The Flight of Form: Auden, Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s

Alexander Nemerov

Pieter Bruegel made Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in 1938—or so W. H. Auden helps us see. Auden wrote his famous poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" that year, with its last stanza devoted to Bruegel's picture, and under the poem's pressure The Fall of Icarus becomes a commentary about events in the months leading up to inevitable world conflict. More precisely, the poem transforms Bruegel's painting into a surrealist diagram concerning the place of the intellectual in violent times. What do artists and poets and critics do in the face of catastrophe? How do they register it in their work, or should they even try to do so? Auden makes Bruegel's painting address these questions with a special urgency, indeed with enough power that this picture painted around 1560 becomes a template for understanding literature and visual art at the end of the nineteen thirties and into the forties. In particular the motivations and underlying energies of American abstract painting of that era—that of Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, for example—become unexpectedly clearer in light of The Fall of Icarus. What did it mean for the artist to turn away from the world? Bruegel suggests some answers.

Auden wrote "Musée des Beaux Arts" when he was in Brussels in December 1938, biding his time before he and Christopher Isherwood moved to New York early the next year.¹ The poem refers to two other Bruegel paintings, The Massacre of the Innocents and The Nativity, both in Vienna, but it is the Brussels Fall of Icarus that Auden concentrates on the most. Then as now in a second-floor gallery of the museum the poem is named after, the painting depicts the story from book 8 of Ovid's Metamorphoses of Daedalus and his son Icarus (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1560. Oil on panel transferred to canvas, 28 5/8 x 43 5/8 in. Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Daedalus fashioned wings of wax, thread, and feathers to escape imprisonment on the isle of Crete and made a second set of wings for his fellow prisoner Icarus. He warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, which would melt the wax and bring him crashing down, but the impetuous youth ignored his father's advice and suffered the forewarned meltdown, falling to the earth.

Some artists—Peter Paul Rubens, for example—focus exclusively on the airborne drama of father and son, but Bruegel omits Daedalus and shows only Icarus's pale legs as he plunges into the water at lower right (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (detail). Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Bruegel concentrates on other aspects of Ovid's tale: "Some fisher, perhaps, plying his quivering rod, some shepherd leaning on his staff, or a peasant bent over his plough handle caught sight of [Daedalus and Icarus] as they flew past," Ovid writes, "and stood stock still in astonishment."² These figures appear throughout Bruegel's picture—the fisherman at lower right, the shepherd at midground center, and most clearly the plowman at left foreground—but Bruegel departs from Ovid, as Walter Gibson notes, by showing them oblivious to the drama around them. Even the figures busily scaling the rigging of the ship at lower right notice neither Icarus nor the feathers floating past the sails. Indifference and preoccupation are everywhere. In the distance, the culpable sun sits half-submerged, as if in sympathy with Icarus's sinking, but it too is part of a vaster world—even the icon of that world—that goes about its business, its daily cycle, unconcerned with particular tragedies.

This of course is the quality Auden seized on in his poem, with its famous last stanza devoted to the Brussels painting:

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.³

What is striking about the poem, first, is its relation to Auden's experiences in 1938. From January to June, he and Isherwood had been in China, writing a book about the Sino-Japanese War called Journey to a War, which they finished in Brussels at the end of the year. (It was published in 1939.) The wartime experience, as David Pascoe points out, left a lasting impression on the Auden who saw Bruegel's painting: "In Brussels in the winter of 1938," Pascoe writes, "suffering was on Auden's mind; he had witnessed it in a Chinese field hospital six months earlier and had not recovered."⁴ Journey to a War combines journalism, poetry, and photography, and some of the photographs show these field-hospital scenes: a pairing called The Innocent, the Guilty, for example, with its unrecognizable victims on a stretcher and pulverized into the ground (fig. 3); or another, called Soldiers and Civilians: With legs, Without (fig. 4). Bruegel's Icarus, with legs, must have conjured these scenes to the person who had witnessed them so recently.

Figure 3. War Zone: The Innocent, the Guilty, from W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War.

Figure 4. Soldiers and Civilians: With legs, Without, from Journey to a War.

