Simple Gifts

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

—Simple Gifts by Elder Joseph Brackett

In the second half of the nineteenth century in France, artists such as Gustave Courbet became captivated with the world of the peasant as a subject for their art. The hard life of the poor matched with their simple, hardy faith led to images of great piety as well as great strength. For Courbet and others, however, they could only paint such images from the outside looking in, having been born comfortably middle class or better. Born October 4, 1814, Jean-François Millet grew up in a poor peasant family, and learned their world of work literally firsthand. Paintings such as Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz) (above, from 1850-1853) speak of the respect and awe Millet had for the world he never truly left behind him. Millet spent three years working on Harvesters Resting, lavishing attention on the work as if it were a royal portrait. In such works, Millet takes the mythological-historical landscapes of his idol Nicolas Poussin and updates them with real-life field workers in contemporary dress against the recognizably French countryside. With other artists such as Théodore Rousseau, Millet founded the Barbizon school, which harvested the visual and spiritual richness of the Forest of Fountainbleau and its surroundings and brought realism back to French painting.

In perhaps Millet’s greatest image of the nobility of work and workers, The Gleaners (above, from 1857), Millet bathes the women bent over the collect the very last vestiges of the harvest, “the gleanings,” in a light previously reserved for religious figures. The women bow down not in servitude to authority but in humility before the land and God. Work becomes almost a form of prayer. Millet’s own deep sense of the sanctity of work emerges strongest in such scenes. In a way, his labor over his paintings mirrored their labor over the earth. As revolutionary as someone as Courbet was in painting scenes such as Burial at Ornans (1849-1850), Millet was even more revolutionary in taking the conventions of art history, such as the depiction of holiness through light, and bending them to his purpose. Courbet, of course, played with art history in his own way in painting a lowly country funeral like a grand, epic moment, but Millet’s personal spiritual link to his subject drives him to even more audacious lengths.

Millet loved the works of Michelangelo. The grand figures of the Italian master strewn all over Italy and embedded into the mind of every European artist afterwards led Millet to Michelangelo-ize his own favorite subject. In The Sower (above, from 1850), Millet takes one of Michelangelo’s larger than life figures and clothes him in peasant garb. The gesture of the sower spreading seed seems as sweeping and majestic as anything done by the Biblical figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Sower strides across the landscape like a new Adam giving birth to a new Eden. Vincent van Gogh loved The Sower and painted his own version of Millet’s work. Praise for Millet’s vision of the nobility of the peasant life fills van Gogh’s letters to his brother. Millet’s unique painting style and unique combination of religious piety and social liberalism appealed to later artists such as Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro. For all the great ill-tempered artists throughout art history, Millet seems to be the nicest of the nice guys—a true believer in the hidden majesty of the simple life who passes down to us the simple gifts of his upbringing through his heart-touching works.

Industrial Revolution

Impressionism, thanks to the seemingly endless string of blockbuster exhibitions circling the globe, often seems a tired, exhausted vein of art gold. Too-often relegated to the soft-focus, pretty pictures of calendars and gift shop items that rake in profits for museums, Impressionism and the Impressionists too often seem toothless. The disconnect between the bite of later Modern art movements and our present understanding of Impressionism leaves us wondering how those later schools rose from that first revolution. In Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh, James H. Rubin gives Impressionism teeth again and reconnects the rebels of Impressionism with their unruly descendents. Rubin recovers the lost roots of Impressionism, explaining why, for example, Paul Cézanne included a railway bridge off to the right of many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire (above, one example from 1885-1887). Opposing the common view of Impressionism and industrialism as diverging paths, Rubin sets both revolutions on parallel tracks and “places images of industrial waterways, trains, and factories… at the heart of Impressionism’s pioneering artistic enterprise of the late 1860s and the 1870s.” For too long, critics have condemned Impressionism as a primarily aesthetic revolution. “Grounding Impressionism in socioeconomic, technological, and political modernity,” Rubin counters, “makes it possible to reevaluate and strengthen the movement’s claim to avant-garde status on far more than aesthetic grounds.” Rubin allows the “effete” Impressionists to rejoin the modern, Industrial Revolutionary world and finally get their hands dirty again.

