Marvelous Millet, in St. Louis

We can debate his influence on modernists, but a new retrospective of his work shows his enduring appeal.

T he new exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum is Millet and Modern Art from Van Gogh to Dali. Jean-Francois Millet (1814–1875) painted The Sowers, The Angelus, and The Gleaners, all spectacularly famous in Millet’s day as well as controversial. They’re recognized today, remaining after years and layers of subsequent art movements in our communal Rolodex of images.

Millet did multiple incarnations of gleaners and sowers, as well as knitters, spinners, mowers, faggot gatherers, and, here and there, saints and nudes. Most of the best are in St. Louis now. The show’s an elegantly done, moving tutorial on an artist who mattered once, long ago. But has he mattered, say, in the last hundred years? That’s the issue.

When I was a curator many years ago at the Clark, the museum asked for The Gleaners, from 1857, for a Millet show. The astonished director of the Musée d’Orsay, said, “Absolument pas,” “oubliez,” “jamais,” and “impossible,” or absolutely no, fuggitaboutit, never in a million years, no way. “It’s an Icon of the French State,” he wrote, the “i” in “icon” emphatically capitalized, and the rejection letter dampened by his indignant tears.

He agreed eventually. The Clark’s savvy, no-is-the-first-step-to-yes director asked me to prepare a list of everything the Clark had lent to the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay and everything we’d borrowed over ten years. The score was 200 to 1. We’d sent our best to Paris and got a measly Adam Pynacker in return. Even the French were embarrassed.

It hadn’t left Paris since the 1960s. It was insured for $50 million, the maximum, in those days, for which anyone would insure a work of art. “How do you value an Icon of the French State,” the French registrar sobbed.

The St. Louis show first examines what the French, or, more precisely, the Paris critic and bourgeois art lover, saw in Millet when he was a contemporary artist. Millet’s peasant pictures are more than scenes of everyday rural life. When they were first shown in the 1850s and 1860s, they were seen in Paris as provocative, even seditious. “How can a good artist like Millet depict those pumpkin-headed rubes so nobly or kindly?” Who knew they worked like dogs, prayed, or had kids, or that there were so many of them, or that they were so big and strong? “Why look at beasts?” one critic asked.

Over time, Millet’s work conveyed an emotional juxtaposition at the core of French politics, one of poverty against wealth, and servitude against power. By the 1870s, when he painted fewer peasants and more landscapes and seascapes, he’d mainstreamed. Millet died a rich man. He didn’t get a retrospective at the Louvre until years later, but he was famous, and his work sold at high prices. New radicals like the impressionists arrived on the scene, making Millet look not old-fashioned but certainly old-school.

Soon, Delacroix’s Marianne leading the people, David’s Greek and Roman heroes, and Millet’s gleaners and sowers represented the spirit of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Not so much now, since most of the descendants of those French peasants are voting for Marine Le Pen. They’re the Yellow Vests trashing the neighborhoods of Paris’s rich. Even in France today, Millet is historical, like a statue of Danton on a Paris street — there, part of the furniture of civic life, but in no one’s hearts. This is a change from the days of the Clark’s Millet show in the mid-1990s, though I suspect in France this perspective was in the making even then.

Millet and Modern Art works beautifully on many levels. The museum, in partnership with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, gathered most of Millet’s best work — he’s a superb artist — and many dazzling Van Goghs. Gauguin, Seurat, Pissarro, and Monet are there in fine form. Seeing lovely paintings by lesser-known, niche painters such as Émile Bernard, Ferdinand Hodler, Paul Sérusier, and Laurits Ring is a treat.

Does the show make the case that Millet was notably influential to modernists past, say, Cézanne to Salvador Dali? It tries, doesn’t succeed, but I don’t care. It’s still an impressive and intelligent exhibition.

In the 1850s, Millet centers on the French peasantry, a surprisingly new subject given its abundance, and he doesn’t present the humble, often achingly poor as rural burlesque. That’s the take of Bruegel or the Dutch genre painters. And he doesn’t make them rococo props, as Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau do. Rather, Millet shows them stoic and prayerful in the context of hard work that exhausts them but also makes them strong and tough.

