Thoroughly Modern Millet

Few painters have inspired as many other artists as Jean-François Millet. For the German Impressionist Max Liebermann, Millet was "the most groundbreaking artist in modern painting", while for Vincent van Gogh, the Frenchman was "that essential modern painter who opened the horizon to many." 

What made Millet so thoroughly modern? It was his rough brushwork, his simplified forms with strong contours. These were radically new compositions featuring high horizons and empty expanses.

And yet in his own time, Millet's warts-and-all depictions of the harsh reality of rural life were just too avant-garde, too controversial for many. Take Man with a Hoe from the start of the 1860s. 

The critics attacked the ugliness of the man leaning on his hoe, taking a brief breather from his back-breaking work. They decried the style as caricatured. For Millet, though, this was an image full of compassion for the peasant's lot, full of detail like the purple thistle on the left. "To me it is true humanity and great poetry," he said. 

In an extensive exhibition entitled Jean-François Millet: Sowing the Seeds of Modern Art at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam you get to see not only the masterpieces by Millet that gave an impetus to so many painters in the years after he died in 1875, you can also admire an astounding range of pictures by his devotees, drawn from a huge number of galleries around the world, many from the US and Japan. It's a truly impressive and enlightening show. 

Let's focus on three of Millet's most imitated works, starting with The Gleaners. Millet's peasants may be engaged in the humblest of toil -- here carefully searching for any leftovers missed by the harvesters you see in the background -- but as in so many of his pictures they are huge figures that dominate the canvas. This is poverty into nobility. Critics saw the sympathetic portrayal of three poor woman as a social threat that could stir up insurrection.

What we notice right through this show is how the poses adopted by Millet's characters seem to have struck a chord with later artists down the decades. We see the stances faithfully reproduced, even if the context of the picture has changed, and in a wide variety of different styles.

The Italian painter Angelo Morbelli's work focused on the harshness of rural life and on social deprivation. He probably saw The Gleaners on a visit to Paris in 1889, and In the Rice Fields, painted 12 years later, clearly borrows its depiction of back-breaking labour from Millet, even if the elegant, decorative treatment of the subject is very different.

Paul Sérusier was another pioneer whose painting helped take art in a completely new direction, but he too borrowed from Millet. This is The Seaweed Gatherer, gleaning the seashore rather than the grain field.

Now, you can understand why the critics pounced on Millet's The Sower back in 1850, attacking the coarseness of its technique and comparing its layers of paint to rough soil. It's such a raw image.

Van Gogh was fascinated by The Sower because of its religious and spiritual significance, seeing the sower as one who spreads the word of God as well as the cycle of life in his seeds.

This was a motif he drew and painted dozens of times. There's one in the Van Gogh Museum collection in which the setting sun appears as a halo around the sower's head, but in this much lighter, brighter version from the Kröller-Müller Museum in the eastern Netherlands the sun goes down centre-stage, almost relegating the sower himself to a bit part.

The final Millet painting we want to highlight from this really superb exhibition is The Angelus. In an empty plain at the end of the day, the horizon broken only by the steeple of a church, a peasant couple digging potatoes pause for prayer. 

Salvador Dalí was obsessed by it: "This painting produced in me an obscure anguish, so poignant that the memory of those two motionless silhouettes pursued me for several years," he said. Dalí, being Dalí, saw the woman as a sexual predator about to devour the man, her stance like that of a praying mantis. You can see the Surrealist's reworking, Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, in the show.

Others got in on the act before Dalí. Van Gogh's Dutch contemporary, Jan Toorop, painted the Angelus couple in Pointillist style in the watery landscape of the village of Broek in Waterland, near Amsterdam. And, surprisingly, one of the brighter, greener reinterpretations is this one, Fertility, by Edvard Munch.

Millet's Angelus also sparked a heated debate in 1890 about the commercialisation of the art world when a French businessman bought it for 750,000 francs, almost 200,000 francs more than it had sold for just a few months previously.

There are a lot more artists, a lot more surprises in this really excellent show, one of the most illuminating we've seen at the Van Gogh Museum, with less of a focus on Vincent himself than you might expect. It exceeded our expectations, and it's well worth a visit.

Practicalities

Jean-François Millet: Sowing the Seeds of Modern Art runs at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until January 12. The gallery is generally open daily from 0900 to 1700, with lates until 2100 on Fridays (longer hours around Christmas and New Year; see the museum website). Tickets for the museum cost 19 euros full-price (no extra charge for the exhibition) and should be booked online with a timeslot here, because the last thing you want to be doing on a wet wintry day in Amsterdam is queuing in the rain outside the most popular museum in the Netherlands.

American readers will be interested to know the exhibition will subsequently travel to Saint Louis, where it will be on display from February 16 to May 17.

We generally find at the Van Gogh Museum that the temporary exhibitions aren't as crowded as you might fear, but it's best to go early in the day or later in the afternoon, though don't leave it too late, as you'll need a good two hours to do justice to this show.

The Van Gogh is situated in the museum quarter in the south-west of the city centre, not far from the Rijksmuseum. It's easily accessible by tram or via a direct bus from Schiphol airport. 9292.nl is an excellent site that gives you public-transport connections across the Netherlands.

While you're in the Van Gogh Museum 

You have the chance to explore the world's largest Van Gogh collection, with more than 200 paintings including The Potato Eaters, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat and The Bedroom. Portraits hung in empty halls? Not here.

Images

Jean-François Millet, Man with a Hoe, 1860-62, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Angelo Morbelli, In the Rice Fields, 1901, Private collection
Paul Sérusier, The Seaweed Gatherer, c. 1890, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Jean-François Millet, The Sower, 1850, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan
Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857-1859, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Edvard Munch, Fertility, 1899-1900, Canica Art Collection, Oslo