Rubin builds a highly convincing case by presenting piece after piece of evidence, going back to the very beginning of Impressionism with the work that gave the movement its name—Claude Monet’s Impression: Sunrise (above, from 1873). Monet’s painting shows the busy industrial harbor of Le Havre. Sunlight plays upon the water, but tugboats spew bluish smoke into the air as well. “In many of his paintings of industrial scenes Monet exercised aestheticizing options, such as blurring detail in fog,” Rubin responds to those who don’t “see” the industry in such Impressionist work. “But that does not necessarily mean he was suppressing such elements; rather, he seems to have been trying to capture what for him was their invigorating beauty.” “Believing profoundly in the value of productive labor,” Rubin later writes, the Impressionists try to make even the pollution beautiful. Even more interestingly, Rubin argues that the Impressionist style itself expresses that faith in labor. “Impressionism’s representation of a modern naturalistic landscape in an ostentatiously proactive style is inextricably bound up with the metatheme of productivity,” Rubin believes. Whereas photography captured the image faithfully, Impressionistic painting not only reproduced the image but added the reproduced the act of labor itself through labored brushstrokes.

Rubens paints an Impressionist movement far more engaged with their time and place than ever done before. “Impressionism’s pleasing imagery is not value free, even though it implies disinterested freedom and enjoyment,” Ruben writes. For Rubin, the Impressionists present an “essentially urban, upper-middle-class, consumer-oriented vision of the world” chafing against the repressive establishment of 1870s France. The Impressionists complete culturally the renovations that Napoleon III and Georges Haussmann began when they modernized Paris into the city we still know today. Rather than fight progress, the Impressionists embraced it as the quintessential aspect of their age. The Impressionists praised figures such as industrialist Henri Rouart, who patronized the Impressionists and even tried his own hand at painting. Edgar Degas returned Rouart’s friendship and patronage with the affectionate portrait titled Henri Rouart in Front of His Factory (above, from 1875), which links industry with artistic sensibility beautifully. Rubin’s revival of the industrial roots of the Impressionists makes them seem much like the American Ashcan School of Robert Henri, and vice versa. Henri imbibed the spirit of Impressionism during his time there in the late 1880s and brought it back to America, where he adapted it to his increasingly industrialized and urbanized homeland. Thanks to Rubin’s argument, such (re)connections between the Impressionists and later movements not only become possible but, perhaps troublingly so, blur many of the lines of distinction between Impressionism and later developments.

Ruben centers his argument on the Impressionists’ embrace of progress, so it’s understandable that he falters momentarily when dealing with conservative dissenters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who bemoaned Haussmann’s renovations to Paris that introduced new buildings “cold and lined up like soldiers at a review.” In the catalogue to last year’s PMA exhibit Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883, Christopher Riopelle argued in an essay titled “Renoir in the City,” that Renoir willfully painted out many of Haussmann’s new additions in works such as The Grands Boulevards (above, from 1875), focusing instead on the parks and private gardens also introduced by Haussmann. “That such islands of privacy and peace” that were Paris’ many private gardens “were still to be found in the metropolis,” Riopelle writes, “was, for Renoir, a beguiling feature of city life.” For Riopelle, Renoir’s blurring is a “corrective” or “subtle, utopian statement,” whereas I assume Rubin chooses to read it as just another aestheticizing choice. The dichotomy in Renoir’s attitude and how it plays out in his painting, however, does not take away from Rubin’s larger argument but, instead, attests to just how passionately involved these artists were in everyday life in late nineteenth-century France—enough to march along with progress but never in mindless lockstep.

