Last year I learned more about, and was impressed by, Jean-François Millet when I read “To Plow His Furrow in Peace: Jean-François Millet’s art taps his peasant roots to honor the dignity of rural life,” a major article in the Spring 2021 issue of Plough Quarterly.** That became the seed for this blog post.
Millet (1814~75) was born in rural
northwestern France, and his most famous work is “The
Angelus,” an oil painting completed between 1857 and 1859.
The painting, which the Plough author says you may have seen “hanging in some grandma’s living room,” depicts two peasants bowing in a potato field to say a prayer, the Angelus, that together with the ringing of the bell from the church on the horizon marks the end of a day’s work.
I don’t remember when I first saw a
reproduction of this painting, but I’m sure it was when I was still a Missouri
farmboy.
Two earlier paintings by Millet are also
widely known and appreciated, perhaps especially by rural people: “The Sower”
(1850) and “The Gleaners” (1857).
What I did not know until I read the Plough
article is how Millet was criticized. The author says that Millet’s “rustic
paintings met with a great deal of negativity from critics and Parisian
society. The truthfulness with which they depicted rural people and rural life
was labeled mere ugliness.”
The sophisticated city folks thought that art
should depict “dignified things, like lords and ladies and historical events
and Greek myths and things like that. It was not for poor people.”
But by his paintings, Millet continued to
depict the sacredness to be found in ordinary rural life. And in the concluding
words of the Plough essay, to this day Millet’s “works remain a reminder
of the worthiness of the ordinary worker who lives an ordinary life.”
My father was born in rural northwestern
Missouri 101 years after Millet’s birth in France, and
while not a “peasant” such as those depicted in Millet’s paintings, he—and his
father—were “common” farmers, and from them I learned, and came to appreciate,
the dignity of rural life.
On Aug. 15, 2020 (my 82nd birthday),
I posted a blog article titled “My
Old Missouri Home,” and I won’t reiterate here what I wrote then, but it
was in part about “the benefits of being a farmboy.”
What I didn’t say in that article is that I learned
about the dignity of rural life from my father and his father. Grandpa George
lived on a farm in Worth County (Mo.) all of his life except for a brief period
in the early 1910s, and my father (d. 2007) did the same except for the years
from 1935 to 1945.
There were exceptions, but they and most other
farmers like them, were good, honest men who worked hard to provide for their
families, who were kind and helpful to their neighbors, and who didn’t get into
harsh verbal conflicts with anyone (except maybe on a few rare occasions).
Yes, 80~100 years after Millet, they embodied
the dignity of rural life that the French artist painted so beautifully, and I
remain grateful for what I learned from them.
But what about now? The world is much different now than when Millet painted “The Angelus”
in 1857—or when my father bought his farm in 1945. I am afraid, though, that the
dignity of rural life has deteriorated in the last forty years.
“Talk radio” (such as The Rush Limbaugh Show
from 1988 until Limbaugh’s death in 2021) and, to a lesser extent since it
requires cable, Fox News augmented the polarization of the general public,
including and perhaps especially rural Americans.
When 80% of the people vote the same way, as
they did in many of Missouri’s (and other states’) rural counties in 2016 and
2020, perhaps that indicates a notable loss of the dignity of rural life to the
polarizing forces in contemporary society.
That dignity has been tarnished in recent
years by the MAGA majority demonizing those with opposing political views and many
of those in the minority 20% feeling alienated from their neighbors/friends.
_____
**
Back in 2016, I posted “Following the Plough” on a Blogger.com page. Few have
accessed that page, so if you would like to know more about Plough Quarterly
and the Bruderhof community that produces it, click on this
link.
Well, we recently spent several years in rural America (Iowa), and our experience was that rural life is still a place of greater peacefulness and neighborliness. It's startling how socialized small-town community is. There are, of course, still the few super wealthy living out on the fringes and whom you never see and the few alienated poor in the hollows and trailer neighborhoods. But by and large the community pulls together in mutual regard and help. People rarely talked politics very openly. But, yes, you're quite right; it's an awful shame what the white evangelicals and media such as FOX have done to polarize all of America. One of the things we realized more than just intellectually was how it's nearly impossible for rural folks to understand the intractable social problems manifest in our cities.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, Anton. And, yes, I think your description of rural small-town communities is basically the same as mine, although I have had far less direct contact with such a community since my father died in 2007--already fifteen years ago!
DeleteSometime in 2017, I asked a cousin who lived in my hometown (with a population of under 1,000) what people there (80% of whom had voted for Trump) thought about the new president, and she quickly said, "Oh, we never talk about politics."
On the other hand, I have friends who still live or have lived in the same county and who are part of the 20%. Some of them have expressed their feelings of estrangement from the 80% because of their political views. And I see the Facebook posts of some of my FB "friends," including active Baptist church members, from my home county that ridicule Pres. Biden, Rep. Pelosi, and Democrats in general. That is the reason I wrote about what appears to me to be a deterioration of the dignity of rural life.
