A Great Lost Painter

By ROBERT HUGHES

For M. Millet, art is slavish copying of nature. He lights his lantern and goes looking for cretins. . .imagine a monster with no skull, the eye extinguished by an idiot's squint, straddling in the middle of a field like a scarecrow. No spark of intelligence humanizes this resting brute. Has he been working or murdering?

So ran one Paris critic's response to Jean Franc,ois Millet's Man with a Hoe at the Salon of 1863. And how the Second Empire's fear of the collective poor is distilled in the last six words! Proletarian labor, as a subject for art, was the invention of the 19th century; for that, the country-bred Millet was largely responsible. Other paintings of his met similar critical obloquies: The Gleaners, 1857, "have enormous pretensions--they pose like the three fates of pauperdom." The Sower, 1850, was greeted by one conservative as an insult to the dignity of work: "I regret that M. Millet so calumniates the sower," he wrote, disturbed by that faceless and inexplicably menacing colossus striding down the dark hill.

Yet before the century ended, these paintings, together with Millet's Angelus, had become the most popular works of art in the new age of mass production, disseminated by millions of engravings, postcards, knickknacks and parodies. The Sower became the Mona Lisa of socialism, but it served capitalism equally well as the corporate emblem of its owners, the Provident National Bank in Philadelphia.

After the boom, slump. Millet had died in 1875, having greatly influenced Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat, blue-period Picasso and especially Vincent Van Gogh. Later, modernism lost interest in images of rural labor; they were derided as sentimental masscult. Millet sank from view, leaving behind one obdurate cliche: The Angelus, in its tacky frame, on every parlor wall.

The Millet centenary exhibition, which began at the Grand Palais in Paris and is now at London's Hayward Gallery, is a remarkable event. It consists of 147 paintings, drawings and pastels, catalogued with bracing intelligence by Yale Art Historian Robert Herbert, who gives us one of the best readings of a 19th century artist to appear in a decade. What Herbert achieves is the restoration of a great lost painter whose images are central to any understanding of radical culture in France.

Millet was what Gustave Courbet pretended to be: the son of peasants. Born in 1814, he spent most of his life in rural France. He was able to perceive the land and the labor it exacted from men as substance and process, not as a sight for a city-dwelling impressionist on an outing. Millet's The Plain of Chailly, 1862, was unlike virtually every previous landscape in Western art. It is neither a bird's-eye "world view" in the fashion of Bruegel nor a meditation on cosmic energy as in Turner. It is not "romantic." Especially, it is not a vision of property, such as Rubens painted. What it offers is a numbing pressure of material substance. The plain stretches away under the winter sky, its bleak horizontality interrupted only by crows, harrow and a plow. Nothing could be less picturesque.

This is landscape as seen by those who cannot escape, who must work on it. Such people were not rococo milkmaids. They were the rural lumpen proletariat, the rooted, shapeless mass brutalized by the agrarian disasters of the '40s and '50s. Millet was the first artist to make peasants a subject instead of an accessory. His paintings are an encyclopedia of work: digging, hoeing, planting potatoes, spreading manure.

The peasants are large. They fill the foreground. They make it uncomfortable to be the traditional audience of salon painting, the middle-class observer. They are also deliberately iconic. Herbert points out that in Millet's Going to Work, 1850, the young peasant couple striding through the fields is based on Masaccio's fresco of Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden and condemned to labor. This resonance is deepened by the potato basket on the wife's head and by the thong she carries like the attribute of a martyr.

Millet sought an enduring and stoic language based on large shapes, resolute drawing, deep tonal contrasts. The result was a classical gravity, "a Homeric idyll, in patois," as one admirer put it. From such an angle, the decorative side of impressionism would have seemed pointless, and perhaps it is only as the taste for pretties like Renoir recedes that Millet's achievement becomes once more apparent.

Reality Grasped. Millet's sympathies were republican. His whole conception of peasant realism was in tune with, and fortified by, the political experiences of 1848: to grasp plebeian reality was to engage in a revolutionary act. But he was no militant. As Herbert is careful to show, Millet's imagination was fatalistic and conservative: the peasants, in his view, could never escape their cycle of toil but were bound like weary oxen to the mill of earth and seasons. That was the root experience of his own peasant childhood.

Millet was an artist, not a propagandist; his depth of feeling was as unquestionable as his lack of egotism. "I will swear to you," he wrote to a friend in 1851, "at the risk of seeming even more of a socialist, that it is the human side that touches me most . . . and it is never the joyous side that shows itself to me: I don't know where it is. I have never seen it."

Robert Hughes

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