Henry Miller published Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch in 1957. The book is unclassifiable, a collection of sketches about life on the California coast at Big Sur. Emerson and Thoreau’s influence looms over the book, although mostly unacknowledged. In large part, Miller uses the text to imagine an earthly paradise, or kind of libertarian utopia, centered around the community of anarchists, eccentrics, and artists living in the Big Sur wilderness. Expressing rage and disdain for American consumer values and conformism, Miller sets about to devise a solution to the dystopia that he perceives gripping the United States, the “air-conditioned nightmare” as he calls it in an earlier book. Following Emerson, Miller posits that we need to transcend our dysfunctional reality by imagining a beloved community, a place of generosity and kindness and neighborliness in which the arts flourish. Following Blake and Emerson, this project is construed as an endeavor of the imagination – we must imagine a new reality. For Miller, as for his forbears, the imagination is sovereign – what we imagine to be true and real becomes our truth and reality in a literal way. In this respect, Miller praises previous efforts to exercise “mind over matter”, particularly, the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy and the utopias at Nauvoo (Mormons and Icarians), Oneida (free love practitioners espousing “male continence), and the community at New Harmony, Indiana under the guidance of the radical industrialist, Robert Owens.
The emblem of this new reality is Hieronymus Bosch’s large triptych (now in the Prado) that has been called “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. No one knows what the painting was originally called. The provenance of the picture is obscure and gruesome. It seems to have been commissioned for a Wunderkabinett owned by Henry the Third, the Duke of Nassau (a province of the Netherlands with its principal town at Breda) that was likely painted around 1500 – the wood on which the oil painting was made has been dated by dendrochronology to between 1460 and 1464. There is a surmise that Engelbert II of Nassau, Henry’s syphilitic uncle, was the actual party of who commissioned the triptych. The first mention of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” appears in 1517 in a traveler’s diary. The Duke of Nassau kept the painting in his Wunderkabinett among other curiosities. Henry was a bon vivant – he had a huge bed made for his castle. When his guests drank themselves into a stupor, they were unceremoniously flung into the bed to sleep it off. After Henry’s death, the painting was inherited by William of Orange. The sadistic Duke of Alba, entrusted with maintaining Spanish hegemony over the Low Countries, was aware of the painting and coveted it. He demanded that William of Orange, who was Protestant, surrender the triptych to him. When William refused, the Duke of Alba mounted a genocidal war against the Protestant provinces in the Netherlands, a conflict that lasted seven years, and resulted in the division between Catholic Flanders (now Belgium) and the Protestant Netherlands. Alba ended up with the painting after some gory episodes including the 18 month torture of one of William of Orange’s concierges responsible for protecting the picture. The painting was shipped to Spain where it fell into the possession of King Phillip II. The picture remained in Phillip’s palace, the Escorial (a structure modeled by the pious King off the grid-iron on which St. Andrew was roasted) from 1592 to 1939. The picture was, then, installed at the Prado Museum where it remains to this day with other works by Bosch. The Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, to whom we will refer later, saw the painting in the Escorial. Schmitt was involved in diplomatic and legal negotiations with Generalissimo Franco – Schmitt’s good friend, the art historian Wilhelm Fraenger, asked him to serve as “his eyes” when he inspected the painting and wrote a description for Fraenger’s benefit.
No one has successfully deciphered the painting’s central triptych, the famous “Garden of Earthly Delights”. Efforts at understanding this enigmatic part of the picture are part of the triptych’s history and, in recent months, the picture is once again a cause celebre, due, in large part, to an anti-Fascist (and anti-Trump) book written by the eminent art historian Joseph Leo Koerner. But more about this anon.
