My favourite room

The vast marble staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is meant to put you off. Just the scale of it is intimidating. But it leads to some of the most wonderfully proportioned galleries I know, filled with the works that draw you into a magical world. It could take a lifetime to look at one room properly.

I got to know the Kunsthistorisches when I had an exhibition there in 2008. It was quite a moment, having my paintings on show there, as it’s one of the great museums for historical art, and, at the time, they didn’t really display any contemporary works. However, it was only during the second month of my exhibition that I felt I knew my way round the museum. I completely fell in love with it. There was one room in particular – Gallery 10 with the Bruegels – that I went to again and again.

You will find examples of Bruegel’s work in the Met or the National Gallery. But the only place in the world where you’ll see pretty much all of his major compositions is here – and the really good versions of them as well, because they do vary and some are more intense than others. Of the two versions of The Tower of Babel, the one in the Kunsthistorisches is the best.

I have always found the story of God destroying the tower so strange. I think he was quite vindictive to punish the workers because they were all getting along so well, speaking the same language. Not only is Bruegel wonderful at telling stories – there are lots of enjoyable little details such as men lifting masonry up on pulleys – but nobody had represented Babel quite like that before. Because the Bible doesn’t describe the tower, Bruegel has licence to create a mound, a sculptural shape that represents the mass of language. The way your eye moves around the colours, shapes and abstract dimensions of the painting is masterly as well.

There’s a sense of madness in the work. He’s not trying to represent the world as it was – the perspective is all skewed. He’s tilting the whole structure, anticipating its collapse. There are a lot of lessons to learn from the work. But his use of colour, and the way that colour is dispersed around the painting is extraordinary. The little spots of red and blue let your eyes flick around the painting as if it’s a pinball machine, with your pupils bouncing around these colours and little shapes. As a result of being immersed in the Kunsthistorisches, my work was probably pushed back a few decades, if not centuries. I started out using contemporary art, looking at artists such as Frank Auerbach and Karel Appel, then Impressionist work by Renoir and Cézanne. But, after my exhibition, Velázquez and Rubens came to the forefront of my mind. It created a deeper sense of that history of art for me. Bruegel was among many artists that were collected in great detail for the Kunsthistorisches. That’s why it’s a wonderful room, in a wonderful museum, in a wonderful city. It just doesn’t get better.

The Bruegels are in Gallery 10 of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (Neue Burg Heldenplatz, 1010 Wien). khm.at/en/

Glenn Brown’s exhibition ‘We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent’ is at Gagosian New York (541 West 24th Street; gagosian.com) until 23 December.