie, Crumb’s brother Charles speaks about wanting to read Hegel, among other things, and reminisces about their childhoods -- how art became a way to escape and to find oneself, as Charles encouraged it in his brothers. Some of the early comic book art that Charles did is shown, and he has talent, but his pen seems to get away from him progressively during his youth, and the dialogue engorges the cells, the pages. There is in it the genesis of some form of a mental illness, of a teetering lack of balance. There is a lot of pain in the Crumb family, and it seems Robert Crumb is the only one who found a way of saving himself from self-destruction. Enter Crumb's other brother, Maxon: charged up with tearing the skirts down of girls in line at grocery stores, punishing himself for something - doubtfully that - by sitting on a bed of nails, or swallowing a string which will find its way out of his digestive tract sometime in the next few days.
The movie follows Crumb around, and nowhere is it more apparent how both tortured and talented Crumb is then when he visits his brothers, the inspirational Charles, and Maxon. At some point in the movie, Crumb’s brother Charles speaks about wanting to read Hegel, among other things, and reminisces about their childhoods -- how art became a way to escape and to find oneself, as Charles encouraged it in his brothers. Some of the early comic book art that Charles did is shown, and he has talent, but his pen seems to get away from him progressively during his youth, and the dialogue engorges the cells, the pages. There is in it the genesis of some form of a mental illness, of a teetering lack of balance. There is a lot of pain in the Crumb family, and it seems Robert Crumb is the only one who found a way of saving himself from self-destruction. Enter Crumb's other brother, Maxon: charged up with tearing the skirts down of girls in line at grocery stores, punishing himself for something - doubtfully that - by sitting on a bed of nails, or swallowing a string which will find its way out of his digestive tract sometime in the next few days.
After the film was made, Charles Crumb killed himself. Almost unimportantly, it is mentioned briefly in the credits. Nowhere does anyone consider that Charles would be so torn up over all that was said that he would be driven to suicide by embarrassment, shame, this invasion of privacy that perhaps he thought he could handle. Too much did he perhaps forget the many eyes and ears his ‘confession’ would find. Too much attention, just knowing that you’re known, and that all that is known can never be unknown. The movie leaves him in the velvet river of the credits, a sentence mentioned alongside the rest of the credits, the reams of workers, the recognitions, the slew of information; a sentence there almost unnoticeable from the rest of the white letters on black. Honoring the dead then in small, inculpable white letters.
In the Brueghel painting, Icarus is shown in the bottom right, a pair of legs kicking above the water, drowning. As if no one saw him fall. As if no one mourned his ending, or even noticed the last throes of Icarus’s life, as the young, bold, vainglorious fool of a hero, chased the Sun only to lose his power in the face of its heat, and fell. Like so many, particularly the various gods of ‘rock’ - - like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, James Dean, River Phoenix, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Arthur Rimbaud etc. – whose deaths we all know about, but whose private sufferings, we know almost nothing.
Drawing by R. Crumb
As Brueghel painted it, suffering and death come in anonymous, overlooked moments, when the world almost rudely, almost blindly moves on, uncaring but yet not guilty or innocent. The problems of the world are often too small to move the world an inch of interest out if its set path. It’s just another day.
As Brueghel painted it, suffering and death come in anonymous, overlooked moments, when the world almost rudely, almost blindly moves on, uncaring but yet not guilty or innocent. The problems of the world are often too small to move the world an inch of interest out if its set path. It’s just another day.
Wow, really cool. I saw the painting before but never thought about it like this.
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