Like Van Gogh, he painted starry nights. Like Monet, he painted haystacks. And like Dalí — well, let’s come back to this one. (A hint: A praying peasant later takes on an ominous air.)
Jean-François Millet’s skies, haystacks and laborers were created first, yet the other artists are now better promoted and loved.
“Many people don’t know him,” says Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ƶ Art Museum.
But Millet influenced artists across Europe and even in America and Russia, Kelly says. Van Gogh once called him “the essential modern painter who opened the horizon to many.”
“ begins Sunday at the art museum and runs through May 17.
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Museumgoers will likely recognize some of Millet’s iconic images of humble French workers sowing seeds, harvesting wheat or spinning wool. And with the big exhibition of more than 100 works, including 47 by Millet and 12 by Van Gogh, they’ll see Millet’s influence from the mid-19th century into the 20th.
“We have some amazing loans in this show,” Kelly says.
Among highlights:
Millet’s “The Sower” and “Summer, the Gleaners” • The field workers were portrayed more than once by Millet and copied and re-imaged by many later artists. Although the paintings may not seem controversial now, critics sometimes compared him to a socialist.
Millet’s “The Angelus” • On loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the painting of two praying peasants set a sales record for a modern painting when in 1889 it went for 553,000 francs. Later, copies hung in Catholic schools across France.
Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” • It’s not the Dutch artist’s most famous night sky, whose enormous, whirling stars hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But this calmer yellow and blue scene, with lights reflected in the river, is also achingly beautiful.
Edvard Munch’s “Fertility” • The Norwegian painter of “The Scream” shows the “Angelus” pair not praying, but still peaceful in a vivid field under a bountiful tree.
Many of the paintings have never been in Ƶ before.
The exhibition has been almost a decade in the making, springing from a session Kelly co-chaired at the 2010 College Art Association conference. He developed the exhibition with Maite van Dijk, senior curator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the exhibition opened last year.
Kelly and van Dijk say in the introduction to the show’s catalog that Millet’s work “impacted later artists for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from its inventive compositions and use of color to its perceived spiritual or political content. By the late nineteenth century, Millet was arguably the best-known modern artist in the world.”
The “perceived spiritual or political content” is intriguing because to a 21st-century eye, the rural scenes of fields and laborers look anything but controversial.
But observers of the time would link Millet’s portraits of peasants to politics that followed the French Revolution and tout him as a supporter of the country’s move toward egalitarianism.
Kelly writes that although “Millet never clearly defined his political position, he was undoubtedly supportive of republicanism. He rejected any association with socialism or radical socialist clubs but was deeply empathetic in his work to the hardships of the rural working population.”
Fundamentally, his work is about the importance of representing human dignity, Kelly says.
“I think a lot of the themes he’s dealing with are still relevant. He deals with questions of labor, questions of oppression. He represents rural workers in France struggling to make a living.”
The rural laborers were poorly paid, with women earning half of what men did. Their work was also threatened by the rise of mechanization. These themes transcend any particular moment, Kelly says.
Millet had grown up in a comfortable peasant family: His father was a landowner who inherited a house and 50 acres. An eldest child, Millet was born in 1814 on the Normandy coast and helped on the farm: He knew how to use a plow and the tools he would later draw. He grew up reading not only the Bible but also Latin and classics by Shakespeare, Virgil and others.
At 18, his father sent him to study with a portrait painter, and in 1837, Millet moved to Paris and studied for two years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
His early paintings included portraits and nudes, which are strikingly sensual compared with the later work featuring laborers. The exhibition has a gallery with nudes, including one by Edgar Degas, “Breakfast After the Bath,” which also is linked to Millet’s influential and innovative use of pastels.
But he mostly abandoned nudes after being criticized for licentiousness and began focusing on workers in the area where he and his wife lived in Barbizon, south of Paris. The exhibition is arranged thematically, with Millet’s work next to that of artists he influenced.
Although Millet knew the Bible well, his piety can be overstated, Kelly says. His agent and friend wrote a biography after Millet’s death emphasizing religion, perhaps to counter the accusations of socialism. The prickly artist, who was the father of nine, was not known as a churchgoer in later years. But clearly his “Sower” paintings could be linked to the parable of the sower in the Bible.
“The Gleaners,” too, will remind many of how the Bible says some landowners must allow pieces of wheat left after a harvest to be picked up by the poor. By the mid-19th century, though, some landowners decided they’d rather try to sell the “gleanings.” Kelly writes about how Millet’s painting was controversial:
“Conservatives saw a threatening message in Millet’s sympathetic representation of these impoverished outsiders. The journalist Jean Rousseau thought the work incited revolution and that it recalled ‘the pikes and scaffolds of 1793.’”
Gleaning is a term used today in the names of many food banks and humanitarian organizations. Contemporary controversy over the legalities of dumpster diving shows links to the 19th-century debate.
Likely the most extreme interpretation of Millet’s work came from surrealist Salvador Dalí, who saw a copy of “The Angelus” in his Catholic school. The painting depicts a man and woman stopping work and praying in response to the ringing of church bells, timed every day at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m.
In 1865, Millet said: “The idea for The Angelus came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed.”
Dalí was obsessed with the work and believed that the pair were really remembering a deceased child. He convinced the Louvre museum in Paris to X-ray the painting, which showed a vague shape had been painted over. (Kelly doubts it was indeed a coffin, which some stories maintain.)
Dalí’s own creations included sexual interpretations, such as alluding to the woman as a praying mantis who would devour her mate after copulation.
The SLAM exhibition will show Dalí’s “Meditation on the Harp” from 1933, which comes from the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. That museum’s description of the work says, in part:
“This painting presents several aspects of Dalí’s hallucinatory fascination with the painting, altering the interpretation from the reverent mood of evening prayer to sexual repression and oedipal anxiety.”
Other artists represented in “Millet and Modern Art” pay homage in less extreme, but still creative, ways. In addition to Monet and Van Gogh are Winslow Homer, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Jan Toorop, George Seurat, Emile Bernard, Paula Modersohn-Becker and more.
By the end of his life in 1875, Millet was considered successful and well-off. A photograph from 1862 shows him in full beard, holding a cane and wearing casual rumpled clothes and wooden clogs. His agent, Alfred Sensier, told him: “You look like a leader of peasants who is about to be shot.”
Apparently Millet liked that.
What • When Sunday through May 17; hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday (closed Monday) • Where Ƶ Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park • How much $12-$15 for adults; $6 for children 6-12; free for 5 and under and for members; Fridays are free, depending on availability • More info 314-721-0072;
15 must-see pieces at the Ƶ Art Museum
Sometimes museums are so large that visitors don't know where to start. At local (and free) institutions like the , it can help to focus on a particular area, make frequent, shorter visits — or know some of the highlights. Here are some of the artworks there you shouldn't miss. Occasionally they are on loan or moved around, but that just means you can catch them the next time. By Jane Henderson