The 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.
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