PUBLIC FAVORITES (6)

Detroit's Institute of Arts is one of the nation's biggest and best museums. Its Italian Renaissance building (of Vermont marble) covers a city block, and holds treasures ranging from an Assyrian bas-relief to a mural by Diego Rivera. The public's favorite painting is Pieter Bruegel the Elder's big, brash The Wedding Dance.

For three centuries after his death Bruegel was considered a vulgarian and a boor, almost beneath the notice of refined art lovers. He painted the world around 16th Century Antwerp just as he saw it, with a sharp reporter's eye for detail. He drew with the assurance (though not the delicacy) of DUerer, and the informal air of his most complex pictures conceals a master-composer's iron hand. Love of life--the smooth along with the rough--was the driving force in his work; he scorned artiness and sentimentality.

Bruegel's earthy realism has found a not-so-earthy reflection in contemporary U.S. art. Genre painters and magazine illustrators have learned from him, and to such realists as Andrew Wyeth and Henry Koerner he is the greatest of old masters.

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