Adriaen Brouwer (1605/1606–1638)
A Boor Asleep by Adriaen Brouwer
By Martin Sexton
“I am the world's forgotten boy
The one who searches and destroys.”
— Iggy Pop, The Stooges
There are still a large number of unresolved questions surrounding the early life and career of Adriaen Brouwer. His father died in poverty when Adriaen was only 15 years old. Brouwer had by that time already left the family home, a street kid, broke, living on his wits — it is likely he was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, drunkenness and other offences.
How exactly did he live no one really knows. His time moving itinerantly around is sketchy — but it is known he belonged to a Chamber of Rhetoric in Haarlem whose motto was: ‘Love Above All Else’ which sounds proto-hippy or code for a pick-up joint. The chamber and similar organisations were all over Flanders and Holland and were a kind of working-class punk-rock amateur dramatics society.
They would be viewed with contempt by the time the Greek classics and Shakespeare became revived amongst a new Dutch elite determining theatre. It can be surmised Brouwer hung out with outsiders like himself, hard partying with artists and poets and getting into all kinds of trouble.
Eventually his own passions and refuge in art, led him to Antwerp, a city he spent his final years and where his name is known to officials, not as an artist, but by his impressive accumulation of debts. In 1633 he ends up in prison in Antwerp, no one knows exactly why, most likely debt or tax evasion but brawling, political reasons, lewd acts or all of the above cannot be ruled out.
One thing marks Adriaen Brouwer out — and its not his criminal record — it is the exact same reason why his fellow artists, now long dead, would both gawk and marvel — as I do — at his paintings: discordant scenes with their street fighting genius, physicality, stark realities and fuck-you arrangements that would have classist golden ratio fetishists averting their eyes.
His isolated, faces or ‘tronies’, with painterly strokes echoing their pained expressions like cuffs to the chin. His figures are not posing, they are not dressed up; they are nobodies, drunk, asleep, saturated with booze or indolence, they are fighting, arguing, gambling or simply bored and yet painted with a paradox of vacant presence. Think of the best social documentary photography but instead captured with paint brushes in the 1600’s yet absent of any sense of compassion or sentimental framing inherent in the entirely separate modern medium.
Brouwer gives us: this is it and this is how it is. One could play ‘Raw Power’ by The Stooges alongside Brouwer’s paintings and it would not be out of place. He is drawn to the bleak and hopeless, giving us despair, so no one was interested in Brouwer in his short lifetime, he was dead at 34 apart from the artists, outsiders and rebels whom he hung out with.
Brouwer is that rare thing however and for good reason in that it was not just his fighting and drinking friends — other artists whom he did not know who happened across his raw genius — became addicted to it. Rembrandt collected every painting he could find of Brouwer and Rubens owned 17 of his works.
Today he is forgotten. The few paintings held by art institutes and museums are not on display — gathering dust in a vault or shoved up beside the foot fall entrance, veiled in a dark corner, forgotten or deliberately left in the naughty corner as if considered slightly offensive and ugly. Adriaen Brouwer is all of that but he is much much more.
It is true that Caravaggio was also a street fighting man and painter too and that Jean Genet prowled the streets at night defiantly wearing his foster mother’s make-up — street knowledge as their pedagogue — Adriaen Brouwer possessed both of their genius and his very distinct own.