So must the story of "a boy falling out of the sky." This is Auden and Isherwood's description from Journey to a War of watching a Japanese air raid on the city of Hankow on April 29, 1938:

Soon after lunch the sirens began to blare. We put on our smoked glasses and lay down flat on our backs on the Consulate lawn—it is the best way of watching an air-battle if you don't want a stiff neck. Machine-guns and anti-aircraft guns were hammering all around us, but the sky was so brilliant that we seldom caught a glimpse of the planes unless the sun happened to flash on their turning wings. Presently a shell burst close to one of the Japanese bombers; it flared against the blue like a struck match. . . . Then came the whining roar of another machine, hopelessly out of control; and, suddenly, a white parachute mushroomed out over the river while the plane plunged on, down into the lake behind Wuchang.⁵

Icarus, the boy falling from the sky of whom Auden wrote some eight months after the air battle, precisely figures these other aviators, the sun flashing "on their turning wings." He also evokes another of the falling airplanes from that aerial dogfight, itself sun-succumbed: "another plane, a Japanese, [that] came tumbling out of the eye of the sun, shot to pieces, and turning over and over like a scrap of glittering silver paper."⁶ Enemy Planes Overhead, another photograph from Journey to a War, shows a Chinese soldier and another man looking up into the sky, emphasizing Auden's attention that year to minute and almost indiscernible life-and-death dramas taking place in the heavens (fig. 5).

Figure 5. Enemy Planes Overhead, from Journey to a War.

As on the embassy lawn, even when you looked for these dramas you "seldom caught a glimpse" of them. The men in the photograph, their faces starkly illuminated, stare into the sun to behold dramas unfolding, but it is not clear that they see the matchstick-and-tinfoil machines high above, eclipsed in the pervasive brilliance. Only when the sunlight ignites, flaring and glittering at a particular point, did individual tragedies become visible, though then only fleetingly and on a minuscule scale. Aerial machines, squinting upwards, innocent victims—these experiences so fresh in Auden's mind must have given the fate of Bruegel's falling boy a contemporary resonance.

But if we focus still more on the figure of Icarus, we can begin to see that the painting becomes, thanks to Auden's poem, not just an allegory of 1938 but something somehow made in 1938, as though it were a surrealist work of the poet's own era. A contemporary literary event shows how this is so. In the same month Auden was in Brussels, December 1938 (on Christmas Eve, in fact), Jorge Luis Borges ascended a flight of stairs and accidentally struck his head against a freshly painted window casement, incurring a life-threatening case of blood poisoning. While convalescing, he decided to write a story to see if his intellectual powers had been permanently damaged in the accident. The story, finished in 1939, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," is now perhaps Borges's most famous. It concerns Pierre Menard, a modern-day author, who decides to rewrite, or actually to write anew, Cervantes's famous novel, Don Quixote. Menard's "admirable ambition," Borges writes, "was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes." Cervantes writes, for example, "Truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future." Menard writes the same passage, says Borges, this way: "Truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future." The two passages are identical, but as Borges notes, dismissing Cervantes's original, Menard's vision is "almost infinitely richer."⁷

The passage brings us back to Auden's transformation of Bruegel. Menard's rendering of Cervantes is richer because the modern-day author has given the older text a newfound relevance. The original now refers to the present not merely allegorically—as a static and obsolete set of personifications—but in a more direct fashion: its antiquated language has been transformed into something itself made in the present, and therefore immediately responsive to modern events. "History, mother of truth," the narrator writes, "the idea is astounding."⁸ The old, because transcribed unchanged, is suddenly puffed into a new significance. The same principle is at work in Auden's rewriting of Bruegel. His poem does not change a thing in the painting—on the contrary, it tries to transcribe its original content, as it were, word for word—but under the poem's pressure everything in The Fall of Icarus is different. Take for example Icarus's part of the painting in relation to that passage from Journey to a War. "Then came the whining roar of another machine, hopelessly out of control; and, suddenly, a white parachute mushroomed out over the river." Bruegel's image of Icarus falling into the water (see fig. 2), while above him the ship's sails billow with air, is, of course, just as it was when the Flemish painter made it about 1560; but thanks to Auden's poem the same image, unchanged, is yet completely transformed, modernized, into the image of an aviator and a trailing, billowing parachute. Without having changed a brushstroke on the painting—indeed precisely because he has not changed a thing—Auden has, like Menard, revised the older work and turned it into something modern, something "almost infinitely richer."

Making Bruegel modern was not Auden's invention. Hans Sedlmayr twice likened Bruegel to the surrealists in his essay, "Bruegel's Macchia," published in 1934, and others have since referred to Bruegel as a surrealist.⁹ The Fall of Icarus, however, is an especially twentieth-century picture. It came into the Musée collection in 1912, having been acquired that year in London, and right from the first there was something strikingly current about its depiction of aerial catastrophe.¹⁰ The coincidence of an aviation picture appearing in a public collection in precisely the years aviation was invented was too clear for artists not to see. Painters such as John Singer Sargent, in his Crashed Aeroplane of 1918 (fig. 6), were quick to note the modernity of Bruegel's theme of flight.

Figure 6. John Singer Sargent, Crashed Aeroplane, 1918. Watercolor, pencil, and gouache on paper, 13 ½ x 21 in. Imperial War Museum, London.

