REVIEWS
BookWire Review: November 20, 2006
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Flemish master painter of the Renaissance with a remarkable gift for realism and detail. Famous particularly for his paintings of peasant life, Bruegel’s major paintings vary from seasonal landscapes to chaotic scenes packed to the edges with games and visions.
In Painting Life: The Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, sociologist Robert L. Bonn takes the reader on a journey through Bruegel’s major works. More than just a retrospective of a master painter, Painting Life is part history, part art appreciation, and part Bonn’s memoir of his Bruegel-inspired travels. Bonn “met” Bruegel on a trip to Madrid in 1972, where he encountered two of the master’s works. After encountering Bruegel again twenty-five years later in Vienna, Bonn set out to view all of Bruegel’s works in person, a journey that took him throughout Europe and the United States. Bonn found himself fascinated not just by Bruegel’s technical gifts, but also by the meanings that lie beneath the surface subjects of his paintings. This “something more” may be a commentary on the encroachment of the city into the countryside, political issues, or the tension between material and spiritual selves. These buried commentaries encourage the viewer to interact with the painting, and even to apply its messages to his own life.
With an erudite but straightforward tone, Bonn takes the reader on a world tour of Bruegel’s art. Paintings are grouped by the cities in which they now reside in the order in which Bonn saw them. Full-color prints of each painting are accompanied by Bonn’s commentary on their subjects, themes, and techniques. Bonn also provides context for these paintings by discussing contemporary events—the Inquisition and Counter Reformation, the political strife in the Netherlands, and the growth of cities and commerce, among others—and how those events affected Bruegel’s works.
Bonn is an affable and enthusiastic tour guide. His appreciation for Bruegel is almost visceral; it is difficult not to catch his enthusiasm for the subject. He holds an easy grasp of the historical and sociological issues of Bruegel’s times, and his commentary is thought provoking. At its heart, though, Painting Life is most notable as a sort of romance between an art lover and the objects of his affection. Bonn’s deep and abiding love for the work of this painter provide glorious proof that art can provide us with “something more”—a glimpse into not just the world of the artist, but also our own souls. |
Small Press Bookwatch
Midwest Book Review: The Art Shelf
July 2007
Written by City University of New York professor Robert L. Bonn, Painting Life; The Art of Pieter Bruegel, The Elder is an extraordinary tour through the visual and social landscapes in thirty-six major paintings by Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel, The Elder (1520/25-1569). Plates of the paintings themselves illustrate Painting Life in glorious full color, while chapters discuss Bruegel's genius in capturing the qualities of human life from work to play, foolishness, and conflict; expressions of Bruegel's anthropology and social philosophy in his creations; and stories of the influential cities where Bruegel's paintings hang today: Madrid, Vienna, Antwerp and Brussels, Rome and Naples, San Diego, Prague, and New York City. A seminal excursion into the timeless testimony of classical art.
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Painting Life is available in bookstores and online at www.amazon.com.
Distributed by Syracuse University Press - Published by Chaucer Press Books/Richard Altschuler & Associates, Inc. - ISBN: 978-1-884092-12-1 |
Image on this page: Children's Games (detail), 1560. Pieter Bruegel, The Elder (c. 1520/25–1569). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. |
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