I am struck by Millet's depiction of a (most probably) married couple whose daily life-rhythms of work on the land, piety, and customary orientation to a larger faith-community reveal what an English scholar called "The World We Have Lost". Mr. Jacobs' comments suggest hope remains, though. Millet's scene (his paintings are understood as belonging to the Realist movement) allows the unseen presence of many others in the fields, I think. The church tower and its bell, and the front of the woman and all else from left to right are illumined in a way the Parisian supposedly middle-class (Americans--think "comfortably-to-filthy rich"), modernist elites evidently did not appreciate, let alone notice--as if the poor were worth a glance in the first place. In "The Gleaners", the evening's heavenly light plays in the background, and the presence of the stooped gleaners in the shadowy foreground suggests the presence of a common rural poverty against the socio-economic reality of agricultural abundance, but an abundance owned and controlled by too few hands. For the working poor, it is a bitter harvest.
ReplyDeleteThis is a fundamental and recurrent "modern" problem that highlighted the contrasts and the conflicts between urban and rural life in the USA and the modern West. Someone observed that there is no more rural life, the world is urban. It's a stretch, but they have a case, or why would so many "better-off" folk live and work "in the country" but still generally have all the perks of city life, and increasingly its problems? And why would both urban and rural working poor have so many urban or urban-related problems?
I think Millet's paintings still are a clue to the sentiments and concerns of the "working poor". Just last Sunday our pastor's sermon ended with a guest speaker's brief presentation about the "ALICE" effect: in our county (and the many like it across the USA) approximately 60% of wage earners (some with multiple PT jobs, and even at $15/hr. and up are not able to float basic expenses by the week or month--they've been priced out. https://www.unitedforalice.org/national-overview . Like Millet's gleaners, they are scrambling for everything. Functionally they fall all the time well below the poverty line.
No wonder the extremists have so much resonance among the working classes. And no wonder that Millet's bell tolling the Angelus has little relevance for most of them. It's easy to blame the church, the city, the stubbornness of political views, but it is the entire system that lacks leaders who truly unify and are not in the pockets of our increasingly anti-republican-democratic socio-economic establishment. But then we are back to the fractured nature of western societies, and the spoken or unspoken desire for the welfare of all persons in a beloved community.
Let me add that the ALICE summary link is worth your time, especially if you have been unaware of the effect. The link I gave enumerates the basic points of identification -- and these are people who art NOT the persistent poor, though they just might be, and soon, without patient and focused legislative leadership -- driven by citizen involvement, urging, voting, and initiatives.
ReplyDeleteJerry, thanks for introducing me to ALICE. While I have long been aware of such people, I was not aware of the acronym or the organization that goes by that name. For others who may not be familiar with it, here is a succinct summary I found on their website:
Delete"ALICE is an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, and represents the growing number of families who are unable to afford the basics of housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, and technology. These workers often struggle to keep their own households from financial ruin, while keeping our local communities running."
Here are comments by Thinking Friend Eric Dollard in Chicago:
ReplyDelete"I agree with your article and without farmers and peasants, none of us would be here as they are the ones who grow our food, so there is great dignity in being a farmer. We need to do more to ensure that small farmers survive; many of them struggle to maintain a lifestyle they love.
"The majority of farmers voted for Trump, who did nothing to help farmers. He actually hurt them with his tariffs. The Democrats have an opportunity to win the favor of farmers by listening to their concerns, promising to act on those concerns, and then acting on them."
"A good point, Leroy. The farmers I grew up with were independent thinkers, kind of like Missouri mules. I’ve loved Millet’s paintings because they seemed to feature the 'show me' attitude." (Comments by Thinking Friend Glenn Hinson in Kentucky, but a native Missourian)
ReplyDeleteThinking Friend Ron Kraybill in Maryland shares these important comments:
ReplyDelete"Thanks for this. I'm a farmboy too! I agree with your closing paragraph about MAGA, which has been ruthless and unprincipled. I would only add that people who are ruthless and unprincipled in this way always do so from a place of deep inner hurt of their own. People humiliate others because they are struggling with their own ancient sense of humiliation. Among the various sources of that humiliation is the way TV and radio has for years used mockery for entertainment. The old TV shows made a lot of fun of mountain people, I believe. (I grew up without TV, thank God, so I have only distant impressions of this.) It was considered fine to mock them in humiliating ways. Sophisticated big city comedians still do this with MAGA people. There's a place for comedy and humor, but I think that more than we know, laughing at our exaggerations of others perpetuates the wounds that hold us all in thrall.
Thanks for your perceptive comments, Ron, and I appreciate your pointing out how rural people have been and currently still are often made fun of by "sophisticated big city comedians." In my post I was looking at the matter from the other side, but I certainly admit that there has been the type of ridicule of rural people that you mentioned. Since I am early-to-bed person--after all, I did grow up as a farmboy--I never watch the late-night talk/comedy shows, but what I hear about them or see reported later, the humor is usually at somebody's expense. And that the brunt of the jokes has often been MAGA people. While I may agree with the criticism, I don't think anyone--whether they are on the left or on the right--should be belittled on national television.
DeleteLocal Thinking Friend send an email with a picture (which can't be posted here). Here is what he said:
ReplyDelete"I too have long appreciated Millet’s painting. As you can see below, I have a copy on the top shelf of my bookcase, between a couple of my beloved rock samples. It speaks to me of the integration of faith, Spirit, and everyday life.
"Thanks for your encouragement."