A New Look at Impressionism: Millet and the Painters of Barbizon

[Applause] Thank You Arianna and thank you all for coming today well whenever I give a lecture here I always try to include as many works from the Museum of Fine Arts as possible and this one was not a problem because we have here in the museum an unbelievably large collection of jean-francois musee fuer Barbra Jean's but we do have some and it's kind of a remarkable thing the way that me lay was bought up by wealthy Americans in the late 19th century and had an incredibly high reputation for a while only to be forgotten or really not looked at much for a lot of the 20th century until for example 1967 which was the I'm sorry 1976 which was the centennial of his death where the Robert L Herbert who was who's a great meal a scholar did an exhibition and he also the same art historian didn't work in exhibition back I think it was in the 60s on called Barbizon revisited and you know revived interest in them but the thing is that it's extraordinary that it was really after his life or at the very end of his life that meal a got this kind of attention for a lot of his life and this is such a familiar story think van Gogh think Cezanne he really had a struggle I mean people he did have his admirers and he exhibited publicly in a way that you have less of certainly with Van Gogh and also with Cezanne emulate did show in the cell all which was the official government-sponsored art venue exhibition venue but at the same time and he did have his supporters at the same time he had his detractors and we'll be talking about that a little bit as we go on today now I called this earthen forest and I'm gonna start out with meal a and I'm really thinking about Earth here and here we go our first painting from the MFA and so many of the ones that I'll be showing it's showing you are from the MFA this self-portrait from 1842 41 which really suggests the rural you could say origins of this artist that he was born to a priya lee moderately prosperous farming family they weren't peasants even though Malay paints peasants but they were from Normandy and he came to he he came to Paris he got a scholarship from the biggest local town which is shear board you know the that wonderful old Catherine Deneuve movie the umbrellas of Cherbourg well that's near that was kind of the closest big city or big town and it's at Cherbourg that's a museum called the musee Thomas Henry that Museum and then the collection divided between the Louvre and the musee d'orsay are the only ones that I know of that come anywhere near the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in terms of malaise and of course you can find others in other parts of the United States for example in New York if the Met and engine Chicago well this talented young artist was given a scholarship by the town of Cherbourg to go to Paris and you know study art and he actually enrolled at the Ecole des Vosges are the School of Fine Arts is still there you can still study painting sculpture and architecture and in the nineteenth century it was the place to go for an art career but he didn't stay very long he dropped out he competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome contests and didn't win it and when he dropped out in 1839 in other words a year before he painted this the town cut off his scholarship and we'll hear more about not very happy relations with a Cherbourg to come but one of the things that's fascinating about meal a well there's so many paradoxes about him you know as I suggested looking at that when I said that it may suggest is rural origins what I really meant was there something kind of Frank and forthright and uncomment sized about this it looks like but you know it sort of suggests something that's earthy and yet at the same time meal a was a was a really quite well-read man he was very fond of literature he knew the work of Virgil and he was steeped in the Bible he also was very aware of the art for example of Michelangelo he never went to Italy but he certainly knew it through prints and so you have this kind of sophistication which is not undisplaced now this sense of sort of Frank almost country forthrightness you also find in here again we're staying in the Museum of Fine Arts with this portrait of his young wife you conceive tragically died when she was only 23 I think she died of TB which you know I always told my students the 19th century was not a good time to get sick you know they could sort of cut things off and they could give you opiates but that was about it they did have a vaccine for smallpox but other than that they couldn't do much for you especially if you got TB but anyway so she died and but there's a kind of sort of almost doer humorless straightforward kind of austere Puritan quality to both of these portraits that's really striking so his young wife dies and he takes up with Katharine the man who is a servant in Cherbourg and his father does not approve of this they actually moved to the hive for a while which is where Monet grew up and then they go to Paris and Kathleen the man quite a bit later he has a civil wedding too with civil marriage to her and then in 1875 when he's bedridden the year before he dies they have a Catholic marriage but they have nine children together so that's he was productive in more ways in more ways than one but now this one also is in the MFA and it's a remarkable drawing you can see that male is a very fine draftsman but he's not a refined iseman he works with a very kind of muscular bold manner and there's a kind of an earthiness to the way that he puts down the chalk here that's analogous you could say or fitting to this provincial woman who he is drawing here but very much you know drawing her with with affection now I'm sorry this is also in the MFA and it's often up and I you know I have to I always have to get my complaint in when I'm showing anything 19th century for the MFA there's so many wonderful things in this collect in this collection not just me lay but other nineteenth-century things that you you almost never see and I'm hoping that someday they'll do for 19th century Europe what they've done for the American collection that would really be spectacular and they could really fill it with amazing things and even the stuff that I'm gonna show you today from you late it's not everything there's lots of other paintings there's lots of drawings this is really just a sample but they often do have this up the end of the hamlet of gooshie a work of 1866 and it's really rather remarkable painting clue she is where he grew up it's the little hamlet the little village on the English of the coast of the English Channel which you see here you couldn't actually see the channel from his house where he grew up but if you went down to the end of the town the little hamlet I mean it's not even really a town you could see the water and there's something wonderfully kind of nostalgic about this painting because he's doing this later on in life he doesn't live in that area anymore I mean this is long after he moved to Barbizon but there is something soft about the handling generalising there's a little child and a woman here who's sort of holding up a little child to look at the water there's also this sort of storm blasted elm trade which takes on a kind of personal aspect you know sort of like you know the man maile himself you know sort of withstanding the batarangs of life and this whole idea of seeing his place his place of origin or seeing peasants because he grew up around peasants as I said they weren't a passing family to me lies they really were much more affluent than that but they were farmers and but he sees them through this filter this kind of generalizing filter I want to say idealizing but I don't want to suggest idealizing in the sense of that it was meant at the academy you know with you know based on classical antiquity or something like that or beautiful bodies it's nothing like that but it does have this sense of being larger than the individual somehow more generalized well I want to start off with a rather remarkable event that takes place in the early career of of LA as I mentioned and I wanted to show you first of all here's another wonderful portrait of self-portrait self-portrait of Miele this time not from the MFA but it shows them with this wonderful beard and long hair where really you see him identifying say with the artists the poets the Bohemians of Paris at this point in his life because that's really where he is and I also I'm showing it to you because you can see the resemblance and I'm sorry this painting is pretty damaged but you can see the resemblance here in this very strange image a self-portrait as Moses and I want to show you this I actually wrote a book of my the book that Mariana mentioned that broken tablets the cult of the law in French art from Davi to dellacroix has all it's all about moses and representations of moses and that's where i came upon this picture i mean it had been published as a picture fairly obscurely but i sort of put together you know what was going on here now what happened is i want to go back