Henry Miller takes the central panel of the triptych as an emblem for the sort of earthly paradise that he imagined to exist at Big Sur. (Interpretations of this sort ignore the left panel that shows the Garden of Eden, mysteriously full of predatory beasts, and the right part of the triptych, a horrific and spectacular vision of Hell, the so-called “Hell of the Musical Instruments” in which sinners are tormented by an army of demons and crucified on harps and lutes while reptile monsters carry a monstrous fleshy bagpipe through the flames and a choir sings from musical notes transcribed on the naked buttocks of one of the damned.) Miller derives his interpretation from a book by Wilhelm Fraenger printed in Germany in 1947 (and translated into English in 1951). Fraenger’s treatise is referenced in the preface to Big Sur (at page x) and, then, cited, at length, at page 22 of the section of Miller’s book that he names “The Oranges of the Millennium”. Curiously, there are no oranges depicted in “The Garden of Earthly Delights” and Miller’s reference to that fruit is a misnomer. In the central panel, naked men and women feed one another red and blue berries (and are fed berries by giant songbirds) and several figures whirl about dancing orgiastically under a huge strawberry. At the Escorial, the painting was called la Madrona, referring to a “strawberry tree” that grows in Spain – but this is also a misnomer, the fruit of that tree is bitter, no one can eat more than one berry; the fruit just resembles strawberries but tastes nothing like them. Miller seems to be referring to an orange tree that appears as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in another triptych painting by Bosch, “The Last Judgement” – in that image, Eve accepts an orange proffered to her by the Serpent wound around the trunk of the tree. Miller uses a peculiar verb to describe the orange fruit on the tree – he says the tree is “diapered” with oranges. This verb is consistent with Miller’s interest in children, particularly babies in his own family, evidenced in Big Sur. (There are no children, except some underage girls who are statutory rape victims, in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer – by contrast, there are many children mentioned in Big Sur and, in fact, the author is involved in a custody battle in that book.) In one episode in Big Sur, Miller walks from the post-office several miles in the rain lugging various things, including diapers for the infants at his cabin.
Miller again quotes Fraenger later in the book, in the long central passage that he calls “Peace and Solitude: a Potpourri”. In that text, Miller equates his neighbors at Big Sur with the hundreds of naked figures cavorting in the central panel of the painting – these figures, Fraenger says, are ‘vegetal’, rooted in the green earth, and they embrace like ‘tendrils.’ In both Tropic of Cancer and Big Sur, Miller maintains that every heaven (Big Sur) contains a hell and that the inferno (Paris in Tropic of Cancer) insulates a heaven of creativity and liberation. Big Sur, like all landscapes, is what the mind makes of it. Miller chooses to make Big Sur into a heaven, a paradise of creativity and loving kindness although with diabolical aspects – these are developed in the long penultimate section of the book involving Conrad Moricand, a pornographer, occultist, and astrologer, who comes to live with Miller as “the Devil in Paradise.” Ultimately, Miller expels the noxious Moricand from paradise and Big Sur, again, is perceived as a place of peaceful prayer and blessings.
Fraenger’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the central panel in Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” has been refuted by the iconologist Erwin Panofsky and the German art historian Hans Belting. Panofsky interprets the image as showing antediluvian man, the kingdom of lust and violence that arose after Adam and Eve had populated the world. This is the kingdom of human depravity that God punished be sending a flood to wipe out the sinful generations. At Genesis 6:11, the Bible says that the world’s people were “corrupt” and “filled with violence”, a stain on the earth that God cleansed by flooding them into oblivion. The problem with Panofsky’s interpretation is that there is no violence depicted in the lustful antics of the pale male and female figures in Garden. So Panofsky’s analysis is ultimately unpersuasive. Around 2008, Hans Belting, the leading German art historian, argued that the central panel of “The Garden” represented a sort of subjunctive thought experiment, a philosophie als ob (a “philosophy as if”–). Belting points out that garden with its four rivers flowing through a strange landscape, part mineral and part vegetable, seems to derive from the description of the the garden “east of Eden” – the place where human desire, uncorrupted by sin, might flourish. Citing the second book of Genesis, Belting speculates that Bosch was attempting to show what paradise would have been like if man had not fallen. In this respect, he observes that Bosch would have known the garden “east of Eden” as described by the Latin vulgate as paradies voluptus – that is, a “paradise of pleasure” as set forth in Genesis 2. It is this paradise, a state that never actually existed, that Bosch paints in the central panel of the triptych. (The phrase “east of Eden”, of course, was used by John Steinbeck as the title to one of his novels, the last section of which was adapted into a famous motion picture. “East of Eden” in novel and film refers to the coastline around Monterey, California – Monterey, or the village to its south, Carmel, is said to be at the northern border of the coastal region named “Big Sur” which extends south to San Simeon.)
