T.J. Clark on Bruegel

A Financial Times Book of the Year: T.J. Clark offers profound insights on Bruegel’s art, where we encounter a reality formed from wholly worldly materials, yet suspended between belief and disbelief.

Renowned art historian T. J. Clark unveils the hidden depths of Bruegel the Elder’s work in this captivating analysis of some of the artist's most famous masterpieces. Taking the medieval concept of Schlaraffenland, a whimsical dreamland of milk and honey, as his starting point, Clark reveals the satire behind Bruegel’s depictions of paradise and damnation.

In an age marked by enforced orthodoxy, religious wars and threats of burning hellfire, Bruegel the Elder reflected on the powers as well as limitations of religion, deriding the sanctimonious and ridiculing the righteous. At the heart of this book stands Bruegel’s ironic yet highly tender picture of The Land of Cockaigne, where we encounter a vision not of heaven above, but on earth. A parody of paradise, Bruegel’s heaven is consumptive, empty, idle and irresponsible; made of wholly worldly materials, just on the precipice of possibility.

Review

'Our most original art historian. Clark brings the paintings to sensuous life, and draws riveting contrasts between mass culture then and now' - Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

About the Author

T.J. Clark is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the seminal The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984) and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999). He writes art criticism regularly for the London Review of Books. His other publications include Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1983), also published by Thames & Hudson.