Like everyone, I had thought Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts was a great poem…until I started to learn about art. For one, he said the great masters of the visual arts knew a lot about suffering. Well, if they did, they certainly did not put it into their paintings.
Numerous art critics have expounded on the fact that we do not have much “real” suffering depicted in Western art until after the French Revolution. Mary Anne Staniszewski, for example, explains in Believing Is Seeing that after 1789 a market developed for art among middle class buyers which opened up whole new possibilities for depictions of events wealthy patrons would never have requested. More importantly, the rise of periodicals funded by middle class entrepreneurs allowed artists the opportunity to finally visually depict the reality of human suffering due to social and economic factors.
Before the French Revolution suffering in art is the suffering of Jesus, or some martyrs or maybe some Greek mythological characters, not real people. The folks who were suffering due to slavery or serfdom, military invasion or religious intolerance were completely and totally ignored in the visual arts. In his famous poem Auden references paintings of the birth of Jesus, the apocryphal massacre of the innocents and a mythological figure.
Auden did not choose a painting of a serf who was starving to death, because such paintings do not exist. Patrons of the great masters did not pay them to paint such stuff. If patrons paid for suffering it was the exulted suffering of the Messiah or his followers, to remind us that we needed to look up to these sufferers who were worthy of our worship. So the great masters were paid to show little knowledge of human suffering.
Indeed, sometimes clever “old masters” even sexualized suffering to sell a piece or two, like Guido Reni and his famous St. Sebastian. This painting is so laden with homo-erotica that the gay Japanese writer Yukio Mishima experienced his first orgasm just by looking at it in a book. But, basically, the suffering of the saints and martyrs was to establish credibility for them to be venerated and solicited from for help and the suffering of ancient Greek mythological figures presented quaint and safe visual allegories for monied buyers.
I suddenly realized that Auden was on the wrong track completely, the way folks suddenly, recently, realized that we should really NOT have statues of Southern Civil War Generals mounted heroically on horses in the South, even though those statues had gone unquestioned for generations. So I decided to do Auden a favor and rewrite his poem so that 1) it made sense and 2) it showed greater humanity. I wanted, as an aspiring “good” man, to help the “great” man, because he was so terribly wrong about both art and humanity’s alleged indifference to suffering. He interpreted the three paintings he references incorrectly, misattributes one of them and fails to realize a point John Locke made hundreds of years ago: when we see suffering, we suffer too.
His first line about his wanderings through the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels and the works of the great masters was: “About human suffering they were never wrong…” This is quite an unsupported and sweeping generalization. For reasons mentioned above, I changed that line to: “About suffering they were often wrong.” Yet, the three paintings Auden references were by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (one was authentic, one a copy of a painting by Bruegel done by his son, another a copy by an unknown artist based on a Bruegel design). Pieter Bruegel was one of the few pre-French Revolution artists to actually address issues concerning the hardships of “peasants”, but often in a disguised and subtle way. Indeed, he had to cloak two of the paintings referenced by Auden with religious titles to surreptitiously depict real suffering caused by the Spanish occupation of Northern Europe.
However, neither the Census at Bethlehem nor the Massacre of the Innocents shows indifference to suffering. In the Census Flemish folks are being compelled to pay onerous taxes to the Spanish (there is a Hapsburg coat of arms at the tax office), and we see examples of destitution and even leprosy. Everyone is suffering and into this contemporary scene wanders Mary on her mule. Jesus is going to be born into this type of world. In the Massacre of the Innocents, we see Spanish troops and German mercenaries attacking a Flemish village. There are no detached or indifferent bystanders here.
Given the fact that Bruegel had to cloak the visual reality of suffering under traditional religious titles, I changed Auden’s next couple of lines to this: “The Old Masters: how well they understood their positions vis a vis their throng of patrons and the tastes of this vile brood.” Everybody is suffering in these two works. If they are unable to help or care about others, it is because they are barely getting by themselves.