to when me lays scholarship was terminated by the city of Cherbourg well that wasn't probably didn't make him feel very good about this the town but then something happened that was about to sort of add insult to injury they asked him to do a portrait of someone named Colonel Javon and Jevon had been a mayor of the town and he was he was dead somila I couldn't look at him what they did was they gave him a little miniature picture and they said well here use this well he painted the portrait which is now in the musee Thomas Henry and it's a somewhat awkward portrait but they didn't like it they said no this is no good so they and they weren't gonna pay him and they didn't eventually decide to pay him but they were gonna pay him a third of the commission but before me lay even learned that they were gonna pay him that that small sum he wrote them a letter that I want to read to you he sent them this painting this painting self-portrait is Moses and he said this is what he wrote to them you will receive in a few days at painting that I beseech you to accept I hope that this feeble result of my Labor's so generously encouraged by you justifies the expectation that determined your honorable choice I have perhaps waited long to express my gratitude toward you my gratitude toward you but you will understand I am sure that this delay was not caused by an ungrateful negligence I have only waited until I felt capable of delineating some work worthy of you in the painting that is submit to your good will I have sought to represent Moses I did not believe that I could offer a subject more appropriate to the magistrates of the city of sheer board than the image of this ancient and severe legislator of the Hebrews I can only attest anew Monsieur owes to the gratitude of a schoolboy whose first efforts have been aided by you and to his keen desire to succeed in bringing you satisfaction so this is extremely aggressive stuff and the thing that really makes sense here is that Malay had been in Paris in Paris it was really a common place a cliche at this point among well among the sort of bohemian set that the artist and the poet were the legislators of mankind and that they were supposed to lead everyone it's the sort of rhetoric that you find associated with a utopian group called the sense Simoni ins that was very much there so Amelie would have been steeped in this and so what he's really doing is he's saying you know he's asserting his authority against this provincial town the other thing that's really interesting you may not be a little it may be a little hard to see but the commandments are numbered and he's pointing to number 8 the prohibition to bear false witness so they were breaking his contract and also they were expecting him to make bear false witness by doing you know showing this using this you know inferior painting as the source for his his portrait so I wanted to draw on that for a moment simply because it suggests meal a did have a certain rebellious streak and it also in a sense gives you a an alert that he is really someone who's going to be supported by that is critically supported by critics on the Left people who really were you could say in in the opposition now I want to jump right to malaise mature work with this remarkable painting called the winnower which was shown in the Sun law of 1848 now for a long time this painting was lost it was discovered in an attic in the United States I think it was in 1972 now it's in the National Gallery of London and it's quite a remarkable thing but first I want to tell you about this law the settle of 1848 took place in it opened in March of 1848 and right before that in February was a revolution the revolution of 1848 and this was an absolutely you know world historical event 1848 was a little bit had the kind of world historical international significance the way that 1989 does you know how you know the Berlin Wall Falls the Soviet Union Falls all of those communist governments well something like that happened in 1848 but it was somewhat different what happened in 1848 is that you had the successful revolution in France and then it spread all over Europe but it wasn't successful in other places for example in Germany that's when you got a lot of German immigrants coming to the United States because it was there but it did succeed in France it overthrew the the the last constitutional monarchy that France ever had that was the July monarchy where King Louis Philippe had been on the throne he's the one that doe me I used to make fun of and make him look like a pair that was overthrown and the thing that was so remarkable about this revolution and it was really unlike any other french revolutions before this is that it was a social revolution it wasn't just about politics it wasn't part it wasn't part about politics but it was social and what I mean by that is that it had the issues had to do with unemployment homelessness hunger these are mass issues and it's no accident that you know these issues were coming to the fore right around this time it's no accident that that's the year that the communist manifesto was written that somehow there is this moment in mid 19th century when all of these pressing social issues come to the fore and in France this issue of homelessness of Wanderers was a big issue because France was always traditionally primarily an agricultural rural country and you had all of these people leaving small villages coming to the cities to look for work and not finding any so one of the things that the revolutionaries did when they had this revolution was they instituted national workshops where people could get work well they stopped them shortly afterwards and then there was another phase in the revolution where there were the the more radical contingent rose up and they were violently put down now the interesting thing about me lay is that he had he took no part in the revolution of 1848 his supporters people who wrote about his work praising late and he thanked them for their praise and he agreed with it those were people on the left but do me a hymn I'm sorry me lay himself did not get involved in politics apart from the fact that he apparently volunteered to to help put down the radical uprising that took place in June of after the February revolution but anyway when this painting was shown in the salon of 1848 it got in in part because this was considered a free salon that is traditionally the salon had a jury you had to get by the jury and later on when I start showing you the Barbizon artist the work of well the the the most famous of them Taylor who so he was perpetually brutalized by the jury that is he was kept out of the salon for most of the well a good deal of his career the second half of the 30s and all the way up to the revolution but after the Revolution the whole idea was well now we have fraternity we have you know liberty equality fraternity let's have an open salon where you don't have to submit to the jury so meal a has this painting now you'll notice it's a peasant it's a patient who's laboring he is sifting grain he's winnowing grain and it's painted with a kind of rough character in fact one of the critics said that it looked that somehow it had a roughness that went along with the roughness of the subject there's nothing refined here and at the same time it has a kind of monumentality a kind of generality it's not a specific person but a kind of generalized type and this is really going to be very very typical of malaise work now one of the other things I should tell you about the Revolution of 1848 is that it there one thing that was very much on the minds of the people who did make that revolution were the provinces the provincials remember how you have all these people leaving little towns in the provinces coming to the city and there was the sense that somehow the French provinces this sort of the heartland was changing was something was being lost and so you have people on the left you know in other words people who supported the revolution very nostalgic about the provinces very nostalgic about peasant life and so when meal a comes on the scene and he starts doing these peasants not just peasants but monumental peasants there's nothing pretty about them there's nothing cute nothing picturesque you can see how some of the people who had that sort of ideology love the provincial world of the peasants really came to his support now one of the artists that he befriended or at least knew at this time was Daumier and I mentioned Daumier before he was now domi a was much more political than and on the left then Malay and dou me a light meal a heeded the call of a competition that was held after this revolution took place to come up with an emblem for the new republic and that the government by the way it's a very brief government it's just a few years doesn't last very long but it's called the second republic that's the government that's brought in with a revolution of 1848 it's called the second republic as the first one was during the french revolution that is the revolution of 1789 that created the first republic so the Second Republic is just February