Rubin uses the work of the Post-Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists as a bridge between the Impressionists and twentieth-century Modern art. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac develop a more scientific style that mimics technological progress in an updated way when the Impressionists’ style no longer fit in with the changing industrial world. Even an old hand such as Camille Pissarro tried to keep up with the times and paint in the new fashion. The popular print media began to generate more images of industry and progress, inspiring artists such as Vincent Van Gogh to see industrialization in a whole new light. In Factories at Clichy (above, from 1887), Van Gogh responds not only to popular print culture but also the Post- and Neo-Impressionist works he saw in Paris, while simultaneously updating his own sympathy for the common man. “Van Gogh’s leftist sympathies for the working man led to his interest in urban and industrial imagery,” Rubin writes. Such faith in progress seems naïve today, but we must remember that the Impressionists worked before the Robber Barons and the grand failure of technology in the cataclysm of World War I. Living in our post-Enron world, the Impressionists’ belief in the power of industrial progress to do good seems not only naïve but dangerous. Perhaps that difference in mindset is the highest hurdle to overcome in accepting Rubin’s premise, which revitalizes the Impressionists as active participants in their time and not just timeless, disengaged makers of pretty pictures.

[Many thanks to the University of California Press for providing me with a review copy of James H. Rubin’s Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh.]

A Woman on Her Own

When you search for the art of Mary Cassatt in most museums, it’s hard to know where to look. Born May 22, 1844, Cassatt is often placed alongside the
French Impressionists with whom she worked and studied. Other times, her American nationality takes precedence and she appears in the American wing. What can’t be disputed, however, is her vital presence in the history of late nineteenth century art and the long history of women in art. Cassatt’s Mary At the Theater (above, from 1879) shows the influence of Edgar Degas, her greatest friend and teacher among the Impressionists. The same vibrant, almost pulsating pastel strokes Degas used in his works appear in Cassatt’s portrait set at the theater, a passion she shared with Degas. Thanks to the wealth of her family, Cassatt could pursue a career in art against all the obstacles society and the art world placed in the way of women artists.

After studying at the PAFA in a patronizing atmosphere where, she complained, “There was no teaching” for women, Cassatt traveled to Europe to study the Old Masters first hand. Jean-Léon Gérôme, who also taught Cassatt’s old PAFA classmate Thomas Eakins, began the string of male teachers and mentors that continued with Thomas Couture before ending with Degas and Pissarro. Whereas some other women artists pursued art as a way to obtain a husband, Cassatt remained focused on her career, never marrying. The domestic life she sacrificed for herself became her greatest subject in such works as The Child's Bath (or The Bath) (above, from 1893). The tender intimacy of these parent and child images demonstrates Cassatt’s psychological depth, even though such intimacies could only come for her with nieces and nephews.

I remember seeing in late 2006 Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (above, from 1878) during the Americans in Paris: 1860-1900 show at the at the Met and being blown away. It’s hard to appreciate the sheer size of the painting in reproduction, which is as sprawling as the child herself. The freedom of the brushstrokes gives this work a tremendous energy, which is itself a paradox considering the lazing posture of the little girl. Cassatt not only copied the Impressionists but internalized the spirit of their movement. No other American so beautifully translates the French mystique of the Impressionists to an American setting. Cassatt was fortunate in that her family’s fortune freed her to follow her dream and pursue it all the way to Europe. How many other artists—women, African-Americans—would have flourished given a similar chance? Looking at Cassatt’s paintings, you truly appreciate how much more there could have been.

Gentle Mentor

When I saw the Pioneering Modern Painting: Cezanne and Pissarro 1865-1885 exhibit at the MOMA in 2005, I came away with a greater understanding of Paul Cezanne, whom I already knew very well, but I also came away with a greater appreciation and affection for Camille Pissarro, born on July 10, 1830. (Cezanne [on the left] and Pissarro [on the right] appear above, heavily bearded and ready for some en plein air painting.) Pissarro’s great-grandson, Joachim, Head Curator of Drawing and Painting at the MOMA, curated that show, so you could accuse him of understandable bias, but I think that the gentleness and generosity of Pissarro, “the father of Impressionism” in the eyes of many, transcends any bias.




