Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. .

Nadine M. Orenstein, ed. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. (Exhibition Catalogue: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. xii + 323 pp. illus. $60 (d), $45 (pbk). ISBN: 0-87099-990-7 (cl), 0-87099-991-5 (pbk).

What did Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-69) create? This is a central question underlying a superb exhibition of Bruegel and Bruegelesque graphic works organized by Nadine Orenstein (curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Manfred Sellink (director, Sredelijke Musea, Bruges). Not too long ago, scholars confidently thought they understood Bruegel's art. In his Bruegel: The Drawings--Complete Edition (1961), Ludwig Munz listed 154 drawings by the artist. He grouped these into landscapes (nos. 1-50), "naer het leven" (nos. 51-126), and compositions (nos. 127-54), many of which were designs for engravings. Karel van Mander, writing in 1604, praised Bruegel for his images of peasants done from life. Yet recently art historians have removed all but one figure study (no. 98) from Bruegel's oeuvre. Most of the drawings of peasants are now ascribed to Roelandt Savery (1576-1639), a Flemish artist active in Prague. The Pieter Bru egel d. A. als Zeichner exhibition in Berlin of 1975 continued to whittle away at the core opus, while at the same time enriching our understanding of drawings by his Netherlandish contemporaries. Hans Mielke, one of the curators of the Berlin exhibition, carried on this quest for the authentic Bruegel. In 1996, two years after his death, Mielke's Pieter Bruegel: Die Zeichnungen appeared. He accepted only sixty-seven drawings as by Bruegel. Many of the most evocative (and frequently reproduced) landscapes were stripped away, primarily on stylistic grounds or due to the presence of watermarks from the 1580s or later. Several are attributed to Jacob Savery (ca. 1565-1603), who deceptively (if cleverly) forged Bruegel's name and the plausible dates of 1560 or 1561.

Although Orenstein and Sellink obviously considered their show as a chance to test Mielke's thesis, their ambitions were far greater. They have assembled the most comprehensive display of Bruegel's graphic art ever. The 144 works by Bruegel and his peers offer an exceptional visual and intellectual feast. The excellent, well-illustrated catalogue opens with five essays that nicely introduce Bruegel and the questions about his artistic production. Orenstein's "The Elusive Life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder" offers a very lucid critical assessment of what is known about Bruegel and what is mere speculation. Karel van Mander's biography of Bruegel, published thirty-five years after his death, has shaped posterity's understanding of the artist. Orenstein shows that van Mander mixed fact, fiction, and current artistic topoi when describing Bruegel. She also reminds us that Bruegel focused primarily on his graphic production prior to 1562, a year before he moved from Antwerp to Brussels, and on painting during the la st seven years of his life.

In his essay "Pieter Bruegel as a Draftsman: The Changing Image," Martin Royalton-Kisch speculates that the sixty-one drawings accepted by Mielke plus six others known from copies represent less than one percent of Bruegel's output. Van Mander tells that Bruegel instructed his wife to destroy many of his sketches because of the unstable political situation in 1569. Whether van Mander's anecdote is true or not, much has been lost. Thirty-five of the extant drawings are designs for engravings. Therefore, we lack sketches for at least forty-nine other prints. Furthermore, no drawings exist as studies for any of his paintings. Royalton-Kisch, who essentially accepts Mielke's reduced corpus, provides a very thoughtful explanation of Bruegel's drawing style.

Orenstein's second essay, "Images to Print: Pieter Bruegel's Engagement with Printmaking," discusses Bruegel's relationship with Hieronymus Cock, who published most of his prints, and the different professional engravers with whom he worked. To minimize any creative additions by his engravers, Bruegel used clear outlines and easily copied hatchings for shading. Does this same practice extend to Bruegel's independent drawings? She notes that, in general, the surviving drawings for prints are in better condition that his other sketches. Is this because the engravers, rather than Cock or Bruegel, kept the drawings? Orenstein provides a very intelligent assessment of the different engravers with whom Bruegel collaborated. The distinctive style of each engraver is immediately obvious when visiting the exhibition. Philips Galle's prints have a tonal lushness that is lacking in the engravings of Pieter van der Heyden or Frans Hogenberg. Did Cock or Bruegel pick the engravers? Who composed the texts beneath many of h is prints? Did Cock suggest marketable themes to Bruegel? Why did Cock occasionally censor Bruegel's designs, as in the Ass at School (nos. 40-41)? Many questions remain to be addressed.

Manfred Sellink's "'The very lively and whimsical Pieter Brueghel': Thoughts on His Iconography and Context" correctly asserts that, lacking much biographical information about the artist, scholars must intuit meaning from his art. Nor surprisingly, there are lots of conflicting interpretations. I would add that every generation sees Bruegel through the lens of its own experiences. It is hardly coincidental that a wealth of literature about Bruegel as a subversive and anti-Spanish critic appeared during the 1960s and 1970s. Sellink offers a sensible overview of Bruegel's different themes and his possible intentions. He does challenge specialists who view Bruegel as "the learned scholar and erudite humanist" by noting the artist never mastered Latin. I wish that the author had addressed the fact that themes, such as the Kermises (nos. 79-80), the Land of Coekaigne (no. 116), and the Festival of Fools (no. 114), have precedents in earlier sixteenth century German prints. He does acknowledge a direct German wood cut prototype for the Merchant Robbed by Monkeys (no. 95). I am less interested in the identification of particular sources than a recognition that there were rich pictorial and literary ties linking sixteenth century German and Netherlandish art.

Larry Silver's "The Importance of Being Bruegel: The Posthumous Survival of the Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder" assesses the artist's impact on the subsequent course of Netherlandish art. His style and subjects inspired innumerable direct copies, most notably by his sons Pieter the Younger (1564-1637/38) and Jan (1568-1625), and works in his manner, as in the case of the Savery brothers or David Vinckboons (1576-1632/33). Silver looks at how Bruegel helped popularize polished drawings and ambitious prints depicting landscapes and rustic scenes.

The catalogue entries, authored by Orenstein, Sellink, Michael Plomp, and Jurgen Muller, provide a lucid summary of factual information and of scholarship about the individual objects. Although not always agreeing with some of their conclusions, I greatly appreciated the cataloguers' efforts to explain their reasons for attributing or not attributing individual drawings to Bruegel. In almost all cases, they followed Mielke's judgments; however, often their justifications flesh out Mielke's summary thoughts. I still remain perplexed by Bruegel's earliest landscape drawings. Upon seeing catalogue numbers 1, 2, and 3, all dating to 1552, side by side in Rotterdam and then in New York, each has a slightly different drawing style. The tight stippling of Southern Cloister in a Valley (no. 1) bears only scant resemblance to the wide expressive pen strokes and looser composition of Pastoral Landscape (no. 3). Perhaps since these were done during his trip to Italy, we should be more open to Bruegel's experimenting wi th different styles. On the other hand, perhaps we should place less faith in some signatures since, as Mielke and others have shown, later masters skillfully forged Bruegel's name on their own creations. It would have been helpful to have a sustained discussion about how Bruegel's drawing style changed over the course of his career. Some of Bruegel's finest sketches, including the Beekeepers (no. 107) and the Artist and the Connoisseur (no. 100), were never engraved. Who was the audience for such drawings? Was it the same circle of acquaintances who acquired his paintings?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints is a fitting scholarly record of a marvelous exhibition. Orenstein, Sellink, and their collaborators remind us of the aesthetic and thematic richness of Bruegel's drawings and prints. Hopefully, Bruegel specialists, who traditionally have privileged his paintings, now will adopt a more comprehensive view of his art.