The figure in Man with a Hoe, done in the early 1860s and lent by the Getty, looks so tired that he seems awed by it, his mouth gaping, resting not on the ground but standing, with his weight on the hoe. And Millet’s Sower, from 1850, a loan from a Japanese museum, might work all the time, but his stride is dynamic. He’s sowing wheat, but is he sowing insurrection, too? Paris’s take was that he was sowing more peasants like himself. Even in the 1860s, 80 percent of France’s people were peasants.

The big Musée d’Orsay Gleaners that the Clark borrowed isn’t in the exhibition at St. Louis, but that doesn’t matter. There’s a version of it, and the so-called Icon of the French State did go to the Van Gogh Museum. What’s a gleaner? After harvesting, gleaners, mostly women, prowled the fields gathering ears of wheat the scythes and sickles left behind. Until the 1840s, landowners permitted the poor to salvage freely. Then, owners and overseers started to charge, in an ugly display of capitalism over charity. In the face of this, Millet’s gleaners struggle and persist.

Parisians looked at the French peasantry, not the urban poor, as the most unpredictable, truculent, and combustible part of the populace, but they were invisible, a big, unseen Other. Millet’s approach is different. He both humanizes his peasants and universalizes them. In the France of his day, where revolutions were both remembered and repeated, that’s dangerous. By investing the rural poor with humanity, with dignity, Millet suggests they might have agency, too. Universalizing them — they’re never freaks, and their faces are uniform — suggests they’ve got big numbers behind them.

The show is a Millet retrospective, more or less, and that’s one of its many strengths. It’s got a generous selection of his work from his early nudes to all aspects of peasantry, his pastels, which are delicious, and his landscapes in the 1870s. The first wave of avant-garde artists after Millet are the impressionists. On the one hand, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Monet are deferential and curious. By the first impressionist salon in 1874, Millet was successful and rich, so he was a man to admire.

The impressionist debt to Millet is subtle and depends on the artist. Using nice Pissarro and Monet choices, we see the two using Millet’s high horizon lines and his paint surfaces, which are rougher than Academic painters such as Rousseau or Gerome. Millet’s pastel figures and landscapes are a network of crosshatches, giving both a gauzy finish informing the impressionist dab of paint.

Millet’s figures don’t have high finish, and often their faces are mask-like or bare outlines. Their forms are bulky, but they’re still abstractions composed of blocks and color. Millet generously uses complementary colors, especially mauves and greens or soft blues and yellows, but they’re muted. While the impressionist palette is brighter, it’s clear in Pissarro’s colors that he’s looked at Millet closely.

On the other hand, Renoir and Pissarro said they loathed Millet’s work. That could be a function of younger artists naturally dissing their elders. “I hated Millet,” Renoir said. “His sentimental peasants made me think of actors dressed as peasants.” Pissarro complained about Millet’s “idiotic sentimentality” in 1887 and described him as a religious artist and, worse, as “morose.”

 Methinks they doth protest too much, and so does the exhibition. Critics compared Pissarro especially to Millet, and artists hate it when critics say their work is like someone else’s. The proof is in the pudding, though. Pissarro’s Washerwoman, from 1880, and Peasant Girl, from 1881, both strikingly lovely, tell no lies. Pissarro drew plenty, and plenty that’s positive, from Millet.

Degas’s pastel technique shows he looked closely at Millet. Dense crosshatching, layering of color, and the fusion of pastel and black Conte crayon characterize both artists. A gallery niche in the show displays brilliant pastels by Degas and Millet, and even if the viewer knows nothing about either artist, this space alone is an immense pleasure. Nearby is a selection of Millet drawings juxtaposed against Seurat’s, and the visitor will leave this space thinking about nothing else, like a dog thinks of food, if the visitor can bring himself to leave at all.

The exhibition makes a valid, overlooked point on the value of Millet’s reductiveness. Millet’s peasants are often heavily contoured outlines filled with minimal detail. He created sweeps of fabric through subtle, steady grades of color and form through a few well-applied lines. I think all the avant-garde artists, snark aside, from Renoir and Pissarro to Cezanne and Seurat, would agree that Millet’s spark was hottest and brightest on this one point.