Born on the island of St. Thomas, Pissarro’s mixed lineage of Portuguese Sephardic Jew made him an outsider even among the outsiders of nineteenth century French art. After studying under Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet, Pissarro himself painted in a realistic style that soon evolved into proto-Impressionism. In works such as The Garden at Pontoise (above), you can see the softness and gentleness as well as the master draftsmanship of Pissarro. Pissarro, in turn, became a mentor and friend to other artists, such as Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas. All of these artists spoke of Pissarro with respect and love in later years, even as their reputations soon eclipsed his.



One of the great features of the MOMA exhibit in 2005 was the ability to see the same scene painted by Cezanne and Pissarro from different perspectives, as if you were there on that day, walking from one artist’s easel to the other, seeing the same world through two different, yet complimentary eyes. Few other artists convey to me this same warmth of community within the art world. The Romantic notion of the artist as individual rebel often conflicts with the reality of just how close a community these artists tried to forge. Van Gogh longed for a community of artists in Arles, failing to connect with Gauguin. Pissarro’s genius, however, allowed him to see the genius of others, even the cantankerous Cezanne, and embrace their differences and find common ground. In works such as Haymakers Resting (above), we see Pissarro toy with proto-Pointillism before giving that up and returning to more standard Impressionism. Such versatility of technique goes hand in hand with Pissarro’s versatility of spirit—his ego and artistic soul was large enough to encompass not only different styles but also different artists. Pissarro remains one of the many “minor” masters deserving of greater repute.

[BTW, The Jewish Museum in New York will feature an exhibit titled Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country this September. ]

Master of the Sky

“You are the master of the sky!” Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot once said to Eugene Boudin, born on July 12, 1824. Master of both sky and sea, having once been a seaman, Boudin broke new ground and was among the first French landscapists to paint en plein air. Beach Scene at Trouville (above) demonstrates Boudin’s dominion as well as his early proto-Impressionist technique.

Boudin worked at a small art shop run by his father, who gave up the sea-going life early. Working in the shop, Boudin met artists such as Jean-Francoise Millet and the Dutchman Johan Jongkind, who encouraged Boudin to take his painting outdoors. In 1857, the 33-year-old Boudin met the 17-year-old Claude Monet, the beginning of a life-long friendship. Monet later exhibited in Boudin’s shop and acknowledged his debt to Boudin. In 1859, Boudin met Gustave Courbet, who thought enough of his work to introduce Boudin to Charles Baudelaire, whose reviews of Boudin’s work helped him find an audience. Despite his connection to Monet and even exhibiting with the Impressionists, Boudin resisted the Impressionist label. Even today, he’s seen more as a maritime painter thanks to works such as Trouville, Awaiting the Tide (above).

As Pissarro was to Cezanne and other artists, Boudin was to the young Monet—helpful mentor, generous friend, and gentle teacher. In the standard history of Impressionism, Monet and Cezanne seem to come out of nowhere. It doesn’t belittle their genius to say that even they stood on the shoulders of others who may not themselves have been giants, but who certainly deserve remembrance.

Rejuvenating Barbarism

“To me, barbarism is a rejuvenation,” boasted Paul Gauguin, the French Post-Impressionist famous for “going native” and those 9 tumultuous weeks in Arles living with Van Gogh, born on this date in 1848. His Self Portrait With Yellow Christ appears above. Gauguin lived the dream that every over-civilized person dreams of: breaking the bondage of a boring job (he was a stockbroker) and going off to live among beautiful natives in a beautiful island paradise. Gauguin arrived in Tahiti on June 8, 1891, the day after his 43rd birthday, in what was essentially a rebirth for him as an artist.