of 1848 until December of 1851 that's when the nephew of Napoleon Louie Napoleon Bonaparte stages a coup d'etat he actually had gotten himself elected president of the Second Republic but that's so it's a very short period that I'm talking about here so what I'm showing you on the right is a sketch or a study that was painted by domi a called the Republic that he submitted to this this competition now apparently nobody won the competition so it wasn't very successful but and I don't think we have malaise entry but the one by domi a is quite remarkable you know it has the whole problem of well we have a new form of government and new kind of ethos this sort of you know belief in equality and the people how do you emblem at eyes this how do you make this into an emblem so what he came up with was this monumental woman who's nursing these Herculean children holding the tri-colored French flag and throne and then you see another one of these mighty children here reading and that probably is a reference to universal education it was one of the ideals universal suffrage also that was one of the new things that you get with this with this Republic and what you have Indomie a is somewhat analogous to what you have in meal a that is the sense of something that's not at all idealized in this sort of academic sense but something which is monumental and weighty and ambitious has a kind of a solemnity and gravity and that's something that we also feel about this winter work by by me lait and I wanted to suggest also by showing you a later work by Tomei this is called the laundress from around 1863 that domi a in some ways can be considered an urban counterpart to meal a meal a is the urban or you could say meal a is the urban I'm sorry that amelia is the rural counterpart to domi a dome used of the the urban counterpart as in this painting of a laundress now walruses were terribly exploited in this period that used to do their washing in these laundry barges along the Sen and anyway so here is a laundress carrying laundry with her child and you can see that it's very much generalized this kind of generalized cityscape in the background these rounded forms like what you have in the Millay and that really suggests you know thinking about Michelangelo thinking about high art and this is one of the the paradoxes about what we call mid-century realism and both me lay and domi a and corbeil as well all fit into this category mid-century realists these are artists who really wanted to paint things that had actuality in some cases the here and now the contemporary things although in me lay there's nothing particularly contemporary about it he could it really has a timelessness but what they also and they didn't want to idealize things they wanted something that was much had a kind of a roughness of actuality of reality but at the same time they really wanted both ways they also want to have some of the grandeur of the museum of the old masters and that's very typical and I didn't want to suggest that me lay was coming at this without some kind of knowledge of art history it's just the kind of things I mean I mentioned Michelangelo but another sort of model our historical model that was in the air around 1848 that was being approved ups getting the the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval from the kind of critics like Te'o field talk or a Sean flurry these are critics who liked st. meal a and Korb a were the Lenin the the Lenin family and the most famous one is Louis and then for example this painting peasants at supper so this is a 17th century French artist and he's really you could say discovered around this time and this is a remarkable thing that I remember that my my mentor Robert rosenbloom used to say that we that the the art of the past is transformed or in you know remade by the art of the present in other words we see things in the past that we never would have seen before but for what people are interested in in the present and so here suddenly the 17th century artist became very interesting because he's also painting people in the provinces and he's painting them with great dignity and solemnity a sense of gravity nothing prettified or picturesque about this and I also wanted to make a comparison to the work of corbeil I've mentioned him a few other times he's of course really the the king of all of these mid-century realists and what I'm showing you here is a painting from just a year after me lay showed the winner where the stone breakers and as I indicated down here below it's it's very fortunate that we have a color photo because it was destroyed in World War two in Germany but it's a remarkable painting it's often reproduced as an example of core base work it's somewhat unusual in that it's a painting with what you could call a social consciousness whereas most of core base work is not like this especially later on he specializes for example in portraits in landscapes and hunting scenes and nudes that don't have anything to do with hard labor but this one has everything to do with hard labor it's these two men breaking rocks out in this rural setting and back in the mid 19th century this was how you paid your taxes if you couldn't actually paid your taxes you had to break up rocks it was called the corvée which sounds like corbeil but it's it's corvée and it means chore and it was something that you can imagine was really detested and corbeil who apparently saw these two men doing this got the idea to do this painting and what he does is he really gives you a sense of the sort of bone grinding labor and its butt and it has this sense of angularity in the poses that it looks painful in other words there's nothing fluent or mellifluous about the these poses they have a kind of an ungainly nests and awkwardness and at the same time that you could say that both of these you know monumental eyes hard labor they really are very very different that sense of angularity in the in the core Bay is really contrast with this these rounded forms that you get that sort of rounded bulky forms that you get in the Malay but also one of the other aspects of corbeil is the he tends to focus on one thing at a time and everything is additive in other words there's nothing tying this composition together in fact there really isn't much of a composition at all it's just sort of this thing you know a plus B plus C the C being this wonderful still life of this pot with their lunch whereas in meal a everything is bound together it has this wonderful sense of rhythmic unity a very different kind of thing and coming back to the MFA we've got in we have in 1850 the sower another one of these monumental peasant paintings now I put up at the top that in 18-49 the year before this meal a moves to Barbizon and we'll be talking more about Barbizon it's a little village that's nearby the forest of fault and forest of Fontainebleau is about 40 miles from Paris southeast of Paris and originally the forest of Fontainebleau there was a palette there's a palace there the Palace of Fontainebleau which still stands which was the Palace of Francis the first Francoise Pommier and some of that area that's that's now around the forest is parkland because it was sort of set aside for it was really a hunting preserve for the for the for the king and so what happens is that in 890 18-49 there's an outbreak of disease I think it was cholera and meal a it moves to Barbizon he goes with with with Katharine and his children and I don't think he had all nine of them quite at that point but he had some and they actually walked to Barbizon and then he stayed there that's really where he largely remains although he still does do some traveling in other parts other parts of the country and the thing about Barbizon is that it becomes a kind of an art colony and we'll see this later with the the Barbizon painters it it really is a kind of a magnet for people who want to be in a setting where they feel that it's unspoiled by by society by by civilization it's a kind of a place to go for peace and for immersing yourself and there's this forest you know in addition to the that sort of parkland there also is you know they're kind of wild rocks and oaks and things like that that we're very exciting to the painters now with the sower and we don't know this might be the one that he showed in the salon there's a couple of versions of it but the MFA s might be that one but in any case it really has some of the this the same qualities that I talked about in regard to the that I talked about in regard to the the winnower that is this sense of anonymity of generalization you know we don't even really see his features at all but also a sense of monumentality and this is one of the things that makes it very different from the stone breakers that I just showed you I mean that you could say corbeil was doing peasants on a large scale but the it's and even though both of the the sower and the stone breakers you can say are engaged in hard labor the sower has a certain sense of dignity that you really don't find with the stone breakers there really are kind of the you know grinding in away and misery and