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Art in Japan>European Art 1500-1930>The Dignity of Humble People: Jean-Francois Millet and Naturalism in Europe Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. The Dignity of Humble People: Jean-Francois Millet and Naturalism in Europeby John McGee  Jean-Francois Millet, The
Shepherdess, Salon of 1864, oil on canvas, Many visitors to the Musée d'Orsay rush right past the brown and gold paintings of the Naturalists en route to the purples and blues of Monet. This tightly conceived exhibition at Bunkamura, jointly produced with the Paris-based Orsay, shows what they're missing. Seventy works by artists like Courbet, Millet, van Gogh and Picasso track how the seeds of Naturalism sprouted in the fields of France and drifted throughout Europe in the second half of the 19th century. The Naturalists were based mainly in the French town of Barbizon. Like Gustave Courbet and other Realists, they tried to depict the world around them without the overt idealization or sentimentality of the Romantics. Jean-Francois Millet (1814-75) is the name-brand draw in this show with eleven of his soft-focus paintings (seven from the Orsay), several large pastels, and a string of small pencil and ink sketches. "The human side of art is what touches me most," Millet wrote. And while his Barbizon colleagues focused on landscape, Millet documented the daily toil of peasants. In The Gleaners (1857), perhaps his most famous work, three rag-shrouded women stoop to scratch the last bits of straw from a well-picked field. A larger group works in the background, watched over by a man on a horse. In The Shepherdess (1864), a girl loses herself in her knitting while her flock munches turf behind her. In other paintings, a boy in a straw hat sits on an embankment spinning wool and a woman balances a huge milk jug on her shoulder as she walks down a narrow footpath. 
Vincent van Gogh, Peasant Digging The aristocracy disliked Millet's common folk, branding him a socialist revolutionary. But other artists sided with Millet: virtually every painting in this show is an in situ portrait of a peasant. Seen together, they create an anthropological study of mid-to-late 19th century rural people akin to the typologies of workers August Sanders photographed years later. Jules Breton (1827-1906) took archetyping to an extreme, turning tenant farming into epic poetry. In his two large canvases in this show, fecund farmlands serve as the backdrop for monumental, almost classical groupings of figures. In The Return of the Gleaners (1859), for example, women hoisting sheaves of ripe grains in the graying light seem to walk from the autumn fields straight into a Greek marble frieze. Another Frenchman, Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-84), brought his subjects down to earth, individualizing them, often as a lone person staring out from the picture. In Little Girl Going to School (1882), he stops a blue-eyed tyke in the dirt streets of a small town. Naturalist-influenced paintings from Hungary, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe take this exhibition out of familiar territory. Finnish artist Eero Jarnefelt's Under the Yoke (Burning the Brushwood) (1893) is perhaps the most haunting image in the show. In it, the ash-blackened eyes of a tattered young girl stare out from the smoke and embers of a smoldering forest clearing.
Eero Jarnefelt, Under the Yoke (Burning the
Brushwood), 1893, oil on canvas, Throughout Europe, the Naturalists and their followers preserved the bent backs of agrarian society just as they were beginning to be replaced by the steam engine of the Industrial Revolution. Their legacy is art made by observing the world directly, an art of the everyday rather than the rarefied. This led directly to the plein-air paintings of the Impressionists. And, most significantly, it laid the foundations of 20th-century modernism. _______________________________________This exhibition was held May-July 2003 at Bunkamura Museum of Art, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. ©2006 John McGee |
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