Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Wallace Stevens wrote of dying as absolute and without memorial.
No one gets out of this painting alive except those already dead.
Some in this group blow trumpets signaling this godless apocalypse.
A skeleton sticks his head out of the face of a clock; midnight is nigh.
Two skeletons nearby ring two large bells.
They toll for us all.
These were common sights to Bruegel.
About a decade before Bruegel was born near Breda, Martin Luther made his95 Thesespublic, initiating the Reformation.
Look closely and youll see bones beneath these devices.
Bruegel knew brutal fear, human cruelty, and the terrible mirror of precarious life and mindless death.
The curse is global and happening to everyone everywhere at once.
Only about 40 paintings survive, along with numerous prints; his work sold well.
Critics, art historians, and academics scoffed at it.
Modernism and academia had little use for his simple, roly-poly, awkward caricature-like world.
Bruegel isnt complicated enough for most scholars.
It turns out, however, that not complicated is medicine for our complex times.
Bruegel communicates directly to the cerebral cortex.
His work isnt a palliative or any idea of the beautiful.
It was a secret garden.
I would never ask her what her images are.
These strange days, I now spend time being inside of the Bruegel.
None of what I see is depressing, scary, sad, or chilling.
I dont cower in fear or feel harrowed when I look at it.
These days, I bathe in its revelatory waters.
