The Brooklyn Rail

The Frick Collection, named for industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919), has long epitomized privilege and cultural elitism. However, in recent years, the museum has sought to shed this reputation by engaging broader audiences through curatorial experiments and a critical reexamination of its collection’s origins—acknowledging that Frick amassed his invaluable collection through exploitative industrial practices. The Frick Diptych publication series is part of this initiative, designed to foster critical engagement by pairing an old masterwork with an essay by a Frick curator and a response from a contemporary artist or writer.

Bruegel’s Three Soldiers, part of this series, presents Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Three Soldiers (1568) with Salman Toor’s Three Mascots (2023). The book includes an essay by curator Anna-Claire Stinebring, who acknowledges Toor, “whose art has offered me new perspectives on monochrome painting, on artistic portrayals of male beauty, and on the often unacknowledged homosocial dimensions of quotidian aspects of society.” These themes unite both Bruegel’s and Toor’s works in this book.

Bruegel’s work, one of very few works by the artist in an American collection, depicts three soldiers who appear to be the same man in different positions: one in the foreground, facing the viewer and playing a fife; another in the background, shown in profile, holding a flag aloft with his sword pointing upward toward it; and a third, viewed from behind, carrying a drum with his sword pointed downward. In contrast, Toor’s figures function as mascots—perhaps both merrymaking fools and marching activists—united in their forward-facing stance. One, barefoot, holds a sign with no text; the central figure wears a hat resembling a petasos, a symbol of Mercury and traits of communication and trickery, and smiles while playing a tambourine. The third figure ecstatically holds an arm and flagpole erect, with the action of the hand grasping the pole that glows although the billowing flag itself fades into the grey background. While Bruegel presents us one homogenous soldier in three varying positions, Toor depicts three individuated figures united and synchronized for a purpose of joy and forward movement.

Both Toor’s and Bruegel’s works are small in scale—Bruegel’s at 8 ½ by 11 inches on paper, Toor’s at 12 by 9 inches on paper—similar to the general dimensions of the book. Both are executed in grisaille, a monochromatic technique using shades of grey or stone-like colors, known in Bruegel’s Dutch as wit ende swert (white and black). For Bruegel, grisaille was a means of showcasing artistic skill within the tradition of paragone, the historical comparison of painting, poetry, and sculpture debating which was more excellent. Bruegel’s grisaille showcases his skill in achieving detail painting with still-wet oil medium. As Stinebring writes in her essay, grisaille was used on the exterior of altarpieces (Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece [1432] being the most iconic), with the subdued monochromatic figures contrasting the vibrant colors of the interior of the altarpiece when revealed on Sundays and religious feast days. This controlled access to not just imagery but also color echoes an enduring theme of art history—what is seen and what remains hidden, and for what purpose. For Toor, the figures that merge into one unit resemble what he has called “fag puddles” with “leakages” that are “heaps of exhaustion and lust.” In conversation with Christopher Y. Lew in another Frick publication, Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, he has said these “puddles” “can sometimes have a flag on top of it like it’s this ruined country or something that just has no more energy.”

Bruegel’s work is a genre depiction of the Landsknechte figure, German mercenaries for hire in the sixteenth century. 1568, the year this work was made, is the same year of a public execution in Bruegel’s Brussels that sparked the Dutch Revolt, a period of brutal war between Protestant and Catholic factions with violence against bodies and images, leading to the Protestant iconoclasm of Catholic imagery. While Bruegel’s soldiers may seem fanciful in their attire and actions, this is a leisure scene that is preceded or succeeded by battle or death. Stinebring writes, “in early modern northern Europe, soldiers—already framed as licentious—were at times negatively associated with sodomy in contemporaneous scenes.” There is a balance both in Bruegel’s and Toor’s work of the homosocial and homoerotic, and both artists engage in what Stinebring calls “martial pageantry,” though their works respond to different social and political tensions.

Images are coded with actions—implicit and explicit—whether in Bruegel’s prominence of the codpiece or the phallic flute and swords as extensions of these men’s bodies, where masculinity is framed through militaristic and sexual dominance. In our contemporary moment, Toor’s work still contains a sense of coded images and actions—while Bruegel insinuates the phallic, Toor liberates some of this coding by presenting the central figure with penis out, even though the figure has hat, shirt, and boots, somewhere between naked and nude. This may seem an almost comical perception, but whereas Brugel has an implication of wars of religion, gender expression remains a contested political issue today, with reactionary policies aiming to define gender in binary terms and limit tolerance of anything outside of this rigid system. Through distinct visual codes, both works incorporate queer subtexts—Bruegel through the homosocial bonds of soldiers in camaraderie, and Toor through his fluid, performative figures that reference queer joy and resistance.

Bruegel’s Three Soldiers extends a curatorial project initiated by the Frick during its temporary relocation to the Breuer Building (as Frick Madison), specifically the yearlong exhibition Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters. This initiative paired old masters with self-identified queer contemporary artists, queering not just the works themselves but also the act of viewing, and included more detailed commentary from all the artists. By comparison, Bruegel’s Three Soldiers seems to miss the opportunity to further engage with Toor, other than sharing the image of his work and a brief paragraph contextualizing its creation and inclusion in the book. But while Stinebring’s essay integrates historical and contemporary perspectives, a deeper dialogue between Toor’s artistic process and Bruegel’s legacy could have further enriched the text. Thus, with Bruegel’s Three Soldiers, it is what is unsaid that echoes the mechanism of access and invisibility—what is not explicit remains an arena of coded language within queer (art) history.