Early today (7/25/25) I gave a short introduction on my Zoom reading group to Edward Snow’s book Inside Bruegel, a profoundly illuminating monograph on a single painting by Bruegel (1525?-1569), Children’s Games (1560). I was struck by the relevance of the painting and Snow’s book to thinking about the possibilities of political art in the contemporary world, and thought it might be interesting to the .7 people reading my blog. So here it is, not vastly different from the way I delivered it:
I first learned of Edward Snow’s book about 25 years ago by repeatedly noticing it among the books reserved for T. J. Clark’s and Whitney Davis’s graduate seminars in art history at UC Berkeley. I read it, and it struck me then as one of the two greatest pieces of art history by a living person (the other was a lecture by Leo Steinberg (now deceased) on Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo that I heard in the mid-1980s. One way of thinking about Bruegel’s achievement generally and of Snow’s interpretation in particular is that the painting Children’s Games is a supreme instance of a Realist artwork, one that further offers a model for contemporary political art. The topic of political art is, so it seems to me, in everybody’s thoughts right now. In the cultural worlds of the internet and social media the latest ephemeral topic is an episode of the animated comedy South Park which apparently offers an outstandingly savage, satirical comic take on the current President of the United States. This episode is near the top of my current ‘to be viewed and re-viewed’ list, only trailing Diary of a Country Priest, The French Connection II, and The Birds. I can’t help but wonder in advance, though: in such circumstances I always recall the remark of Peter Cook about the greatness of Berlin cabarets’ comedy in the early 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent World War II. If satire doesn’t work, why might Realism?
Let’s briefly consider Realism first. I take the beginning of wisdom on Realist art to be a short essay from 1921 by the young Roman Jakobson. There Jakobson distinguishes five different types of Realis, (with further sub-types): (i) deforming given artistic norms as an approximation to reality; (ii) the conservative tendency to remain within the limits of a given tradition; (iii) condensing narrative by means of images based on contiguity with the narrative and its agents; (iv) including (seemingly) inessential details; and (v) maintaining consistent motivation and realization of poetic devices within an artwork. These different senses of the term ‘Realism’ may in practice overlap, but still one plainly one gets very different conceptions of Realism if one treats one after another as the central sense. A bit later Wallace Stevens poeticized the different senses of Realism:
From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
In what sense is Bruegel’s work Realist? Bertolt Brecht considered Bruegel a central instance of a Realist artist whose work was in the service of political art. In a formulation from the late 1930s, Brecht cited Bruegel as a model of how one teaches people to see, not just ‘differently’, but in a ‘correct’ way, one “appropriate to the thing”. The world’s exploiters and the exploited see things differently, and “We Communists see things differently from the exploiters and their subservient spirits. But our seeing things differently is focused on things. Things are at stake, not eyes. If we want to teach people that things should be seen differently, then we must teach this with reference to things.” Bruegel in some sense ‘reproduces’ the colors and lines of things with paint and pencils, “but that’s not all he reproduces. The feelings he generates derive from his relationship to the objects which he reproduces, and that is why these are specific feelings, which can change the relationship which the viewer of his pictures has to the objects represented.” (Brecht (2003), p. 241) A couple of years later Brecht notes that Bruegel’s paintings are full of “pictorial contrasts”—old against new, terror against beauty and gaiety, and fundamentally the tragic and the comic. Bruegel “deals in contradictions” that he does not resolve, he “manages to balance his contrasts . . . [but] never merges them into one another, nor does he practice the separation of comic and tragic; his tragedy contains a comic element and his comedy a tragic one”. (Brecht (2003), p. 157) Following the suggestions of Jakobson and Brecht, one might say that a Realist art is one that invokes generalizations, categories, ideologies, norms, etc., and suspends them in amidst contrasts and specificities. Is this political? I don’t know, but if so it is not of a piece with either an art that imagines it rouses the people around a slogan, nor with satiric or ironic ones constructed on the stable and unquestioned ideological framework. It is rather one that puts its political faith in the world-transforming power of suspension of certainties and rather dwelling with particularities.
Snow’s book, with its astonishing and ever-fertile analyses of particularities, is one that must be read and re-read, experienced and re-experienced for oneself, and does not readily admit of summary. Snow himself notes this at the book’s conclusion. He notes that though “[t]he impulse to generalize seems impossible to suppress”, in Bruegel’s painting “the proliferation of meaning defies any settled statement”. (Snow, p. 159) He concludes with the thought that “some works exist to defy generalization”, and quotes the social theorist Roberto Unger on ‘the secret of art’, which is “Depth without abstraction, achieved through detail pursued to the point of obsession”. (Unger (1984), quoted by Snow at p. 160)
References:
Bertolt Brecht, ‘On non-representational Painting’ (1939), in Brecht on Art and Politics (2003), ed. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles
--‘Alienation Effects in the Narrative Pictures of the Elder Brueghel’ (early 1940s?), in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964), ed. John Willett
Roman Jakobson, ‘On Realism in Art’ (1921), in Language in Literature (1987)
Edward Snow, Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children’s Games (1997)
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1981)
Roberto Unger, Passion: An Essay in Personality (1984)