there's something about this it has something to do with that dignity the monumentality that even suggests something biblical and you know the way that he is sowing its pessimistic at the same time look at the birds in the background as if they're gonna eat the seed there's something also about this Hirai you know the the hill that comes behind him that really drab dramatizes his stride as he goes as he goes forward and I wanted to and well I wanted to point out then that in these in these monumental Sir finger paintings and here is a detail of it you know taken from you know the MFA is painting you you know he really has this sense of generalization and in a way this is his version of doing what was taught in the a called a bazaar in other words the Ecole des Vosges are they taught you to idealize you know make faces more like a beautiful ancient statue well he's not gonna do that but he's not gonna make it look like an actual person either he's going to generalize in this kind of way now I mentioned that there was this kind of biblical aspect and he was reading the Bible I mean this is something that he really admired enormous ly just as he did you know literature Virgil and here's another painting from the MFA a really important one which is actually up now harvesters resting and you'll see that it's also titled Ruth and Boaz now of course from the book of Rufe in the Old Testament and that's apparently how it started it was originally going to be a painting of the story of Ruth and Boaz but instead you know Ruth who gleans in Boaz's field he changed it into a kind of scene of French peasants and you know you could say that their nineteenth-century peasants but there's something timeless about their clothing the whole thing you know it has that sense of weightiness of generalization and this idea of going back and forth between the peasants the French peasants on the one hand and the Bible on the other it really is an extraordinary thing that goes along with this sense of trying to bring solemnity and grandeur and dignity to these kinds of subjects now if you get a chance I really recommend that you go to Manhattan and see the dellacroix show was just opened recently but dellacroix was not an admirer of Millay and I want to read you a rather nasty thing he wrote about me lay that has exactly to do with this the ambitious aspect of his peasants and the way that me lay was thinking about st. Michael Angelo in the Bible so this is a passage from Delacroix's journal I mean it's a very famous journal that he kept over many years and he wrote about all kinds of opinions about his contemporaries about art so on April 16th 1853 so not really say in the year that he finished this painting dellacroix was really annoyed because somebody had brought me lay around to a studio and it's her ruined his morning he says during the morning someone brought me lay to me he speaks of Michelangelo in the Bible which he says is or almost as the only book that he reads that explains the rather ambitious character of his peasants he is certainly of the constellation or squadron of bearded artists who made the revolution of 1848 or who applauded it apparently thinking that there would be equality of talents as well as fortunes now in some ways he's he's maligning me lay because I said he didn't actually make the Revolution of 1848 but he you know his he certainly was appreciated by people who applauded it and as far as we know he probably applauded it himself and for dellacroix you know the the revolution of 1848 was very very disturbing he is Delacroix's the one who painted the famous Liberty leading the people I'm sure many of you know it's in the show in New York that is a celebration of the revolution of 1830 and the 1830 revolution the one that brought in the July monarchy and Louis Philippe that was fought for political purposes it was fought because the Constitution had been violated it didn't really have anything to do with these social issues when these social issues come in in 1848 that's very disturbing to someone like dellacroix who really has a rather aristocratic outlook on the world but anyway oh this you know really comes back to this paradox of you know wealthy Americans in the late 19th century or early 20th century being great meal a connoisseurs because in his lifetime in melius lifetime especially in 1857 when he showed the Gleaners and I'm sure many of you know this painting it's one of his most one of his most famous he was attacked by people say by bourgeois viewers salon visitors who were really horrified by this painting they saw it as a kind of a red flag a kind of a call to rebellion and but there's nothing about it that really suggests that but that's because these are not just any kind of farm workers these are Gleaners and I mentioned the story of Ruth and Boaz earlier and certainly whenever meal a does images of people gleaning you know that must have been in his mind so it's a very ancient kind of activity but it was like it was actually a kind of an ancient privilege but of a very lowly kind gleaning is not harvesting the harvest has already gone by and you can see it's this very bounteous harvest it's all loaded on these on these wagons gleaning was that was going back going along after the harvest and picking up all the little droppings that they had missed so it's for the poorest of the poor and it was actually controlled of a sort of policed and that's why you have this constable on a horse over here so these are the you know desperately poor women but they're shown with a kind of solemnity and monumentality I mean on the one hand you can say that their back-breaking labor is really being emphasized look at how the horizon weighs down on the back of this woman and at the same time there's something very grand about all this the kind of you know a a be rhythm of this the way that they're a sense of bulk in these figures really makes you think of say a civil by Michelangelo I'll show you one in a moment it's that idea of the mid-century realist wanting it both ways one running it both say homespun and uh Nydia lized and on the other hand having the same kind of grandeur gravitas you know gravity in both sense of the words both in the sense of gravity that you know in the Newtonian said that pulls you to the ground it's weighty and at the same time that's grave that's solemn it has bad quality you can also see that me lay was a wonderful painter of landscape that he really gives you this sense of heat and dryness and we're going to see that landscape is something that meal a really is is really going to is really going to practice very well this is just a detail of one of the Gleaners just to show you again the anonymity so that this anonymity it not only raises the the you know these figures in a sense of solemnity and grandeur but it also suggests every man or every woman in other words it's not just one individual but it's a kind of you know universal thing now the the thing is that even though meal a you know this is another one of these paradoxes even though he was supported by critics who were associated with the left and even though he thanked them and you know went along with what they said about his paintings you never get a sense when you're looking at these me lay peasants that they're even capable of rebelling it looks like they're doing something that's been going on since time immemorial and which has the kind of inevitability of the cycle of the seasons and the seasons are something that Malay was very aware of he did a wonderful set of paintings of the four seasons the autumn one is in the Metropolitan Museum and I'll show you some pastels shortly that are on for you now here at the MFA which have a really wonderful evocation of different seasons I hear is that comparison I wanted to make in as I said you know meal a never went to Italy but he would have known the work of Nicola Angelo say through engravings and what I'm showing you here is one of the civils of the Sistine Chapel the Cumaean Sibyl and I picked her because of this sort of ponderous way that she's bent over that book it just reminds me of these mines me of the Gleaners and I also wanted to suggest that meal a went about paintings like the Gleaners very carefully he did all kinds of preparatory work and that in itself was something that he would have learned in art school that was the traditional way of doing things but if and you know this is a rather vigorous drawing but you can see that he really hadn't arrived at that very grand monumental arrangement of the three figures that he has in the paintings when he did the drawing now on view in this wonderful pastel show that's here right now at the MFA which is really the occasion for this lecture you can see another image of Labor it's just remarkable a pastel of these two men turning over soil the way that you have a kind of a counterpoint between the two gestures in some ways it's a pastel that really makes me think about how Van Gogh going to be a great admirer of Malayan we'll come back to that later I mean he also did some incredible images of people laboring outside and you know peasants labouring