Gauguin’s mind was a cauldron of influences: his time spent with Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne learning technique, his fascination with European Folk Art, the love of Japonisme that he shared with Van Gogh, and ultimately the primitivism he embraced in his time in Tahiti. All of these influences were seamlessly coupled with his deep spirituality. As can be seen in his Yellow Christ (above), the same painting in the background of the Self Portrait at the top of this post, the flat areas of color reflect the influence of Japonisme, but the peasant dress of the women at the foot of the Cross pays homage to the simple people documented in Folk Art, while the strong outlines separating the colors and lack of perspective mimic more primitive art styles. Gauguin’s Yellow Christ transcends time and culture in embracing all of these elements and more. The sum of these influences far exceeds the expressive power of the parts.

An even more blatant appropriation of Christian imagery appears in La Orana Maria (Ave Maria) (above). Gauguin recasts the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus as Polynesian mother and child in native dress but with the classic halos representing holiness. The tropical background and tropical acceptance of nudity (as seen in the topless women paying homage to the Tahitian Mary) defy all Eurocentric expectations of what such a devotional scene should be. Clearly, Gauguin felt great respect for these people and what their culture’s different perspective could offer, as can be seen in his memoir of the time, Noa Noa. It’s hard today to appreciate fully the power of the tropics’ exoticism held on the imagination of Western civilization. (For example, when Herman Melville, a contemporary of Gauguin, was alive, he was known as “the man who lived with the cannibals” and wrote about it in his popular works Typee and Omoo and not as the author of Moby-Dick.)

I’m always intrigued by such eclectic, inclusive spirituality as that seen in Gauguin’s work. I believe in catholicism (little “c”), i.e., universality, in my Catholicism (big “C”). Gauguin never left the islands, dying of syphilis in 1903 and finding his final resting place in the Marquesas. The Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the Gnostic Catholic Church, sainted Gauguin (a distinction he shares with William Blake), showing that even sainthood is in the eye of the beholder. Devil or angel, sinner or saint, Gauguin speaks to a deeper, perhaps darker side of us all.

Woman of the World

More than just a painter of mothers and children, Mary Cassatt made inroads into the male-dominated world of art as few women had done before her. Cassatt celebrates her 163rd birthday today.

Born in what is today Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1844, Cassatt studied at the PAFA before growing tired of the old boys network there and traveling to Europe. After studying the works of the old masters in her travels to the capitals of Europe, Cassatt studied with Camille Pissarro, who first introduced her to Impressionism. She soon discovered the works of Edgar Degas, who supported Cassatt’s art and greatly influenced her approach to pastels. (Degas’ painting Mary Cassatt at the Louvre is above.) Cassatt may also owe some of her obsessive approach to the subject of mothers and children to Degas’ similar obsession with dancers and the theater.

I’d like, however, to show aspects of Cassatt beyond the great mother-child images. Like many of the Impressionists, Cassatt was influenced by Japanese art in the Japonisme craze of the late 19th century. Cassatt’s Boating Party (seen above) shows this Japanese influence in the cropped figure of the rower at the right. In addition, this work takes the familiar motif of mother and child and adds psychological depth with the almost sinister figure of the rower, whose dark presence in the foreground seems to threaten the other two figures. Such psychological depth helps dismiss characterizations of Cassatt as a “pretty” painter. Cassatt’s wide-ranging interests, including women’s suffrage in the United States and late-in-life travels to exotic Egypt, testify to her seriousness as an artist as well.

After seeing last year Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Americans in Paris: 1860-1900, I had even greater respect for her as an artist. Viewing the brushstrokes up close and then stepping back to put it all back into focus, the designs on the blue chairs are nothing short of amazing. Even the composition that goes into the dog at left cannot be done justice in reproduction. The pose of the little girl, with its almost eroticized undertones, raises this work beyond the deceivingly comfortable sphere of her mother and child works.

Like John Singer Sargent, Cassatt is an American who always seems more European than anything else. Fortunately, they both belong to the whole world today.