Detroit
The Detroit Institute of Arts owns many masterpieces, but perhaps none as cherished as Pieter Bruegel’s “The Wedding Dance” (1566). The merry peasant scene, with its spirited dancing, drinking and kissing rendered in Bruegel’s detailed, wry style, ranks among his best pieces. When Detroit’s bankruptcy in 2013 prompted creditors to call for the liquidation of museum holdings purchased with city money—which “The Wedding Dance” was—it merited the highest valuation in the collection: $100 million to $200 million. With as many calls to sell it as to keep it as an emblem of civic pride, it was saved by a “grand bargain” that averted all art sales.
Yet until now, “The Wedding Dance” has hung quietly among other Northern European paintings here, rarely moved or lent (not even for Vienna’s blockbuster “Bruegel” a year ago, which gathered some three-quarters of his extant paintings to commemorate his 1569 death).
Bruegel’s ‘The Wedding Dance’ Revealed
Detroit Institute of Arts
Through Aug. 30
In December, just before that anniversary year ended, the museum placed the painting at the center of an intimate, illuminating exhibition called “Bruegel’s ‘The Wedding Dance’ Revealed.” Stripped of its frame, the painting inhabits a vitrine, allowing visitors to see the front, sides and back, where a wooden cradle was affixed in the late 1800s to prevent warping. Visitors are invited to look closely and to learn what experts have discovered since conservators began cleaning the fragile oil-on-panel painting in 2015.
It’s a good—if incomplete—story. Perhaps most startlingly, conservators documented that a narrow band across the top, which added a horizon, was not part of Bruegel’s work. Something always seemed amiss there to anyone who looked very closely: The craquelure (fine cracks in the paint or varnish) is more intense and the coloration different above a horizontal line (green leaves are suddenly brown, for instance). Now analysis by botanists who specialize in trees has determined that the strip came from a different oak tree than the rest of the panel. Infrared reflectography showed that Bruegel’s copious underdrawing, very visible elsewhere (sometimes even through worn paint), is missing there.
When this addition was made is unknown. Pigment study suggests that it could have come as late as 1750, when a yellow used in the addition fell out of favor. Nor do we know who changed the painting or why. Here, the exhibition team, led by conservator Ellen Hanspach-Bernal and curator Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, lets visitors speculate: They display a reproduction of the painting without the addition alongside one with it. Clearly, Bruegel’s version suggests that the boisterous party extended beyond the painting’s borders. Perhaps an owner wanted it toned down.
At some point, the painting was altered in another way, possibly for a related reason. In 1941, a conservator discovered that some details had been changed; most provocatively, some men’s genitals, which Bruegel portrayed in prominent pouches called codpieces, had been painted over. The museum restored them, causing some distress, as contemporaneous documents show.
Then, as now, conservators did not fill in faded areas—so blues are now brown and a prominent purple shirt is rosy, for example. Smartly, to show visitors how the painting once looked, the exhibition includes a well-preserved copy (Bruegel was widely imitated in his day) painted with more stable pigments.
Tracing Bruegel’s methods, the exhibition reveals that a carpentry shop used glue and dowels to unite four boards, taken from four oak trees in Poland that were already at least 200 years old, into one panel for Bruegel. He primed it with a mix of white chalk and animal glue, then white oil paint, and sketched his scene—often changing details—in black charcoal. Only then did he paint, occasionally improvising. Visitors see, in wall panels, how the bride—near the center, with flowing blond hair and red headband—had worn a little crown in his drawing. And one musician has a feather in his cap in the drawing, but not the painting.
Conservators detected the use of eight sizes of animal-hair brushes, and examples of them fill a vitrine, along with the eight pigments Bruegel deployed. Asserting the global nature of this provincial picture, didactics explain how the red came from cochineal bugs in the Americas and the smalt blue from cobalt mined in Saxony.
The third gallery documents how “The Wedding Dance” came to Detroit. In the summer of 1930, the museum’s renowned director William Valentiner saw it in London. Knowing only that it came from an English country home, Valentiner immediately recognized it as the original and asked the dealer to delay showing it around. Within two weeks—akin to the speed of light for a museum—Valentiner had the funds: £7,400 or about $38,000 (some $600,000 today).
As much as this exhibition excels at explaining the life of this exceptional painting, however, it says nothing about what Bruegel was conveying. “The Wedding Dance” has been read as a sly critique of the deplorable mores of the peasantry—or, conversely, as a chiding of overly strict moral authorities. Artistically, it was also momentous for Bruegel—it’s more dynamic and compositionally daring than his previous works and, as an essay in the museum’s bulletin states, marked a turning point for him. If only the museum had explored these aspects, this intelligent exhibition would have been so much richer.
—Ms. Dobrzynski writes about art for the Journal and other publications.
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