{"id":102797,"date":"2026-05-01T09:39:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T16:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=102797"},"modified":"2026-05-05T10:01:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T17:01:13","slug":"102797-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/102797-2\/","title":{"rendered":"May Day: Disorder That Holds Together"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBefore it became International Workers’ Day, before it became a bank holiday, May 1st was a festival of spring: dancing, drinking, flirtation, communal release. It was a ritual of renewal with pagan roots and Christian overlays, not wholly approved by the authorities, where villages gathered around a tall pole dressed in ribbons and greenery \u2014 the axis of a world briefly, joyfully turned upside down.<\/h4>\n

That spirit is evident in “Dance Around the Maypole”<\/em> by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which hangs in the European galleries of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a small painting\u2014oil on panel, just 20 by 30 inches\u2014donated to the museum in 1992 by Salt Lake City businessman Val Browning. The UMFA director at the time called it the crown jewel of Browning’s extraordinary gift.<\/h4>\n

Pieter Brueghel the Younger was born in Brussels in 1564, the eldest son of the leading painter in northern Europe. While the Italians of the Renaissance focused on scripture and mythology, Northern European painters \u2014 and the Brueghel family especially\u2014went out into the village square, up to a high vantage point, and across a teeming scene of ordinary life\u2014and sometimes not so ordinary, if you’re thinking of the works of Hieronymus Bosch. Ordinary or not, these painting were teeming with life and everyday people\u2014peasants eating, drinking, dancing, fighting, making love badly in public. It produced a completely different idea of what a painting could be.<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>Brueghel the Elder, the master practitioner of this sort of painting, died when the boy was five. His original paintings already dispersed across private collections throughout Europe. The younger Pieter grew up trained by his grandmother, absorbing his father’s vision through drawings, cartoons, and prints. By his mid-twenties he had his own studio in Antwerp, a dozen apprentices, and a thriving business supplying an export market hungry for Bruegelian peasant scenes. He’s been called a copyist ever since, but “Dance Around the Maypole” is an original composition, one that both Rubens and Van Dyck admired.<\/h4>\n

Beginning around 1616, Brueghel the Younger developed the kermis<\/em>\u2014the Flemish village festival\u2014as his signature theme. This composition spreads across the panel but centers on the villagers whirling in a ring around a tall pole. Tradition\u2014at least of the past couple of centuries\u2014likes to read the pole as a phallic symbol. Contemporary folklorists are more likely to see it as a reference to the axis mundi, a vertical connection between earth and sky around which the community oriented itself. What is clear is that by Brueghel’s time it was a contested object. In 1644, England’s Long Parliament would ban maypoles outright as “a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness”\u2014and villages kept erecting them anyway, turning the dance into a small annual act of defiance.<\/p>\n

Defiant or not, Brueghel’s scene is definitely a party. Musicians animate the square; drink flows freely.\u00a0 Keep looking, and the scene gets stranger, funnier. A man sprawls drunkenly in a woman’s lap. Nearby, a child holds up a small white flag\u2014a fool’s banner, a standard image in Flemish festival scenes, a mock surrender to appetite and disorder. Couples kiss in corners. Figures brawl, peel off to swim naked in a stream, relieve themselves with cheerful indifference to the crowd behind them. Somewhere in the background, a sword fight has broken out. These are people who, at least for a day, throw off the shackles of regulation.<\/h4>\n

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For a long time, educated viewers read these scenes as comic satire\u2014look at these rustic people, so excessive, so gloriously unrefined. Like “coastal elites” making fun of the Nascar crowd. There’s mockery here, certainly. But there’s also something more human. Brueghel isn’t painting types or cautionary tales. He’s painting people\u2014ridiculous, sensual, communal, vulnerable, alive.\u00a0 That feels like a useful thing to remember on May Day. We’re told we live in a time of loneliness and digital isolation. We could use a few more parties like this.<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before it became International Workers’ Day, before it became a bank holiday, May 1st was a festival of spring: dancing, drinking, flirtation, communal release. It was a ritual of renewal with pagan roots and Christian overlays, not wholly approved by the authorities, where villages gathered around a tall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[832],"class_list":["post-102797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-umfa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Dance-around-the-Maypole-scaled-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-12 15:18:42","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102797"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102803,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102797\/revisions\/102803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}