Volume 48, Number 19 · November 29, 2001
The Thing Itself
By John Updike
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints
catalog of the exhibition edited by Nadine M. Orenstein, with additional contributions by Manfred Sellink, Jürgen Müller, Michiel C. Plomp, Martin Royalton-Kisch, and Larry Silver
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 25–December 2, 2001.
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 323 pp., $60.00; $35.00 (paper)
It felt not too strange, flying down from Boston a month to the day after the World Trade Center disaster, braving the beefed-up security in the city's disgraced Logan Airport (tall state troopers in blue jodhpurs and diagonal belts, pink-cheeked boys in reserve camouflage outfits, grizzled cops squinting at a long day of light duty, the same old security personnel galvanized by a new sense of mission as they waved their peepy wands), gazing down on the widespread loveliness of a Connecticut whose trees were glowing with autumnal red, approaching New York by a wary new route well away from the Hudson and maimed Manhattan, coming into LaGuardia over more golf courses than I had ever known existed in Westchester County, and taking a taxi (the driver bitterly complained of his month of diminished fares) to the fine little Bruegel show at the Metropolitan—fifty-four of his sixty-one surviving drawings, sixty prints based on his drawings, and another twenty drawings imitating his or long thought to be by him.
Review, 2510 words
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