and in this even though this is primarily a figural pastel it also has a very telling a vocation of the landscape of you know Breaking Away this this earth here and then the plains are the the fields in the back and at the same time as we have an image like that which really you know the two men shoveling that it really has this sense of powerful labor he has other images of farm labor that are much more quiet this one is also in the MFA and it's one of his great paintings the potato planners of around 1861 which shows a you know a man and what the wife here is dropping these sort of seed potatoes and with the man is digging holes and burying them and the whole thing has a kind of quiet about it that's really remarkable a weightiness of ponderous nests even the wonderful image of this donkey back here behind the tree also a nice sense of landscape the expanse here but this idea of labor as something that is can also be very quiet and is eternal I mean that's the sense you get with these that somehow you know these are you know activities that look like they've been going on for time immemorial and that you know have this kind of slow development with with the seasons and so when you're looking at something like this you can say well he's really thinking about you know French 19th century peasants but there's nothing to really tell you that they're 19th century peasants there's something much more generalized and timeless about them and that's also the case with this marvelous pastel which is on view right now of this man training grape vines and you also get this terrific you know orchard view here in the background and you know something very quiet and simple but very specific I mean even at the same time that he generalizes the figures he often doesn't show their faces and what we're getting into here and this really brings us to the exhibition is that around the in the eight around the time of the 1860s meal a really starts using pastel a lot and pastel you know is of course colored chalk and it allows him to to draw in color which is a really interesting kind of effect I mean pastel has a really interesting history you know of course in the same exhibition you can see those wonderful Digga pastels indigo of course turn to pastel in the latter part of his career when his eyes were not very good and you know it has a kind of tactile aspect you know they can imagine you know de guy you know moving around with his thumbs just as he did those little like the little horse that's upstairs you know working with his hands when his eyes were not there at their best but in the case of moulay also discovering these really these these you know really wonderful qualities in this in pastel and then these are two more from the exhibition and one of the things that they suggest by putting them together is how he sometimes would have similar motifs that he would repeat in other words he would have something that he liked and then repeated in different versions both of these actually are this one in particular is a paint there's a painted version of it I think there's one of this one as well and so sometimes you would have the painting and then you would have a drawing or a pastel now one of the things about this one is that at one point and the critic was really talking about the painted version some people thought that there was something well sentimental and religious about Mia's work so that they even thought that she's praying she's not she's knitting but this is one of the things about Leia's work especially in his later years some of the people who appreciated him tended to appreciate the more sentimental aspects of his work but another thing about these two pastels is that they have this look of Twilight and Twilight was a time that me lay really came to like and there were really it seems two reasons for this one of them was the sense of melancholy and he really did talk about that as you know that in the Twilight this sort of melancholy feeling comes out but the other is that the Twilight really sort of aids and abets him in this generalizing it makes it so that you know contours are indistinct so that things run together and that's really very much working in his favor and you also see it in this image of watering horses again in the current show where the horses you know really become very indistinct but you know they're there you can see what they are and it actually is you know he's he's captured this moment of the the the peasant you know turning around looking at the the horses and the the far bank of this water has really become very you know filming and indistinct but it's all happening now because we're entering at the very beginning of Twilight you know as it says that this is a that this is sunset and the this this kind of quality can be taken very far and you know again I'm just staying within the exhibition the current exhibition this after the day's work from around 1863 is really taking us sort of beyond Twilight really into the you know very late Twilight really into the time of you know where the moon is out in fall and it's really remarkable how he's worked the pastel here to give you a sense of the darkness it's interesting again you know I think about Van Gogh you know when Van Gogh started out just adoring me la you know when he the first time van Gogh went to Paris and he could have seen impressionist paintings he wasn't interested in them he just wanted to see malaise and then the second time he went well that was over now he wants to see Impressionism Post Impressionism Japanese prints and he decided that Malay was too gray but me lay really stayed with him and when he was ill you know when he was hospitalized he act you know Malay is one of the artists who's you know Prince after Malay that he that he copied but what I'm thinking about here is that just as Malay had this taste for darkness and Twilight Van Gogh wrote in his letters to his brother Te'o about how wonderful the night is about how the night has all of these colors that people just don't notice so think about starry night for example or the night at the cafe Lamartine you know these famous paintings by Van Gogh now here of course you don't really have any hue at all you know you that's the technical term for color you really just have values or tones that is darks and lights but they're incredibly nuanced and here is a detail of that figure the mounted figure here with a whip underneath underneath the moon and the artist too in some ways not just van Gogh that this makes us think of but another a contemporary of Van Gogh and I think about that especially this is a wonderful work again in the MFA this Twilight and that's Silva he's someone that Robert Herbert who you know was the curator of that dig Malaysia show back in 1976 talked about this drawing it's sort of pastel and drawing as a kind of you know something that the only artist who really did anything like this in many ways in this period that was later say about 30 years or 25 years later was so uh and you know giving you this kind of atomized handling of the of the pencil and the chalk you know of course in the case of so I it was done somewhat differently so if I would work on paper that if you put it under a magnifying glass would look almost like corduroy it has it's a paper with what you call a pronounced tooth and so you would you know deposit the charcoal on the little ridges and it was a kind of equivalent to his pointillist handling I mean if you come to my lecture on post-impressionism which is in December you know we'll talk more about that then but in any case in me lay you have this you know as I said this taste for twilight that generalizes everything and really transform something that's very ordinary I mean what's more ordinary than just some people out you know the peasants out you know on their land with you know with some sheep but it sort of makes it into a kind of extraordinary experience it's a little bit like what Whistler said about that moment of Twilight which was his favorite time when he said that chimneys like smokestacks become camp in the LA you know in other words they become Italian bell towers it's a famous statement by Whistler and in this pastel which is also in the show he really takes us completely into night so that's this farmyard by moonlight where you just can pick out the wheelbarrow and the dog and it's wonderful the way that he has he's made these shadows coming from the gate you know shadows cast by the moon and then there are other pastels in the show that show another aspect to this work which is a kind of frank discovery of unexpected points of view and like this one the little goose girl and it's interesting that in this one and in some of the others the human presence is very small they really become much more landscapes than anything else but this kind of view up the hill to the form buildings has a real kind of freshness to it which you also find in this this is one of my favorites this path through the wheat where it really is a very surprising fresh point of view and the man who's going through the sort of trail here you barely see him he's just sort of