I think it’s best to see and taste the section on Van Gogh and Millet as a sumptuous feast. Van Gogh is a unique visionary with a very short career. He was mentally ill and obsessed with Millet, who, thankfully, was dead — otherwise Van Gogh would have stalked him. Van Gogh copied Millet in a compulsive way, with 30 versions of The Sower. These copies are indeed smashing, especially Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow, from 1890. It’s safe to say that Millet’s subjects, especially sowers, inspired Van Gogh in a religious way. He saw sowers as metaphors for infinity. He conveyed Millet’s yellows and violets, but on turbocharge. Millet, he felt, distilled types from individuals.

Forgetting that Van Gogh was psychotic, it’s worth a trip to St. Louis to see the comparison side by side of Millet’s Starry Night, from the 1850s, and Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhône, from 1888, as well as side-by-side views of Van Gogh’s The Sower, from 1888, his freest interpretation of Millet, and the museum’s own Vineyards at Auvers, done by Van Gogh in 1890. It’s a village scene with a Millet-style steep foreground but otherwise a late Van Gogh at his most inventive.

I can’t dispute the merit of any of the points the exhibition makes about debts to Millet by artists such as Ring, Angelo Morbelli, or Jan Toorop, all good and with intriguing, strong work in the show. They’re minor artists, though. Even Dali (1904–1989), given his few good moments, isn’t consequential. This isn’t my taste. It’s a fact. The litmus test for Millet’s durability as an inspiration is Picasso, who did a couple of modest sketches after Millet. Picasso, with 50,000 works of art to his credit, took time to riff on every French artist of any note, but in mining Millet, he found an empty pit or, more precisely, a dead end. Whistler, immersed in French art and one of modernism’s founders, knew his work and yawned. Millet wasn’t even worth his contempt.

Millet’s problem, though it’s more a state of being than a problem, is akin to Renoir’s. A few years after the Clark’s Millet show, the century changed, and this affected both the auction prices and the critical reception of Renoir, an artist densely represented at the Clark. Renoir has never disappeared, but when 2000 dawned, his work seemed to have an Old Master feel, or at least the patina of history or, more critically, its pall. I think after 1900, Millet became an antique, a respected and loved fixture, but an artist whose great work sits passively on the sidelines, inspiring nothing beyond nostalgia. Picasso found nothing in Millet to rebel against. He was irrelevant.

Millet’s impact in America is a tricky proposition the show considers but a surprisingly conclusive one at which it doesn’t arrive. America is central in Millet studies on three fronts. First, he was the first living European artist to generate a market for American sales. While the market for work here by living Americans was good (though not, among a people focused on making money, robust), Europeans, aside from dead ones, weren’t selling. Rich Americans didn’t travel to Europe in meaningful numbers until after the Civil War. For dealers in Paris, London, and Rome, a shop in New York would have been as much a moneymaker as one on Mars.

Millet was the exception. Americans were buying his work in the 1850s. Quincy Adams Shaw (1822–1908), one of Boston’s richest men, bought almost 30 Millet paintings and 30 pastels. This collection went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, today making Boston, not Paris, Millet Central. Shaw stimulated other Bostonians to buy Millet, too. From the 1860s until Shaw’s death, when the MFA got the haul, he exhibited his Millets often. In Boston, Millet was known and loved.

French critics thought The Sower espoused socialism, class war, and revolution when it debuted at the 1850 Paris Salon. I can guarantee you that Shaw, a Boston Brahmin financier and industrialist, wasn’t indulging Jacobin thoughts when he bought it. He admired the work’s spirituality, reserve, and tip of the hat to rural life. Millet’s figures were strong and firm, his palette soothing, his narrative — where there’s a narrative at all — suggesting country peace and harmony.

Millet spoke to Boston’s most soulful Unitarians or, at their most excited, weak martini Episcopalians. This is why most of the best Millets are in America. Even in the 1850s, when Shaw was shopping in Paris, the twin gods of Boston aesthetics were the pre-Revolution John Singleton Copley and Washington Allston, whose specialties were religious pictures and women in reverie.

Boston was a conservative place. Copley managed to leaven the Puritan temperament with Rococo style, establishing the ground rules for Boston portraiture through Sargent’s time there. Allston’s work has an Old Master look. Shaw also collected small Renaissance marble relief sculptures, mostly religious, all serene. Millet’s peasants complemented this aesthetic. Americans hardly looked at rural people as seditious. There was no grumpy peasant class here. Millet’s farm people evoked America’s rural roots and the nobility of agriculture.