Both Panofsky and Belting reject Fraenger’s interpretation of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” as set forth in his book inauspiciously titled Das Tausendjaehrige Reich (The Thousand Year Reich) which echoes the Nazi phrase for the regime founded by Hitler. Fraenger wrote the book in Berlin in 1944 when the city was under nightly bombardment. Fraenger was a renowned art historian. In the twenties, he wrote a book deciphering the peasant proverbs that form the subject of one of Brueghel’s most famous paintings “The Blue Coat” also known as “Netherlandish Proverbs” from 1659. Not only an expert in the art of the Low Countries, particularly Bosch and Brueghel, Fraenger had championed Max Beckmann’s politically oriented work during the period of the twenties, the so-called “New Objectivity” (or Neue Sachlichkeit). He was one of Germany’s most prominent scholars and a formidable prose stylist in his own right – he is influenced by Nietzsche’s writing.
Fraenger argued that the triptych was a religious icon used in the rites of a heretical sect called “the Adamites” or the “New Brethren of the Spirit.” This sect, according to Fraenger, flourished around 1500. The “Adamites” sought to recover the lost paradise in which Adam and Eve lived, a world without sin or corruption. In order to accomplish this renovation of reality, they engaged in free love – that is orgiastic rites involving group sex. Their doctrine was that Adam and Eve copulated without the stain of original sin in Paradise. Therefore, Paradise on Earth could be restored by engaging in sacramental sex in group orgies that rejected all notions that sex and desire were in any way sinful or the cause of human corruption. Because the “Adamites” believed themselves to be saved by Faith – they were a Protestant sect – nothing that they did could result in their damnation. Accordingly, they were free to resurrect paradise by engaging in sexual license – by imitating Adam and Eve copulating in the Garden of Eden, they sought to turn the world in paradise. The “Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych, thus, was an icon that was unveiled over their communal orgies. It is easy to see why Henry Miller, an apostle of sex without guilt or shame, found Fraenger’s ideas congenial and appealing. Hence, the citation of Fraenger’s theories in Big Sur and the reference to the “oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.”
Fraenger’s hypothesis faced several obvious objections. The first was that the Hell panel is immediately to the right of the scenes in garden – in Bosch’s iconography, his paintings are read left to right; this means that the torments of Hell follow upon, and seem consequent to, the pleasures of the flesh shown in the central part of the picture. (Bosch’s celebrated work “The Hay Wain” clearly models this pattern – the hay wain or wagon, emblematic of greed, covetousness, and the pleasures of the flesh seen in the picture’s central panel is dragged by demons quite literally into the third or right-hand part of the triptych, another gory depiction of Hell.) Fraenger engaged in contorted arguments that didn’t persuade anyone, even himself it seems, to explain away the hell panel in “The Garden”. The second, and more serious obstacle to accepting Fraenger’s thesis is that there is absolutely no evidence that a heretical sect of sex-cult Lutherans ever existed. Simply stated, the only evidence for the existence of the Adamite sect is “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, it’s sole surviving artifact. Fraenger explained the absence of any historical record as to the existence of the Adamites as a consequence of the inquisition and the heretical aspect of the cult’s beliefs: of course, we find no evidence of these people and their sex-cult – they could survive only in hiding and their practices were occult or underground. The breathtaking tautological character of Fraenger’s reasoning is obvious: we know the Adamites existed because they worshiped under the banner of Bosch’s bizarre “Garden of Earthly Delights” – the sole proof that they ever walked the earth. But, conversely, the only way we can understand and properly interpret Bosch’s painting is in light of the existence of the Adamites something proven by the painting’s iconography. This would be laughable if not also tragic. Under bombardment, Fraenger proposed a paradise of freedom and love as different from the brutal and oppressive Nazi regime as could be imagined. To Fraenger, Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” proved the existence of a counter-force, an agency of resistence impelled by love, sex, and physical desire, that would ultimately defeat the inhuman Nazis. Miller and Fraenger both interpreted “The Garden of Earthly Delights” as establishing the program for a new post-War world that would be humane, liberal, and peaceful.