peeping out above above the wheat in this really surprising manner there's also this one the rabbit warren dawn so this is kind of a counterpart to the the Twilight but now this is you know showing a scene at dawn where there's you know talk about no human presence it's just this rabbit war and you can see the holes here and a rabbit here looking out in this dawn landscape again with this kind of unexpected incline that is it's really surprising and in some ways I mean even though he's so different from say to God or a Mary Cassatt you find in their work that in those Impressionists work this interest in these kinds of unexpected points of view which in their case really is inspired by Japanese prints but in his case it really seems to have something to do not so much with that because I don't think there's any evidence that he was interested in them but rather and in some ways he's somewhat early for that I mean they were around at that point 67 I mean but I think it has more to do with just observing you know getting down low in the landscape and seeing and the other thing is that me lay like the Barbizon artist would do sketches on the spot that's what these water cod these pastels seem to have really been it seems to really have worked in that way whereas his finished work you know his more monumental works like the Gleaners or the sower or the winner where those are things that were clearly done in the studio very carefully and one of the strongest of all of these is the winter the farm yard and winter from 1868 which is you know again in the the show of pastels this marvelous winter scene and one of the things that Robert Herbert points out about this in the catalog to that 67 exhibition is that there's a real sense of personal references here the animals the chickens well that could be a reference to a former friend of his another one of the Barbizon artists whose name was Charles Jacques well he wasn't really a friend anymore because apparently Jacques had started buying land around the area of Barbizon and the other Barbizon artists did not go for that but there's another more poignant reference which is that in the year before his best friend died oh no Rousseau who were going to hear more about had died he had died in malaise arms melee had taken care of him while he was sick and dying and so this winter scene painted shortly after that in some ways is an elegiac painting you know winter and death you think about that together but it's all done in these very you know clear-sighted descriptive passages and you know the way that he shows the winter the winter landscape the atmosphere in the back is is very persuasive now in some ways I think the stars of the the pastel show are two very humble flower pieces and this is one of them Primrose is it's actually a type of Primrose called a cowslip that we see here and it really is a remarkable pastel it's this idea of being so respectful of the most humble kind of plant that you're going to get sort of right down with the plant and do this very close side view in some ways it really is something that brings to mind van Gogh I mean in terms of you know clothes still you know close views of plants I mean think about Van Gogh's paintings as there's one in the Metropolitan Museum of sunflowers where they're lying on a table he's very close or also also some of his other looks at irises and things like that that are very close eyed it really has some of that aspect but the idea of taking such a humble it really a weed and paying so much attention to it and getting down so close so that a snail looks rather large it really said and it's also very much this side of me lay that we can associate with working out of doors you know of actually capturing something on the wing I mean it's really hard to imagine that he wasn't there with his pastels you know actually drawing this and I mentioned van Gogh but there's another artist who comes to mind here and I don't know whether Millay was even aware that he existed but that's Albrecht Durer and what I'm showing you here is a very famous watercolour by Albrecht Durer called the great piece of turf from the early 16th century and regardless of whether he knew the work of der I think that it's valid to put them together simply because it suggested an analogy between or an affinity that Malay has to this kind of northern Sensibility that you have in Deraa an or their sensibility that has to do with particularity respecting the particularity of humble plants I mean that's a very northern kind of thing that you find in der and just as Dore took this little piece of very humble nature you can see dandelions again of some kind of like odor wheat grass something like that things that are very very simple and humble but paying this exquisite attention to them almost like you're looking at them through a kind of you know magical spyglass we're sort of takes everything that's extraneous but away from this very humble scene now it's interesting to put these two together because in some ways in comparison the Mille a looks a little more dramatic that is that you can see how Millay has made choices to throw the light on these humble of wild flowers and then have her everything around them in the darkness so it really you know there is a sense of drama here that perhaps isn't in the the juror which seems much more regular in terms of its attention now of course the other great star of that show are the dandelion so and that's why I chose them for the handout I mean really remarkable I mean you could say a lot of the same things about it that you know it's this incredibly close eye view where the scale of the dandelions really becomes large it's almost like you're very small is if you're the size of one of the snails or those little flowers and they're looming up but you really get the sense of me laser of immersing himself in this very humble site that he is really using the pastels to show in all of their particularity and that and this is just a detail of these he's marvelous dandelions you know shown with this you know that he's done with pastel no I want to jump back to something that's really that seems to have very little to do with the world of Millay although there's more than meets the eye here and that is I wanted to show you an example of a work by Nicola Pusa pooza and it's a biblical painting and it's it's from a cycle of the seasons this one is summer and you can see it's the story of Ruth and Boaz and remember how me lay himself was you know had thought of Ruth and Boaz a sort of the origin of his pay makers resting that I showed you earlier well the reason why I'm showing you this is I wanted to give you a sense of what classical French landscape looks like because this is a kind of paradigm attic example Pusa is about as classic as you can get he often is classic in the sense that he shows you scenes from classical antiquity but even when he doesn't when he shows you something from the Bible there is a sense of permanence and dignity and monumentality an order that really and I kind of ideal beauty that really is classical so what I'm what I'm talking about here is that in this landscape we're really looking at something that is completely imagined Pusa actually would go out side and do drawings and studies of things like trees but he never would have thought of showing those I mean those were just sort of his homework all of those things went into doing these very elaborated paintings that are all done in the studio and they're set up with a sense of the ideal with a kind of an ideal order whose clarity is the visual equivalent of the high-mindedness of the story the story of course is the story from the Bible but you can see that it's set out with this tree looking like it's a canopy over the main event everything is very artificially created to give you this or arrange to give you the sense of dignity and order it's ordered also spatially so that you have the main event taking place in the foreground you have a building in the in the middle ground and then you have these distant mountains in the rear ground which are all blued out through what we call aerial perspective so it's a very orderly kind of arrangement you also have these alternating bands of dark and light and dark and then finally light in the end and that sort of takes you into the painting like you know the sleepers of a railroad if you look down a railroad track and it takes you into three dimensions has the sort of striated bands that are bringing you in and then of course if the space is also articulated by these by the linear perspective of these buildings and the buildings look classical a classical architecture takes the human scale as it's sort of point of reference so in other words it's a very humanized landscape it has this kind of clarity and sharpness and I can't emphasize enough how much Pusa was really believed to be the kind of model of classical perfection Cezanne said he wanted to redo Pusa after nature and you know there is the relationship between Cezanne and is pretty complex but but that statement really suggests that he wanted to bring somehow the naturalness the