Second, the exhibition considers Winslow Homer’s indebtedness to Millet, but I’d quibble with its findings. Homer (1836–1910) is a Boston artist, though his career was mostly in New York. He was born there and worked for Boston magazines as an illustrator until he moved to New York. Millets were aplenty in Boston through the 1850s, and Homer was in France from late 1866 to the fall of 1867. Millet was famous by then in Paris, too. Homer painted The Return of the Gleaner in 1867, a straightforward homage to Millet if there ever was one. It’s in the exhibition in St. Louis but isn’t the most fetching Homer. The gleaner, a big woman, looks pissed, and if I were a gleaner I’d be pissed when I didn’t feel numb from exhaustion.

Homer’s rural female figures are often big and columnar, like football players. He gets that from Millet. His bourgeois women-at-leisure, like his croquet players, are svelte and petite, so there’s a class difference. Homer didn’t go to Barbizon, but, in 1880, he went to Cullercoats, a fishing town north of Newcastle, and it’s there he has his Millet moment. He went there because he felt America had grown too citified and, he heard, Cullercoats hadn’t changed since medieval times. Much as Millet made Barbizon and Normandy his timeless, rural haunts, Homer made Cullercoats his, if only for a year. It’s in this Cullercoats work, 200 objects, where Homer repays Millet for mood and style.

Homer’s Cullercoats women are huge, not fat but rugged and dressed in simple, loose working clothes. They’re pre-industrial and look prehistoric. Homer’s palette is not monochromatic but nearly so. Millet often imbeds his figures in the landscape, through color and through fields and hills so dominant that only a little sky appears. Homer does the same thing in his Cullercoats pictures and, later, in Saco Bay, from 1896, and some of the other late seascapes he did in Prouts Neck in Maine. Saco Bay is in the exhibition and a fine choice.

The Bright Side, from 1865, by Homer is in the show. It’s a real stretch to say it owes anything to Millet. It’s a Civil War campsite picture depicting four African-American Union Army teamsters, three lounging by a tent and one inquisitively poking his head from the tent, looking directly at the viewer as if to ask, “Hey, whatta you lookin’ at?” The show says it’s “mediated” by a Millet print of reclining peasants from 1860, but it has nothing to do with it. The Bright Side is about the boredom of Army camp life and the cast of characters making the camp run. Millet’s figures never engage the viewer. It doesn’t belong in the show.

Third, Millet, aside from his impact on Homer, did spawn a movement in American painting. William Morris Hunt (1824–1879), also based in Boston, was so smitten with Millet that he studied with him in Barbizon for two years. In the 1880s and 1890s, the American Barbizon School emphasized rural life and is indeed bucolic in mood. George Inness’s Moonrise, from 1883, is in the show. Inness belongs here, though he didn’t paint rural workers and developed his aesthetic in concert with his Swedenborgian religious beliefs. His work is still and hushed, and Millet’s spirit is there. Daniel Ridgway Knight, not in the show, is an American who spent his career in Paris and painted scenes of French everyday life. Insofar as modernism is concerned, thought, Knight’s another dead end. He’s a relic of another age, like Bouguereau.

“This artist was influenced by that artist” isn’t usually a salient or even useful point since it implies aesthetic lineage. Millet informed Homer’s heftier figures and his occasional interest in rural life. The serenity of his work and its sense of authenticity and freshness appealed to Hunt, who did lots of portraits and rural scenes here and there. Hunt’s most famous painting, a big view of Niagara Falls, has nothing to do with Millet. Childe Hassam, William Keith, and even Thomas Eakins have Barbizon moments. All knew and liked Millet, but he was one thread among many in fashioning who they became.

In America, Millet lent a European — and thus credible — aesthetic language to American Transcendentalism. Hunt, Millet’s premier American disciple, counted Emerson, Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell, Transcendent high priests all, as his close friends.

Millet and Modern Art is a big exhibition, with work from nearly 60 museums and private collections. It’s an enormous pleasure, conceived with vision and thoughtfulness, reviving interest in Millet, a great artist, and presenting Millet’s sparks of inspiration on many artists in a coherent, engaging way. Equally great artists including Pissarro, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin drew from abundant sources. These nourished their own genius and unique visions. The exhibition makes sense of Millet’s place in what could be an inscrutable, dense web. I loved it.