The Appropriation of Brueghel, by Barbara Krasner

Massacre of the Innocents, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (Hapsburg Netherlands) 1565-1567

The Appropriation of Brueghel

I.
Hapsburg armor storms the Flemish village in search of young boys to satisfy the order to kill. Double-headed eagles scour in both directions. No one can escape the scrutiny. Parents plead in vain.

II.
The routine was always the same. Prof. C strode into class just a minute before start-time, arms full of loose papers. She insisted someone open a window for fresh air, no matter the weather. She taught medieval German literature and Norse mythology. In the days before classroom computers, she introduced our small class of German majors to the art of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. She presented him as a German painter.

III.
Bringing Spanish rule over the Dutch, say Brueghel’s bristles, is no different from the Massacre of the Innocents. The Spanish have hired German mercenaries.

IV.
In Brussels, I rush to the Brueghel exhibit in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Oldmasters museum. I cannot leave Brussels without paying homage to Brueghel. “I found him,” I want to shout to Prof. C, long since deceased. Brueghel’s style pulses community portrait. 

V.
Prof. C claimed this Flemish painter for Germany well before Germany occupied Belgium in the spring of 1940. Despite a birth record registered in Croyden, England in the summer of 1933, despite her appearance as a British immigrant on the SS Veendam to New York in 1952, presumably to begin attending the college where she would later teach, Prof. C had a thick German accent.

VI.
Like Brueghel, she focused on the minute, the small moments and made them seem important and vital to a larger environment. Open the window, breathe the air, become anyone you want to be.

Barbara Krasner

​Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Michigan Quarterly Review, Paterson Literary Review, Rust + Moth, The Vassar Review, and other journals. She lives and teaches in New Jersey, and can be found at www.barbarakrasner.com.