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

New 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 Press, 1999. 403 pp.; 139 b/w ills. $80

How does one confront Bruegel's Children's Games as a work of art? The challenge has rarely been taken up by art historians, who, for the most part, have devoted their energies to identifying the individual games represented and to puzzling out their moral significations. An exception to this approach is Hans Sedlmayr's 1934 essay "Bruegel's Macchia," which has recently appeared in English translation. (1) According to Sedlmayr, figures and objects in Children's Games appear as abstracted shapes and patches of color that are not integrated into a spatial setting but are dispersed over the picture surface in a seemingly random configuration. Such a composition both registers and produces 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 summon up the specter of the masses and who, according to Sedlmayr's fascist anthropology, belong to the category of the only liminally human. (2)

Edward Snow's Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games (an expanded presentation of a groundbreaking study that Snow published in 1983) offers an important corrective to Sedlmayr's account. (3) Snow insists on the way in which Bruegel's playing children "come alive": how the kinetic energies that animate his carefully individuated figures elicit the viewer's empathetic responses. 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 out of antithetically paired motifs. Paired figures and figure groups are clustered and distributed in such a way as to occasion an extended sequence of dialectical reflections on such themes as innocence and experience, isolation and sociability, nature and culture, and so forth. As this suggests, Snow is primarily concerned with Bruegel as a thinke r, not a maker. In this Snow falls in line with most recent writers, who look to Children's Games primarily as an interpretative challenge. But unlike earlier commentators who have asserted that the activities depicted in the picture serve collectively to support an easily enunciated moral argument--whether affirming the innocence of childhood or the folly of mankind--Snow makes the case for a more complex pictorial intention. (4) Snow shows how "motifs ... are linked by complicated permutations and inversions, not by 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 analyzing specific examples; his treatment of the central vignette of boys 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 energy the players expend seems to energize the image and leap across the belted loop from one contending group to the other. It is as if the game holds out the human bond as a synaptic gap. And with this idea active in the image, many other issues of the social body come into play: cooperation based on opposition, the individual's visceral experience versus anonymous collective purpose, power struggles taking place on the backs of the laboring classes, linear energy bound in circular configurations, and opponents 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, serves 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 on some of the same themes. Other pairs of vignettes counterpoise children with outstretched limbs to children who are drawn in on themselves; still others counterpoise boys 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 on the left. Whereas the children in the urban prospect "are unwittingly caught in a funneling movement that absorbs individual children and their separate energies into patterns of conformity," the children in the pastoral setting "express a creaturely at-homeness," in a sustaining order that is in nature, and includ es humans in the same way it does trees and streams" (p. 88).