PAINTERS OF THE PEOPLE

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 88, 15 April 1939, Page 3 (Supplement)

PAINTERS OF THE PEOPLE

ByJess Duff

IN the early history of pictorial art, religious subjects were the main concern of painters, and next to these the notabilities of the period. At that time no one thought to paint a tree in the field, per se, any more than a man in the street. But recordings of cloister and court are hardly representative enough and artists gradually discovered and noted clown in pigment that deep and enduring relation between man and the soil. Dynasties may rise and fall, technoligical methods may wax and wane, but in every land there is always the countryman tilling, ploughing and sowing, and the artisan in the factory. But long before the democratisation of art, the splendours of court life necessitated aristocratic painters of the calibre of Giorgione, Yelaquez and Van Dyck. Ma"ny able portraits of famous men and women survive, telling grandly of past glories. However, a painter of Rembrandt's size includes all humanity for his subjects and his nobles are usually un- ' named. Hals, too, a lesser man, ranges high and low, making hearty serving girls and inebriated lute players, as well as solid Dutch burghers, worthy of his brush. As for the scallywag of painting, Goya, wo find the rebelliousness of the man ' reflected clearly in the subjects he ', chooses to express. Living in all the ' upheaval of the Napoleonic period, Goya ] took the side of the Spanish people in the Napoleonic invasion. J But earlier still, the brothers le Nain ( in Prague and Breughel in Flanders be- i gin to depict the anonymous peasant life around them. Although painted so long ago, Breughel's studies of the folk at ' their various occupations still take the eye- with their astonishing aptness and style. His closely detailed documentaries of contemporary life will become increasingly valuable as time goes on. Indeed, a film was built around his life only last year: La Kermesse Trersique. Following on the splendid mythology of the early Italians, the early Dutch I painters, with an eye more for character than abstract beauty, brought a ' sober domestic note into art. Their neat paintings of homely interiors, in which even the light falls decorously, are still treasured. J If Ver Meer, of Delft, paints many a satin clad lady of quality in his own incomparable way, he deals just as , choicely with a robust peasant girl holding a milk jug. In Ostadc's and Jan Steen's jolly, crowded interiors, we get the more convivial side of Dutch life. Only a decade or so ago, the brothers ' Maris, Anton Mauve and Israels continued to record the homely reality around them and Israels sits always at > the feet of the great Rembrandt. ! Let us glance for a second at France. . As is natural, the French revolution gave us a fresh orientation to the arts. ' France of that time had a strong republican leaning. This is obvious in the ' work of Courbtel who portrayed revolu- ' tionary themes as well as peasants from ' his native Jura. To-day the Mexican ' mural painters Rivera and Orozco are ' creating on the grand scale what ' Courbtel, for a few years, tried to do in ' a smaller way. I am not so sure that Millet did any ' service to folk art. His approach was I too sentimental and he depicts a peasant ' life too antiseptically removed from any grit or harshness. If we want to know what the French townsman looked like 1 in the 'sixties and 'seventies of last century, Daumier is the draughtsman to show us. His commentaries of the social scene have a real bite and appositeness: ' always he sees more than meets the ■ eye—in short, he sees too much. In a, ' world of dissolving art values, Daumier is holding, remarkably well. J Among the impressionists, Degas ' shows with a merciless realism a mil- '' liner fixing a ribbon on a hat, an ironer with hunched shoulders, a thin little ! ballet dancer off stage, stopping to massage tired ankles. His objectivity does not conceal a feeling of pathos for ' the struggling poor. Following on ■ Degas' lead. Toulouse-Lautrec goes further and gives us the dregs of the Parisian underworld. But Renoir's girls ! are neither ladies nor shopgirls— merely luscious fruits and flowers 1 plucked from any garden. . The German peasant Barlach carves in wood starkly simplified figures. Meunier sculpts with tremendous power and con- ] ciseness the figures of Belgian artisans. ( But no artist I have known identifies , himself so completely with the prole- s tariat aa Vincent van Gogh. The son j of a Lutheran pastor, the young van Gogh from earliest infancy made B close < contacts with the rank and file. When i he began to paint he gravitated natu- < rally to the black country, the Borinage i among the miners. * ° ' ' Far from regarding himself as an ! "artist," Vincent not only thought of < himself as a plain workman, hut lived like the lowliest workers, sharing their hard life, often giving up his bed to a <

poor miner and sleeping in sheds. Even if, most of the time, he lived like a beggar, he pushed on relentlessly with the study of his craft. He painted weedburners, weaver women emptying ashbins; still lifes of a piece of ground with lumps of coal, a kitchen chair, a brass kettle, a pair of old shoes. A friend of mine told me that nothing in all art has moved him so much as von Gogh's study of old shoes. In all that he painted, strong feeling and compassion were uppermost. In letters to his brother Theo, without whose help and sympathetic understanding van Gogh could not have gone on, he declares tljat those who paint the life of the peasant may not belong to men of the moment, but in the long run are likely to hold out longer than painters of exotic harems and cardinals' receptions. Always there is this cryto be simple, to be one with toilinf humanity. When he painted the "Potato Eaters," van Gogli tried to make it clear how these people, eating their potatoes under lamplight have dug the earth with those • hands they put into the dish. This identification with the oppressed was not the result of political convictions, but sprang from the inordinate warmth and intensity of his sympathies, a sympathy more Christlike than any that'l know. With a flash of prophetic insight van Gogli writes of some of his canvases ! "which, even in the deluge, will retain ' their peace." But peace was not for ' him! 1 -J