ARTS
Seeds of Millet
John McEwen
'Millet' (Hayward till March 7) is an historic exhibition; well selected, well presented and timely in its academic reinstatement of Millet to the first rank of Western artists. Robert Herbert from Yale and his assistants from the Louvre, Roseline Bacou and Michel Laclotte are to be congratulated on a notable achievement. Don't miss it.
Millet was born with a prodigious talent for drawing, but his life as an artist is one of dour perseverance to master the art of painting to an equal degree. He achieved this in the final years of his life through the mediation of pastel. As he once wrote: 'Art is not a picnic, it is a struggle, a grinding mill.' The reward of his final masterpieces after forty years of patient endurance is a timeless moral lesson.
Millet is one of the very great draughtsmen. In his late twenties he was already hailed in Paris as the master of the nude on the strength of his drawings, and the crayon 'Self Portrait' of 1845, when compared with the oil of 'Monsieur Ouitre' from the same year, shows an assurance in portraiture that he was never to attain as a painter. '"To make a stew, take some meat." It is impossible for a man to become what he is not destined to become. ' Millet's innate genius for drawing always gave him the confidence of that destiny, but he worked on it no less determinedly than on Eis painting.
The easy-handed sensuality of his early black crayons with their continuous lines modelling the forms, a style especially suited to the nude, evolves into a more tentative, non-linear and increasingly impressionistic style, that reached its apogee in the coloured pastels of his last decade. Here the distinction between drawing and colour was finally broken: through the separate strokes of variegated and contrasting pastels on tinted papers, the drawing became the colour.
Although there are suggestions of this technique even in the work of Chardin, it was Millet who fully revealed its potential. These dessins, as the artist called them, are very fragile, and not many are on show in the exhibition; but there are enough to demonstrate that, as a body of work, they undoubtedly constitute his highest achievement. If there had also been an example of the violently staccato pen and ink landscapes of this same period, the enormity of the debt owed him by the impressionists and post-impressionists, most spectacularly Seurat and Van Gogh, would have been more fully honoured.
Genius though he was as a draughtsman, Millet had to slog to become a painter. His early portraits are mediocre and it is largely the strength of his compositions that makes masterpieces of his celebrated paintings of peasants in the field. This perfection of scale is illustrated by the surprise most people experience on discovering how small these monumental images are in the original: 'The Angelus' some 10 by 13 inches, 'The Gleaners' 15 by 20. But only 'The Sower' improves on the preliminary drawing. In it the heavy paint and colour accentuate the physical strength required to heave each step free of the clods and hurl the seed to the wind. Compare this with 'The Gleaners' where a similarly heavy technique makes the two women stoop to pick the corn as a single static gesture, not one of a rhythmic succession as in the drawing. When this deadening use of paint was applied to even gentler studies, such as 'Woman pasturising her cow', it did introduce a portentiousness which Gaudier still seems right to have laughed at.
But then, after a transitional period in the 1860s, Millet's exploration of pastel technique finally'brought about the synthesis of drawing and painting he had been searching for. His last oils triumphantly succeed in preserving the invention and vibrance of his drawing. The lines he had always covered under the final coat of paint with some regret, he now left bare. He even imposed them. Look at 'Cliffs at Greville' or the great unfinished series of the seasons. But it's not just the line, there is a new mastery in the handling of the paint. The colour is clearer, the touch fast and self-revealing, the application much more varied and less dense. In 'Spring' he brilliantly matches this new scintillation with its most sparkling equivalent in nature: the moment of the first sunshine after a thunderstorm. The distant gardener is still sheltering under the horse chestnut tree, everything is eradiated by the recent drenching of the rain. It is Millet's QED after forty years of effort. Two years later he died at sixty-one.
The brilliant invention of the other late oils like 'Le Coup de Vent' (1873) and his last of all 'The Birdcatchers' (1874) make one wish all the more that he had lived — but art isn't a picnic. Of his contemporaries Daubigny died too young at forty. Daumier lived beyond his fame and died in poverty at seventy-eight. Courbet, five years Millet's junior, whose sensational career undoubtedly served to eclipse Millet's quieter progress, died exiled and forgotten in Switzerland in 1877. Even Mme Millet, for all her husband's success, was happy in the end to accept ten thousand francs from Corot. And the academics began interpreting the work. But not the artists. It was still a revelation to them long after the academics had swum on with the fashion. The fact is his toiling peasants are, supremely, the symbol and the sign of his own relentless effort.
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