This story has an epilogue that casts a light on our present political plight under the second Trump administration.
Joseph Leo Koerner is an art historian, born in Vienna (his father was a prominent Austrian artist), but educated at Yale. He became well-known in art-historical circles for this trilogy of books on German painters: The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (about Duerer and Hans Baldung Grien), Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, and The Reformation of the Image (about Lucas Cranach and the Protestant Reformation). Koerner teaches at Harvard and has been a presenter for the BBC on documentary series on Vienna and the painters of the Northern Renaissance. (He has also made a feature film called The Burning Child).
In 2016, Koerner published a big book on Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel. This book has a suggestive subtitle “From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life.” Koerner has written extensively about contemporary art and knows the South African artist William Kentridge whom he regards as an important figure. Conversations with Kentridge led Koerner to the concept of “Enemy Painting”. By “enemy painting”, Koerner means art that is made from a position of enmity toward what is represented. Koerner’s understanding of Bosch and Brueghel is that these artists originated in a culture in which people imagined themselves under attack by hostile, even, demonic forces. (The best way to understand “enemy painting” in my view is by what it is not – Impressionism, for instance, is a style of art that doesn’t adopt a hostile stance toward what it depicts; it’s not pro or con. Seurat, for instance, or, for that matter Turner, shows the equipment of modern life – that is, aqueducts, smoke stacks, and locomotives – but doesn’t view these artifacts with hostility.) Bosch and Brueghel understand humanity to be embattled – the devil and his demonic minions are besieging us. Human beings are turned against themselves by the forces of sin and corruption – every individual is embattled, a person struggling through life in a condition of conflict. In Koerner’s view, Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” is weapon of war – it’s an instrument depicting temptation and the consequences of temptation; the painting takes a stance, warning us against what it depicts. This is a far-cry from Wilhelm Fraenger’s approach to the image (as endorsed by Henry Miller) in which the content of the painting isn’t viewed with hostility but, rather, as evidence of human potential, utopian possibilities that inhere in each of us.
Koerner’s most recent book, published in February 2025, is called Art in a State of Siege. This book is a highly personal essay considering Hieronymus Bosch (and “The Garden of Earthly Delights”) in the context of Max Beckmann and William Kentridge’s work. In Koerner’s analysis, Beckmann and Kentridge are also “enemy painters”; their images are not “innocent” but take a stance pro or con toward what they depict. A remarkable aspect of this book, and Koerner’s lectures (on You-Tube) delivered in its context, is his engagement with the thought of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi lawyer and professor of jurisprudence. Koerner views Carl Schmitt as a precursor to Trump’s authoritarian assault on the rule of law.