directness of the way that the impressionist painted the plein air out of doors painting he wanted to merge that with the kind of structural complexity and soundness and stability that you have in the work of Pooh Sam well I'm saying all of this because I wanted to give you a sense of what landscape looked like going back to the 17th century but also moving into the 19th century because landscape in France was very very conservative so if Pusa was painting like this in the 1660s if you jump ahead to the 1780s which is really a long time after that this artist Pierre Arie Duvall on C n is still painting in a way that's very if you describe the painting it would sound very much like that Poussin it's a completely idealized space and it's also a landscape of ancient Greece so it's an its is ideal and distant as the world say of the Bible but what I'm also showing you down here is a small another painting a small one by the same artist by Piero a treat of the ancien and it's very different it doesn't it's not something that was carefully elaborated in the studio like this it's something that was actually done outside as a small canvas if you go to the Louvre there's a whole sort of wall of these paintings by these outdoor paintings they're all about so big and artists like Pierre Reed of Lucien worked in that Poussin tradition that Busan s tradition that is that you could make sketches outside but then you took those and you use those as the homework as sort of the basis for these very elaborate kind of paintings like this one which is in the Detroit Institute of Art so you have this interesting kind of dichotomy on the one hand something that looks so fresh and direct but then you have this which is sober you know elaborated but that's the kind of work that the artist took pride in and the point is that this Pusan tradition of idealized landscape what we could call the franco-italian tradition Pusa even though he was French spent a lot of his career in Rome that tradition is something that really survives well into the 19th century and it's the tradition that the Barbizon landscape painters who were getting to really are against that they really are you could say on the outs with and I wanted to emphasize again that this tradition for one thing of doing paintings in Italy of having this kind of ideal clarity and order that's still being done in the 19th century and I the reason why I chose this one it's an artist with a shawl Joseph's Avior bedo this painting of this Italian town of Alba Sano I put down here that he painted this when he was 88 now the reason why I put that is that this artist beedo was a very old-fashioned landscape painter who was in the Academy that is he was on the jury of the salon and he hated the work of Rousseau and he made sure that Rousseau who is really the king of the Barbizon painters and was Malee's best friend he made sure that Rousseau was kept out of the ecology of the salon and between about 1836 and 1848 every time Rousseau submitted a painting it was refused and that's a really remarkable thing because it by the late 19th century Rousseau and it's a also in the early 20th century Rousseau like me lay was very appreciated and bought especially by wealthy Americans well I wanted to show you an example of a painting by Rousseau and he is very much a Barbizon painter I mentioned how me lay moved to Barbizon and you know that Rousseau is really his best friend and you know it Barbizon as I said it attracted artists who wanted to live or be and paint in this what seemed like an unspoiled place it was very quaint it had these forests and what you have in a painting like this one this under the birches and they're not just done and Barbra I mean we call them the Barbizon painters but just like the Hudson River School painters didn't just pain in the Hudson River Valley they painted in various places in the United States similarly the Barbizon art has painted all over the place but they were centered you know that was kind of their headquarters or spiritual headquarters in Barbizon and so this is actually in a place called the bevy region of France and it's just this wonderful autumnal scene with a light hitting these birches there isn't any sense of an artificial arrangement that way you would have in a in a Pusa and there are these very strong effects of light and dark this kind of strong Karras kuroh here's an detail and that's the kind of thing that also was very disturbing to a traditional sort of pusun esque landscape painter these and Rousseau made sketches outdoors and you have to understand the artists like Rousseau is really a kind of progenitor to the Impressionists a kind of generation before but he did his final paintings in this in the studio who worked on them for years sometimes I want to just jump to one that is in the MFA this wooded stream by Rousseau it really has some of the typical aspects of his work there's often a sense of solitude in his paintings and the Barbizon artists were very attached to the woods they were very concerned about trees being cut down they really liked the idea of you know you could say they're it's a little bit like you know kind of early ecology but there is the sense of a kind of solitude of contemplation and this there it's very much of kind of vernacular sort of painting and I wanted to just talk about two important influences on the Barbizon artists and they are an alternative to the franco-italian tradition represented by kou-san this is what we call the anglo-dutch tradition and I'm showing you a very famous painting by John Constable and constant this particular painting the hay Wain came to the French solo of 1824 and after that point and dellacroix for one was absolutely dazzled by it after that point his work comes to be known in England in France and it really represents a completely alternate way of painting to the franco-italian tradition for one things its vernacular landscape its local it's not Italy it's not ancient Greece and it's painted with this great emphasis on the sky constable said that the sky was the chief organ of sentiment in a painting it has these bold effects of light and dark and of course constable was very strongly influenced by Dutch 17th century painters and this one is actually in the MFA I'm really showing it to you as a kind of a generic example of Dutch 17th century painting but these Barbra Jean's like Rousseau were really looking at say constable they were looking at the Dutch with this strong bold of contrasts of light and dark this great sense of airiness or of vitality that comes in with these with the skies there was a one French artist from early in the 18th century who did have some of that Dutch quality he really was an exception as name was George Michel and we often don't know exactly how to date his paintings like this one up here this stormy scene and I just thought it would be interesting to see it next to one of the pastels and the exhibition which by me light which also has this storm I wanted to just show you a little bit of some of the other Barbizon artists because it really you could say it was really a colony another one was jewel do play who was a good friend of of these other artists of Rousseau of meet me lay as well in this painting of the sluice or the duck pond and it really has this sense of density a kind of opacity which is very typical of these artists there's also diaz or diaz de la pena and in his paintings he really has this kind of thick opacity but they're also the thing that distinguishes his work like this one here and I think both of these are in the MFA there's a sense of Fanta see it has worked so it looks almost like you know a rokoko FET Galland by Votto or somebody like that and that fantasy that really comes across in this small one in the MFA of these women we don't know when it was done but in this in Turkish costume but you can see that it has that kind of this bold kind of light and dark passages that's very typical of the Barbizon sand they weren't actually called the Barbizon artists in their time or at least not initially they were called the school of 1830 because that's when a lot of them got their start this is a painting I haven't this these are both in the MFA I haven't seen this one for quite awhile it's a wonderful painting of a hound pointing by another one of the Barbizon sconce tent toyou and it really high put it up here with the young shepherdess by me lay because they both have this real sense of bold monumentality something very humble but shown as being rather monumental that really has something to do with the handling of the horizons in these paintings this would by the way at one point if this was when me lay painted this in the early 1870s so getting toward the latter part of the very end of his life he actually used an earlier canvas that he had shown in 1848 it was turned the other way and he painted over it we actually have an x-ray that you could barely make it out and it was a very different subject it was the it was the ancient Hebrews in the Babylonian captivity and it's an interesting perhaps a reference to his sense of being exiled in Paris and that was a topic