Auden writes of the miraculous birth of Jesus (referencing the Census) and how some kids preferred to go ice skating instead of venerating the new God-man. Sorry, even Tanya Harding would have skated over to the cradle to see the son of God. I changed that part of the poem to this: “When the aged are reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth, children will stop skating / And hasten to see and hold the new baby from the edge of the wood.” Trust me, I’m a teacher. Kids love babies and would want to see the son of God. Just tell them, they’ll go.
Then Auden talks about some torture and killing in a dirty corner, where dogs are being dogs and a horse has an itch on its butt. This is a reference to the Massacre. I suppose it is true that neither dogs nor horses have protested the various genocides of the last 150 years very aggressively. What did Auden want the dogs and horses to do? Again, frankly, if folks find out about something wrong, they are usually mighty peeved and call the police and the newspapers. When you call the cops, they come and look around. All this dirty stuff in barns with dogs and horses with itchy butts gets revealed sooner or later. And people do not like it one bit. Nobody ignores it. When we learn about this kind of stuff, heads roll. Look what happened to Andy Cuomo.
The greatest affront to the very best in all of us comes when Auden has the audacity to say that a ploughman would ignore a kid screaming through the sky and that guys on a ship would just keep sailing and ignore the drowning kid. That ploughman would drop his plough, those sailors would avert their course and people would move heaven and hell to save that kid. Do you know what happens when a kitten gets stuck up a tree? People call the Fire Department and the firemen will literally crawl up that tree to get that kitten. That stuff which makes us crawl up a tree to save a kitten is what redeems humanity and every lousy, crappy thing we have ever done. It is what Locke pointed to in order to rebut Hobbes. Do not tell me people are going to stand around with their heads up their butts, as Auden asserts, while a kid falls from the sky.
Furthermore, it is Bruegel, not Brueghel. Auden attributes the Icarus painting to the wrong guy. Bruegel’s kid used Brueghel, not the Elder guy. Also, since the 1990s nobody even believes Pieter Bruegel the Elder even painted that Icarus piece. It is now believed that Bruegel designed part of it, but what is hanging in that museum is a copy based on a Bruegel design by a less talented artist. You cannot fault Auden for not knowing that, but I am just pointing out that a “great master” did not even paint that piece. Also, Bruegel, a very complex and thoughtful artist who was way ahead of his time, may have been lampooning the lack of real suffering in common mythological works in Icarus. Icarus is an over-the-top comic piece, not the type of painting Bruegel was known for.
In any case, I changed the ending to:
In Bruegel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything is turned awry
Because the ploughman dropped his plough in reality;
He heard the splash and pleading cry,
And rushed to save this little boy.
And what about that cargo ship, which searched where the guiding sun would show,
And added human mercy to the cruel sea?
They did NOT sail on calmly.
So one of the “greatest” poems in the English language, found in virtually every poetry anthology, is based on shoddy interpretations, a mis-attribution of a painting to the wrong guy and a pessimistic, cynical and unrealistic attitude about the human response to suffering. Here is Auden’s “great” poem and here is my “good” rewrite.
Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)
W.H. Auden
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 Breughel’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.
Fixing the Musée des Beaux Arts (2021)
About suffering they were often wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
their positions vis a vis their throng
of patrons and the tastes of this vile brood.
Suffering jars the person who is eating or opening a window
Or just dully walking along.
When the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, children will stop skating
And run to see and hold the new baby from the edge of the wood.
They never forgot
That a dreadful martyrdom must run its course
In a concealed corner, some hidden spot
Where the torturer ties his get-away horse
Lest we catch him and his doggie-life dangles from a tree and rots.
In Bruegel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything is turned awry
Because the ploughman dropped his plough in reality;
He heard the splash and pleading cry,
And rushed to save this little boy.
And what about that cargo ship, which searched where the guiding sun would show,
And added human mercy to the cruel sea?
They did NOT sail on calmly.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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