Schmitt (1888 - 1985) was a professor of jurisprudence and political philosophy. He became an enthusiastic Nazi in 1933, justifying the murders committed by the SS in the so-called “night of the long knives.” Schmitt’s theory was that politics is governed by the distinction between friend and foe. This means that political action revolves around defining someone or some class of people as enemies. The definition of the enemy, by contrast, determines who will be friend or ally. The law is secreted in the conflict between friend and foe – that is, jurisprudence is a bulwark by which allies and friends defend themselves against their enemies. A foundational state of violence establishes enmity from which law arises to govern how people interact with their friends to defend their community against the enemy. (Schmitt follows Hobbes in this respect.) Ordinarily, law arises from political debate, legislation, persuasion, and consensus. But periodically emergencies arise, the so-called Aufnahmezustand (“condition of exception” or “state of emergency”). The “state of emergency” can be characterized as an exceptional and threatening incident or enemy incursion that requires the executive to declare a “state of siege.” In a “state of siege” arising from the Aufnahmezustand (“state of exception”), the executive has absolute power and can suspend constitutional and legal protections. An enemy attack, therefore, means that the “unitary executive” has the power to save the State by declaring a ‘state of exception’ – that is, by decreeing that ordinary constitutional principles are not applicable. In Germany, the constitution was never formally abolished by the National Socialists – it was simply suspended after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and, then, the “state of emergency” was renewed every four years by Hitler until the “Thousand Year Reich” perished in fire and ash. President George W. Bush, in effect, declared an Aufnahmezustand after the 9 - 11 attacks; he developed a zone of exception where constitutional prohibitions against imprisonment without due process of law or torture didn’t apply – this was the internment camp at Guantanamo Bay where alleged terrorists were detained without any of the protections of law afforded by the Constitution. (Previous American states of siege or exception involved the Japanese-American interment in concentration camps during World War II and the detention of American citizens of German ethnicity during World War I.) The analogy to Trump’s autocratic assault on constitutional rights is evident and derives explicitly from Schmitt’s jurisprudential theory. Venezuelan gangs, supposedly, have invaded our country; the problem at the southern border constitutes a “state of siege”. Therefore, the executive has the power to “save the country” by declaring an Aufnahmezustand that suspends the operation of the Constitution and its application to the “enemies” declared to be invading our country. Kristi Noem goes before Congress and argues for suspension of habeas corpus (although she doesn’t know what the phrase means); people are detained in foreign torture-prisons without due process of law. “He who saves his country commits no crime,” as Trump has publicly argued. These concepts, and the rationale for them, originate in Schmitt’s legal philosophy, a body of thought that is being invoked repeatedly even as I write these words.
When Berlin was under bombardment in 1944, Schmitt returned from Paris where he had been presiding over a round table of right-wing artists and collaborators including Jean Cocteau and Ernst Juenger. Schmitt’s closest friend was Wilhelm Fraenger. As Berlin burned around them, Schmitt and Fraenger escaped into discussions of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, including “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Fraenger maintained that Bosch’s painting depicted a state of grace, an ideal anarchist political order in which everyone loved everyone else and from which the idea of the enemy had been vanquished. Schmitt saw the picture from an exactly opposite perspective – to him, the central panel in the triptych signified temptation, an aspect of liberal society that is immensely appealing and, therefore, immensely dangerous. The dream of free love expressed by Bosch in the triptych represents a lost paradise to which all people aspire, but one that is corrupting and destructive.
After the war, Schmitt was confined in an internment camp, awaiting a tribunal’s decision as to whether he should be “denazified”– that is, forgiven for his involvement with Hitler’s homicidal regime. Schmitt refused to apologize and was unrepentant. He was confined for a time at Nuremberg and threatened with trial. During this time, Schmitt corresponded extensively with his old friend, Wilhelm Fraenger. He asked Fraenger to secure a large reproduction of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” which he posted on the wall of his cell. Upon his release, Schmitt was barred from teaching anywhere in Germany. In 1962, he went to Spain and delivered a series of lectures on politics and the law supporting the Franco regime. He returned to Germany and lived in Plettenburg in Westphalia where he continued to correspond with (and receive visits from) Ernst Juenger and the great student of Hegel, Alexander Kojeve.
Koerner’s book Art in a State of Siege addresses how artists might respond to an authoritarian regime. Bosch and Brueghel’s paintings were responses to the power and authority of the Catholic (and Lutheran) churches. Max Beckmann spent the last half of his life opposing the Nazi regime which had declared his work Entartete or “degenerate”. William Kentridge’s practice arose initially in the “state of emergency” declared by the Republic of South Africa when it was under international attack for its policies of legal apartheid. Koerner gave one of his first lectures on Bosch and Brueghel in 2009 at Harvard on the day that President Obama was inaugurated. Koerner said that, thankfully, the idea of art in a state of siege (Aufnahmezustand) would become obsolescent and he could move on to studying happier subjects. But history ambushed him. He delivered the A. W. Mellon lectures in 2016 with the Trump presidency looming and spoke at length about Carl Schmitt, Fraenger, and Bosch. He has said that he regards his most recent book as his duty, as a task that is an obligatory gesture of resistance based on Trump’s declaration that we now live under a perpetual “state of exception.”
May 20, 2025
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