Sargent, who traveled to the Western Front in July 1918 to get ideas for a large war painting commissioned by the British Government, was stationed in the north of France, with the Guards Division at Bavincourt, and from there he moved to Ypres, in Belgium, where he might easily have made a visit to Brussels and come across The Fall of Icarus.
Certainly Crashed Aeroplane is an all-but-explicit rewriting of Bruegel's painting. As in the earlier work, Sargent places a bent-backed farmer at lower left, making him turn to the left, too, as if in direct emulation of Bruegel's plowman. Sargent's farmer is assisted by a woman nearer the picture plane, her head obscured by a bonnet as she reaches down to bundle a sheaf of wheat, who corresponds roughly to the other inattentive figures in Bruegel's picture—the fisherman, for example. Elaine Kilmurray notes without elaborating that the man and woman are "like characters in a Bruegel painting."¹¹ Sargent also places to the right a crumpled biplane, either a SE 5 or (by the looks of its snubby cowl) a Sopwith Camel, partly sunken into the field like Icarus half-submerged in the water, which neither field worker notices.

Sargent does three other things to solidify the connection to The Fall of Icarus. He puts the foreground figures in a field flowing with leftward orientation (the sheathed hay moving the eye left like the plowman's lines in the Bruegel). He uses the hay to demarcate the farmers' separate zone from the blank field in the distance, emphasizing their isolation from the tragedy in their midst. And he sets the scene beneath a high horizon that even seems to follow the contours of Bruegel's darkened mass of distant sea. Only in the shadowy group of tiny figures that mingles directly around the aircraft, one of them on horseback just to the left of the engine cowl, does Sargent substantially alter Bruegel's theme. Yet even here the emphasis on close-up inspection—presumably meant to instill the right level of bureaucratic-patriotic propriety (all accidents are investigated, all misfortunes are noticed, no matter how lonely and obscure)—reads as a form of reluctant overcompensation. The inspecting figures are so small and ghostly as to be almost invisible in a picture otherwise devoted to modernizing Bruegel's scene of aerial catastrophe and worldly indifference.

Auden followed in this tradition, and he anticipated other modernizings of Bruegel, including one soon after he wrote "Musée des Beaux Arts." Paul Nash's The Battle of Britain, painted in 1941, shows a single airplane having plummeted into the water at right, as Icarus does (fig. 7).

Figure 7. Paul Nash, The Battle of Britain, 1941. Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in. Imperial War Museum, London.

It also includes other resonances more or less direct: a whirling set of vapor trails, the traces of an ongoing dogfight, which resemble the billowing curvature of the sheets of Bruegel's ship; a lush green farmland in the foreground (spotted with barrage balloons and puffs of anti-aircraft fire that echo the puffy sheep in Bruegel's picture); a serpentine estuary evoking the waving lines of Bruegel's plowed field; and a disembodied aerial vantage point like the viewer's airborne position in Bruegel's work. Nash spent the war as the official artist of the Air Ministry, and in 1947 he wrote, "I have always been more or less attracted by the idea of being able to fly. . . . My ambition was just that of poor Icaros—to be able to launch into the air of my own volition, and to sustain my flight like a bird."¹² Like Auden, whose poem was first published in book form in June 1940 just as the Battle of Britain commenced, Nash recognized the currency of Ovid's story and Bruegel's painting.¹³

Each transformation—Auden's, Sargent's, and Nash's—modernized the idea of the winged genius, turning the flying young man from a public hero to an anonymous victim. Back when Bruegel's painting came into the Musée des Beaux Arts, Icarus could be shown as a man of admirable courage, glorious even in defeat; a poster of about 1912 shows him as an intrepid adventurer rising stalwart, ever upward, fearless against a looming, bat-wing blackness that marks his fate but also shields him from the sun, the cloak of doom providing a thermal protection. The Gordon Bennett Trophy, the most prestigious award in early aviation, features an ascendant Icarus surmounted by a Wright Flier.¹⁴ Wilfred Owen's brief idea of becoming a pilot in 1916—"By Hermes, I will fly. . . . If I fall, I shall fall mightily. I shall be with Perseus and Icarus, whom I loved"—expresses the grandeur of Icarian dreams even once the war began. Failing like Icarus meant, for Owen, a heroically visible climax, a fate equivalent to his imaginings of himself as a more triumphant aviator: "I will yet swoop over Wrekin with the strength of a thousand Eagles," he wrote his mother, "and all you shall see me light upon the Racecourse, and marvelling behold the pinion of Hermes, who is called Mercury, upon my cap."¹⁵ Marveling, beholding, "all you shall see"—very little of this public witnessing attends the fate of Sargent's, Nash's, and Auden's fallen aviators.

