The Chicago Art Institute is a wonderful museum, but it lacks one thing - or if it has it, I didn't find the room or place on the wall where it was. It doesn't have any Brueghel paintings [or Bosch ones for that matter - its late medieval and renaissance holdings are slim, now that I think of it]. But it does have some things: among them this wonderful beheading of John the Baptist. John's leaned out the window and become decapitated - which was very agreeable of him. Note Salome standing off to the side, like she's picking up some groceries. She's a long way here from Strauss's naked temptress doing a tango with the Baptist's head in fin de siecle Vienna. That's what you get in medieval painting: not much sex but lots of violence.I wanted to find a Breughel or a Bosch because I knew that with them I'd find examples of the carnivalesque and the grotesque. I invite you to do google image searches for them. Here are two the most fervid and frenetic (as well as caustic and laughing) minds that have ever painted a painting. Between 1480 and 1569 the time was ripe for the carnivalesque, and these two exemplified it in paint.
Painting like this is what needs to be taught on PBS painting shows (as well as painting like Jasper Johns or William De Kooning). People should demand their culture give them rich complex food that demands being ripped off the haunch and dipped into vinegary sauces of mystery. Instead cold, prefabricated slices of the most undistingushed and questionable food are placed before them for consumption and the only mystery is how people can consume so much of it and not keel over from boredom. We are a country on the verge of inventing prosthetic brains because the necessity of nature is imposed upon us.