that was very current the Babylonian captivity it was very current say in the 1840s anyway I just wanted to give you this kind of oh this must be our our warning anyway I just wanted to give you again some sense of the the range of these Barbizon artists this is another one Charl and me Jacques and even though and he specialized in animals they're much more literal they're more kind of mundane than anything that you would find in a meal a and although shock was one of the artists who kind of helped me lay initially like get one of his first Commission's mashach was really disliked by the eventually by the other Barbizon artists because apparently he bought land and was sort of gay he sort of became a you know got into capitalism a bit there and so he really was on the outs with some of them and so anyway I wanted to also come to a Koro who's really one of the greatest of these artists associated with Barbizon although in chloros case he spent a lot of time he spent a fair amount of time in Italy and he traveled all over France as well but I wanted to start with this painting of the forest - falta blower - remembered Barbizon is right near there which has this real sense of freshness and a certain kind of immediacy but I wanted to point out that his training was really quite different he studied one of them with classical landscape painters and one of them was Jean Victor 10 this is a painting from 1810 this forest with Apollo and Daffy and typical as is typical in classical landscape painting their historical landscapes you often have something from mythology or the Bible like you saw in that consent and it's a very idealized kind of thing but kaurav also when he was in Italy really sort of latched on to this idea of going outside and making studies and what he did here was he did a series three different paintings of the out in in the open air in in Italy this the forum scene from the foreign easygoing gardens this is the the midday one but what you see here is something very different from anything that we saw in either Koro on it rather Rousseau or Mille a which is an interest in architecture in these simple volumes the kind of geometric shapes there's a sense here of a kind of serenity and also suspension of time that really is quite quite remarkable in terms of making sketches outdoors this certainly was one of those a painting called a Bridget nanny so he actually used this painting the sketch to do a much more refined one so you know working in that sort of franco-italian tradition but this was how it started that interest in architecture you also see in this well-known Koro of Chartres Cathedral which you can see he actually came back to later in his career and there's nothing romantic abut you know there's nothing romanticized about that the Cathedral it's really shown as this sort of dignified building and there's this wonderful kind of geometry you know build up between the blocks and the mound and then the church here that you know has this sense of a certain kind of harmony and that you know really seems to be one of the things that Koro is after I mean another thing is this sort of unity of values of lights and darks that's very typical of Koro and one of the places he traveled to was Brittany and he did this painting that looks so timeless the way that you know like the woman who has the vaz on her head and the way that there some of the others are in profile they really looks like you could be back in the time of the Bible and Brittany is of course or go gal went you know he was really attracted to what we're considered the primitive mores of the people there who were very still very much Catholic and cut off from the sophisticated world of Paris well what Koro eventually gets into is what's sometimes called his silvery manor it he becomes as he gets older much more removed from the the kind of palpable world of you know that you saw of trees and cows and things like that that we saw in the Fontainebleau painting and does things like this the called the regulation of recollection of milk or ten and even the the word recollection and the title suggests that somehow it's all seen through a filter through a scrim of memory in distance and you know this is the contrast that I met you know from that earlier painting that's really done near Barbizon and then this one you know that's so sort of filtered out now when we look at something like that it's hard not to think about some of Monet's paintings like you know and here we again we can be in the MFA like this morning of the said near she Bernie which of course Monet did a whole series of and it looks like he took a little piece of this painting and then Monet blew it up into the whole thing and it's kind of fascinating to think about Monet as being the next generation and how he really is looking you know with respect at these Barbizon artists Rousseau is another one and but completely transforming what they did I mean look at this wonderful painting in the Metropolitan Museum here is Monet here's the Rue so you know Rousseau is so dark you know Monet banishes those dark colors and it looks like he doesn't right on the spot and look at the hues that come out these Blues in the sky the orange of the leaves completely in a different world the Barbizon painter I haven't shown you him yet Charl Francois Dobby me who in some ways can especially be compared to Monet because he actually had a studio boat he went on the Oise River and painted in the in the boat which is what Monet did you know later on because for example when MANET painted Monet and Camille in the studio boat painting outside and I've mentioned van Gogh in the past you know van Gogh as this great lover of the work of meal a and even after he decides that meal a is too gray he scant seemed to get away from him like in the sower here which he also does in this extraordinary version of course change out completely transforming everything in terms of color and of course now he's so enamored of Japanese prints as well but still giving you the sense of this lasting legacy now this painting by me la it's in some ways is his you know going the furthest into sentimentality of these two peasants listening and to the angelus the bells of the church the woman is praying the man is just sort of holding his hat and this painting was bought by an American first of all for a huge price taken on tour as the most famous painting in the world and then because it was a there was a it was repurchased by a frenchman for eight hundred thousand francs and then given to the louvre and then of course not long after that it becomes so old-fashioned but this is the kind of painting this sort of twilit painting which also becomes the basis of some really awful propaganda art so here is beloved Stalin standing among you know high tension wires with this kind of you know this kind of Twilight haze out here actually this one I'm sorry not Twyla the morning but very much in a kind of social real of socialist realist version of Millay but then the strangest thing you get are Salvador Dali's weird riffs on the Angelus which you see up here for example this one which just has the weirdest title gala and the Angelus of Millay immediately preceding the arrival of the Connick an amorphous ease or this architectonic Angelus of Millay just totally weird and in some ways perversely dwelling on something that was considered so old-fashioned at that time now in the same time Koro somehow seemed very modern in 1909 when a whole group of his finger paintings were included in the autumn salon the salon dom and in the next year Picasso did this early human sainted the woman the girl with a mandolin and you can see the the connection and and Koro did i don't know if he knew this specific one but he did a number of paintings of women with mandolins and the thing that's so interesting is at this point in 1910 Koro has become a classic and he becomes a kind of an anchor against which so can go off into these wild experimental things that we see with cubism well as I've mentioned today it's kind of a paradox that these artists you know that someone like me lay especially but also the Barbra Jean's how they really had to struggle in their lifetime than had all of this posthumous fame and then suddenly were you know forgotten somewhat until the late or 20th century but you know of course we're lucky that you had these wealthy Americans like the Shaw family that gave a lot of the malaise because for them they weren't really bothered by some of the things that bothered academic viewers in France you know they would say well well I like peasants sure I'll take that one you know I like cows I like trees I'll take that tree so for that reason are and the same thing was true of the Impressionists our museums like the MFA are loaded with all these wonderful things well thank you [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 32,596

Keywords: barbizon, impressionism, millet, fontainebleau, rousseau, art of europe, art of france, art history, lecture, course, museum, french art

Id: DJx5Y5zI2Fk

Length: 84min 43sec (5083 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018