I made a trip to Powells on Sunday to score some Nag Champa, but also walked away with a bitching coffee table book of art by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Now, I must have been high on cheese sandwiches and hotdogs the week we talked about this guy in Captain Bob's class at SAIC, because, Astromen, this guy was the shit. I have no lanugage to describe how wonderful this guy's paintings and drawings are. He's personal in theme without injecting himself, and he was absurdist and surrealist 400 years early. Fucking FANTASTIC!!!1!
The Stars, Our Destination...
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Bring me the skull of Pieter Brueghel the Elder!
I made a trip to Powells on Sunday to score some Nag Champa, but also walked away with a bitching coffee table book of art by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Now, I must have been high on cheese sandwiches and hotdogs the week we talked about this guy in Captain Bob's class at SAIC, because, Astromen, this guy was the shit. I have no lanugage to describe how wonderful this guy's paintings and drawings are. He's personal in theme without injecting himself, and he was absurdist and surrealist 400 years early. Fucking FANTASTIC!!!1!
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2 comments:
ABSOLUTELY!
Anyway, at least you went to art history lectures freshman year. I was too busy pasting tiny cut-out fragments of letter next to each other, shuffling around downtown in the pre-dawn hours, playing Adam's Family pinball, and being generally deranged to attend any such lectures.
That's the nature of those survey courses though; sneeze and you miss an important milestone.
Ooh! One thing about Breugel and Bosch that really interests me is their connection to medieval art, namely to marginal imagery. Their art was derived from very different sources than, say, the Italians and Giotto.
Marginalia are of course the decorative cartoons in the margins of manuscripts which are often floral or plant-like, or straight narratives, but also can be surreal, or funny, or vulgar.
Sometimes these images illustrate a topic called inversi mundi, or the world upside down. The gist is that earthly hierarchies and rationales will be reversed in the kingdom of god. So there will be images of rabbits hunting dogs, kings begging for food, and so on. There are some good examples of marginalia at the bottom of this page.
A sister concept to the inversi mundi is that of the antipodes or the monstrous races of men. The interior tympanum at Vezelay Cathedral, and a page from a crusader's handbook are the best examples of this I know. An antipode is also the opposite point on the globe to oneself... so for me, somewhere off the coast of Australia.
I recommend Michael Camille's "Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art". Link.
When you come to Madrid I can show "The Triumph of Death" and the majority of well-known works by Bosch at the Prado. Now that you have big bags of shiny gold pieces and what not . . .
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