Conceptual art: history, principles, and contemporary practice

¶ … art analysis: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel

In conceptual art, the aesthetic value of the artistic work is subordinate to the meaning of the work. "Exponents of Conceptual Art said that artistic production should serve artistic knowledge and that the art object is not an end in itself" (Delahunt 2010). Conceptual art is often linked to a text or other mode of culturally-embedded meaning, such as a myth. The movement was first articulated during the 1960s, but its philosophy has been applied retroactively to a number of works of the historical past, such as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel. The myth of Icarus, the boy who grew drunk on his man-made power of flight that approximated the power of the gods and flew too close to the sun has been a frequent subject of both visual and verbal representation. One of the most famous retellings of Icarus is the poem by the great American poet William Carlos Williams, also entitled "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." With his spare prose, Williams attempts to create a similar effect as the great Old Master Brueghel.

The most notable feature of Pieter Brueghel's work is what is absent: there is no titanic representation of Icarus and his father Daedalus flying across the sea, in defiance of the terrestrial nature of Man. Instead, in the foreground of the Brueghel painting, a peasant plowing his field follows behind an old nag of a horse. The peasant is wholly absorbed in his task, and does not look at either the viewer or Icarus in the water. The subject of Icarus might go unnoticed even by the painting's gazer, were it not for Brueghel's pointed and ironic title.

As the title indicates, the landscape is what is first noticed by the viewer because of the dominance of the peasant in the foreground. The presence of Icarus is manifest in a small, insignificant figure of a drowning man -- and the beautiful, blinding presence of the sun in the distance. However, the dominant colors of the work, other than the sun, are earth tones. The peasant life is what is lasting and important, and the higher aims of Icarus mean little. Of course, in the actual myth, Icarus was merely attempting to escape Crete and the rule of the evil Minos who had imprisoned him and his father. But the death of Icarus has been frequently used as a metaphor for those who attempt to transcend the bounds of humanity. Breughel's painting suggests that most people do not care about such efforts.

The painting is a comment upon the artistic project itself, on art in general. Art and artists are on the periphery of the rest of society. Most people are concerned with obtaining food, plowing the earth, fishing on the sea, herding sheep, or preparing for a spring festival. The boats doing significant work completely overwhelm the small figure of the helpless, foolish, splashing Icarus. As the poet William Carlos Williams wrote in his poem about the painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus":

According to Brueghel

when Icarus fell it was spring a farmer was ploughing his field

The preparations for the harvest of the field are seems important in the grand scheme of things, not Icarus. However, there is also an apparent paradox: although the painting makes an argument for the insignificance of the boy who flies too high and burns the wax on his wings, the artist himself is engaged in a godlike act of creation. And the ordinary individuals depicted by Breughel are engaged in their own manmade acts of imposition upon the world, whether by forcing the field to conform to a plough or creating great ships to skim upon the sea. The artful contours of the plough that seem more like curving geometric designs than real furrows add to the crafted nature of the work, as do the graceful and deliberate fluttering of the ship's sails in the background. While Williams writes of the "tingling" of the new year, the "tingling" is not merely natural, not simply the world sprouting into rebirth. It is a very human, manufactured kind of celebration of the world's bounty.

Thus to read the painting as a kind of a mockery of Icarus and the artist's desire for transcendence may not be entirely fair. Brueghel, after all could have just shown Icarus falling into the hungry sea, unnoticed by nature. The key to a more nuanced interpretation of the painting is evident in Brueghel's deliberate choice of a perspective. According to David Cole, this is a "crucial aspect" of understanding the poem (Cole 2000). "The landscape and the action are seen from above -- from the viewpoint, in other words, of Daedalus. The force of the picture is thus, I think, to move the viewer not only to recognize the unconcern for catastrophe inherent in the preoccupation of ongoing life, but also to register a horrified protest that it should be so" (Cole 2000). It is Daedalus, after all, who is the real artist, the creator of the wings, not his son. The father sees what his creation has done to his boy. The artist protests the uncaring attitude of the world by showing the world from the father's perspective. The painting is an act of exposure: by making Icarus not central to the poem, the poem is even more horrific and more damning of ordinary people's attitudes towards a suffering artist who is trying to transcend the restrictions of common humanity.