Word: millets
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...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, Cézanne, 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 cliché: The Angelus, in its tacky frame, on every parlor wall...
...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...
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...