POWERFUL PORTRAITS
Smith, Karen Sue
9 August 1985: 437 Art POWERFUL PORTRAITS MILLET'S VISION OF WOMEN AT WORK THEY ARE swathed in silence, Millet's women. And the silence that surrounds those country peasants is as appropriate to...
...Millet's art bears no reference to the segmentation of women, men — and for many years, children — into separate labor forces within the industrial workplace, nor does it refer to the problems this created and which contemporary workers have inherited...
...Instead, Millet's visual presentation of rural life evokes stability, integrated routines, and an environment of rustic beauty...
...I reflected upon how important physical strength has become for many women today, and of our efforts to regain it...
...The importance of Millet's presentation of the rural woman worker stems in part from the fact that the agrarian society which he detailed predated the breakup of the household as the primary working unit for both women and men...
...Millet insisted on this one anachronism although railroads had already begun to link major European cities, and Brooklyn Bridge was under construction on the other side of the Atlantic...
...In this world the work of women and men was of a piece, equally necessary and accomplished together for one overall purpose: to see the crop through its cycle...
...But in the etching of The Gleaners, and the subsequent painting, Millet distanced the three women from the employed workers and thereby presented them as destitute scavengers...
...And the hands, so crucial to Millet's peasants at work, lie in her lap upturned and idle...
...Similarly received, The Faggot Gatherers is a brittle presentation in which the women's bodies are drawn with the same vertical lines which make up their wooden burdens, and which compose a bleak winter background of leafless, seemingly lifeless tree trunks...
...Curiously, to present the dignity of the laborer and the nobility of work, Millet insisted upon picturing primitive hand tools...
...Taken as a Commonweal: 43$ whole, the images of women workers reveal physical strength, a profound lack of sensuality, and serenity in solitude...
...He calls Millet a revolutionary and describes his work not as "naturalism" but as "social realism...
...babies sleep beside working parents...
...Particularly against the negative portrayal of women in so much advertising, Millet's women embody a beauty seldom held up to the public...
...During his own lifetime, Millet's work was accepted or rejected on the basis of several differing ideologies...
...Women lug huge piles of faggots on their shoulders at sunset and baskets of wash by moonlight...
...The loveliness of Millet's women clearly does not depend upon it...
...Kenneth Clark takes a different view...
...What might Millet's image of the working woman in serene repose teach women who labor today and who are seldom swathed in silence...
...While I have no quarrel with sensuality, either in life or in art, I found refreshing the absence of the sensual dimension...
...The woman is more mythically represented than portraiture would allow...
...Finally, a long look at Young Shepherdess Seated, one of the largest canvasses Millet painted, illustrates not an exhausted rest, but a serene repose...
...Was his choice of peasant as subject part of his own progressive politics—as the work of his contemporary, Gustave Courbet, explicitly was, and as liberal defenders of Millet have suggested...
...Or did Millet's themes illustrate a conservative retreat from the turbulence of revolution, political as well as industrial, to the memories of his own secure boyhood...
...Nineteenth-century critics as well as contemporary ones are divided...
...they slouch over mending by candle light...
...most of the figures presented in the collection from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (a significant portion of it shown at the IBM Gallery in New York City, June 11-July 27) are solitary...
...Hear the slurps of water and the beat of goose wings flapping on the embankment overhead...
...Aristocrats, distressed by the social malaise, as well as disillusioned peasants who had left the fields for the factories, longed to preserve a lifestyle increasingly jeopardized by mechanization, urbanization, and the destabilization of revolution...
...Strength is part of our heritage, developed naturally by women who churned butter and harvested hay, but lost by modern sedentary living...
...The woman, standing close enough to the animal to form one large triangular shape, silently extends the reins as night falls...
...the population doubled within thirty years...
...Millet's women workers are models of feminine strength...
...Alone, they are positioned in direct relation to nature...
...While Millet painted his quiet scenes in Barbizon in the summer of 1849, the Industrial Revolution banged and bellowed its way into France, irreversibly altering the landscape...
...Conservatives attacked the bitterness of the composition...
...Did Millet consciously choose to elevate the peasants to the status of memorialization in art...
...The Gleaners and The Faggot Gatherers, for example, show women brutalized by labor, just as Man with a Hoe and The Vineyard Worker present men as victims of work...
...Members of the latter group were attracted to the sheer beauty of Millet's portrayal of rural life, despite the poverty and harshness of his depiction of nature...
...In Woman Watering her Cow, Evening, a woman's wooden clogs suck against the mud as she leads her cow to a stream...
...Art historian William Fleming describes the phenomenon of naturalism as a retreat back to nature...
...Millet's women are subjects...
...Peasants swarmed into Paris...
...The liberals found this to be a scathing commentary on current laws restricting the rights of gleaners...
...They do not even exude the sensuality often found in art...
...An exhausted couple stretches out in the hay of harvest in Noonday Rest, an action which completes the relentless pattern of nature: work, work, work, rest...
...Under the influence of Dutch mannerists, MilleJ presents women teaching children to sew, knit, and read...
...For example, advocates of self-government (as opposed to monarchy or theocracy) recognized that their position depended upon establishing the nobility of "the people...
...Women-alone, in pairs, and alongside men—plant potatoes, harvest buckwheat, shear sheep, card and spin wool, knit, fill water jugs, feed children and animals...
...The value of labor seemed to require for Millet the sweat of the laborer's brow, virtually unaided by modern technology...
...and many paintings focus solely on the land itself...
...it crawls, almost slinks, as peasants toil steadily from the first rosy hint of sunrise...
...And the silence that surrounds those country peasants is as appropriate to them as is the music-hall bombast that animates Toulouse-Lautrec's women of the night...
...The sun does not march in Millet's pastorale...
...In the pastoral landscape of Normandy, the birthplace and childhood home of Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), a hush permeates the rocky hills, the flat fields, and those who live there...
...They do not appear as objects, and hence, never as sex objects...
...When I first saw the Millet exhibition in Boston, I was struck not only by the quiet beauty and powerful simplicity of the workers, but by the number—over half of the total collection—of portrayals of women at work...
...and economic crisis worsened...
...KAREN SUE SMITH...
...In early studies of the harvest, Millet positioned three women, stooping to collect straw, close to a group of other harvesters reaping the summer crop...
...Millet's sensibility requires the viewer to pause, to look, and to hear quiet sounds...
...That segment of the population which lived in cities and dreamed of an idyllic country life they had no intention of living . . . hung . . . peasant scenes by Millet on the walls of their apartments...
...They saw in Millet's work the human face of poor laborers, and consequently interpreted his art as a form of social criticism...
...Yet they are consistently, unmistakably beautiful...
...Painted in a somewhat classical style, face toward the front, features muted, the woman sits on a mound above the surrounding landscape, a dark figure against the glow of light coming from behind...
...It is only natural that the spoken word is spare...
...While this description may explain the popularity of Millet's work (at least in the later years), and the number of purchases of his work by Bostonians immersed in the ideals of Emerson, it can scarcely explain the phenomenon itself...
...But those aristocrats who were in a position to judge art rejected the more disturbing portrayals of suffering workers...
...He painted a young woman {Standing Spinner) at her spinning wheel, a machine which had long been obsolete...
...Mutely, the sun and moon keep time...
Vol. 112 • August 1985 • No. 14