The shift is especially intense in Auden's case, thanks to the museum his poem is named after. On the façade of the Musée des Beaux Arts, built in 1880, is an imposing allegorical sculpture of a winged boy, Paul De Vigne's Glorification de l'art (fig. 8).

Figure 8. Paul de Vigne, Glorification de l'Art, ca. 1880. Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.

The heroic-sized sculpture is matched by an equally magisterial rendering of a winged female figure on the other end of the façade, Charles Van der Stappen's l'Enseignement de l'art. Together the two works are impossible to miss: a postal card from about 1900 of the museum's façade indicates the massive size of De Vigne's sculpture, visible at right, just above some barely discernible street sweepers (one of them holding a tiny shovel) (fig. 9).

Figure 9. Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, postal card, ca. 1900.

In all likelihood Auden saw this outsized sculpture of a heroic winged youth when he visited the museum in 1938. To go to the museum now to look at Bruegel's painting in light of Auden's poem is to be almost bowled over by confronting an Icarus-like figure before one has even set foot inside.

For Auden, the transition from the outside to the inside of the museum—from De Vigne's to Bruegel's work—was actually a journey forward in time. The Fall of Icarus, made more than three hundred years before De Vigne's sculpture, was yet a far more modern work, far more willing to speak about suffering than the complacent allegories of the recent academic past. The title of Auden's poem is ironic; it refers to the museum itself and not to the paintings within it, as if to underscore the outmodedness, the powerlessness, of academic classicism such as De Vigne's—its inability, with its rhetoric of glory and victory and praise, to say anything to a world on the verge of war. A photograph taken in 1932 of the museum's grand interior courtyard emphasizes the mausoleum-like atmosphere that must have confronted Auden when he visited (fig. 10).

Figure 10. Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, sculpture hall, 1932.

"It is precisely in a museum that the old masters are never in disagreement, whatever the case may be elsewhere, because in a museum they appear to be suspended above the diverse historical circumstances on which disagreement depends," writes the literary critic Paul Fry about Auden's poem, and the photograph of the museum's all-but-funereal sculpture court supports this assessment.¹⁶ Yet lurking within one of the second-floor galleries, back behind the columns and out of view, lost amid the ponderous commemoration, The Fall of Icarus offered its trenchant modern view of fluttering individual human fates.

Figure 14. Jackson Pollock, Lucifer, 1947. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas, 41 in. x 8 ft. 9 ½ in. Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson.

Figure 15. Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock, 1950. Courtesy Pollock-Krasner House, East Hampton, New York.

1 For the chronology of Auden's movements in 1938 and early 1939, see Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (New York, 1981), pp. 346–47.
2Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 185.
3W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts," The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Mendelson (London, 1977), p. 237.
4David Pascoe, "`Everything Turns Away: Auden's Surrealism," in W. H. Auden: "The Language of Learning and the Language of Love," ed. Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (Oxford, 1994), p. 152.
5Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (New York, 1939), pp. 172–73.
6Ibid., p. 173.
7Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," trans. Anthony Bonner, Ficciones, trans. Anthony Kerrigan et al., ed. Kerrigan (New York, 1962), pp. 49, 53, 52.
8Ibid., p. 53.
9See Hans Sedlmayr, "Bruegel's Macchia," in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher Wood (New York, 2000), pp. 335, 345; hereafter abbreviated "B." For Bruegel as a surrealist, see, for example, Roger H. Marijnissen and Max Seidel, foreword, Bruegel (New York, 1984), pp. 9–10. The authors make the analogy only in order to deny it: "Obviously the Surrealism of our time is not to be equated with the spirit of Bosch' and Bruegel's works" (p. 10).
10See Françoise Roberts-Jones-Popelier, Chronique d'un Musée: Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique Bruxelles (Liege, 1987), p. 61.
11John Singer Sargent, ed. Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond (exhibition catalog, Tate Galley, London, 15 Oct. 1998–17 Jan. 1999), p. 269. See pp. 263 and 277 for brief information about when Sargent traveled to the front and where he stayed. Sargent's commission resulted in the large painting Gassed (Imperial War Museum, London), made the following year.
12Paul Nash, Aerial Flowers (Oxford, 1947), p. 2. For a description of Nash's Battle of Britain, see Roger Cardinal, The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash (London, 1989), pp. 102–3.
13See Auden, Another Time: Poems (London, 1940).
14For an image of the Gordon Bennett trophy, see Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), p. 123. For the poster of Icarus, see p. 262.
15Wilfred Owen, letter to Susan Owen, 27 Aug. 1916, Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (London, 1967), p. 408; quoted in Wohl, A Passion for Wings, p. 290 n. 2.
16Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford, Calif., 1995), p. 71.