I was almost an art history major. What could be better, thought I, than sitting around all day gazing at beautiful images. But there were two problems: At the time my small Maine college barely had an art history department having one professor who taught all the courses; and secondly, an art history degree was worth about a nickel more than a philosophy degree.
Fortunately, the lessons I would learn about beauty also resided in abundance just outside the classroom and would coincide with my emerging interests in the environment and public policy. This happened early in the 1970s upon meeting the elder statesman of the Maine Legislature, Representative Ezra Briggs, as quintessential a Mainer as I ever had the pleasure to meet, and a strident defender of the state’s environment. He also had the distinction of speaking with a Maine accent so pronounced that my New Jersey-trained ears were always stunned when he spoke.
At the time, he was persuading the state legislature to oppose the proposed Dickey-Lincoln hydroelectric dam. Its construction would have blocked the St. John’s River, the last free-flowing wilderness waterway in the eastern United States. The region was in the remote, nearly roadless northern reaches of Maine, which prompted one legislative proponent of the dam to challenge Mr. Briggs’ opposition. He argued that the dam’s location was so inaccessible that nobody will ever see it, so why protect it? The bent and bow-tied Mr. Briggs rose slowly from his seat and said, “I may never have a chance to see the National Art Gallery in Washington, DC, but I’m darn sure I don’t want it turned into a rubber factory!” He proceeded to wonder out loud if vast numbers of sightseers were a prerequisite to staving off beauty’s destruction. Ezra prevailed that day. The Dickey-Lincoln dam was never built preserving a beautiful waterway as forever wild, whether you ever see it or not.
Artists Help Us See and Feel
Just to be safe, I thought I’d better start taking in some of those art galleries before they are turned into a 21st century equivalent of a rubber factory, like say a Presidential ballroom. Not too long ago I found myself entranced for a deeply pleasing, contemplative moment by a scene of several robust French women wielding hayforks, some resting from their farm toils or removing extra layers of clothing on a warm summer day. Their long skirts are like drapery, hems touching the ground, and their blouses, while loose and functional, appreciatively reveal their feminine curves. My muscles strain in sympathy with their harvest labor, even as their figures and the textures of their clothing blend with the land, trees, and a distant field hand or two. The bright colors of their clothing mirror the hot flush in their fleshy cheeks, indeed the vibrant health of their physiques and choregraphed nature of their movements compose a scene of easy harmony with nature.
This 1901 composition I’m enjoying is titled Haymaking at Eragny and is one of over 100 paintings by the early French Impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro assembled late last year by the Denver Art Museum (DAM). The exhibition, The Honest Eye – Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism (the exhibition closed in February)*, pays homage to a man considered both a pre-cursor and mentor to such Impressionist luminaries as Monet, Cezanne, and Mary Cassatt. But most notably he was an artist who brought a realistic perspective to the relationship between humankind and nature. Gazing at Pissarro’s farm fields, vegetable gardens, women tending farms or selling at farmers’ markets, I sense the painter’s intrusive presence dissipate and the low thrum of strolling museum patrons reduced to silence. I’m transported through the canvas to the scene and held captive by the light, the color, even the imagined smell of tilled earth and hard-working bodies. As the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel said in eulogy to Pissarro: “It’s the life of the land that Camille Pissarro expresses, without sentimentality…. When he paints figures in scenes of agrarian life, man always takes his proper place within a vast earthly harmony.”
While growing out of the same stylistic tradition as Monet and Van Gogh who lavished their painterly eyes on water lilies and sunflowers, Pissarro rarely composed his farms, gardens, and markets without the warm and subtle presence of humanity. The DAM’s exhibition catalogue stresses Pissarro’s political convictions—he had strong anarchist sympathies rejecting the institutions of government, the army, and even the Paris Salon, the high church of sanctioned art at the time—as an underlying reason for his generous and empathetic depictions of peasant life. Pissarro’s people were not the toiling, subsistence farmers of his contemporary Jean-Francois Millet whose well-known dark, shadowy paintings The Gleaners (1857) and Angelus (1857-59) evoke our pity. Viewing Millet in my college art history classes, I was brought close to tears in much the same way that Dorothea Lange’s black and white photographs of the American Dust Bowl’s victims did. Pissarro’s “peasants” are small, independent landowners that are well-fed, never sentimentalized or romanticized, and affirm a healthy relationship with the land that is the source of their livelihoods.
As I jockeyed for a good viewing position among the other gallery goers, moving from paintings
of larger fields tended by vigorous women, to gardens whose cabbages and gardeners appear rooted to the same earth, to the village marketplace where Pissarro’s frames were filled with an abundance of produce and jostling bodies, I experienced a revelation: I was viewing what might be the first artistic portrayal of a local food system! I could barely contain my joy amidst the hubbub of art lovers, most of whose thoughts of food were limited to the approaching lunch hour and the draw of the DAM’s hip cafes.
As a food system aficionado but also an amateur art critic, I run the risk of letting the social or political content of a painting supersede its stylistic and methodical achievements. After all, Pissarro would never have won the acclaim he did by becoming a community food system advocate. A back-handed compliment of sorts was handed to him by a notable art critic of his day, Jules-Antoine Castagnary who cracked that Pissarro “has a deplorable penchant for market gardens…But these errors of logic or vulgarities of taste do not alter his fine qualities of execution.” It’s one of those age-old arguments waged in the higher echelons of the arts’ world: should beauty serve itself, or should beauty serve a higher purpose, presumably social or political. Great art, beauty raised to the level of exalted human expression, can be both personally inspirational and sufficiently political to arouse one to action — to fight those who will turn farmland into a grotesquely ugly feature of modern-day life (e.g., data centers), or to confront those who degrade the stranger in our midst seeking a life free of violence and hunger. As the poet William Carlos Williams said, “Beauty is a defiance of authority.”
The artist’s power, after all, is in their empathy, in their ability to remove the distance between themselves and the objects of their fascination, and then render for the viewer, the reader, or the listener that experience in ways that are both authentic and moving. It does not mean that the artist must become the object—the person, the place, the cause—or know all that can be reasonably known about the thing before setting paint to canvas or notes to string. They draw on unique capabilities to sense in ways that don’t come as naturally to most of us. In the context of agrarian life and the role of the painter, Pissarro said it best: “…it seems to me that one [the artist] has to be enthusiastic for one’s subject to render it well, but is it necessary to be a peasant? Let’s be artists first, and we’ll have the faculty of appreciating everything…without being a peasant.”
I’ll note one ironic twist to this declaration. Pissarro, his wife, and their six children had settled into a rented house in the French countryside in order for him to pursue his art free of Paris and its blatherings over what constituted correct forms of painting. Since his sales had yet to reach the point where they supported his large household, Madame Pissarro toiled daily in the property’s large garden both to feed the family and earn some cash from the farmers’ market. For his part, Pissarro would often sit comfortably inside the house painting his wife at work, her knees in the dirt and back bent to the laborious task of cultivation (paying her no modeling fees presumably). At the end of a hard day, one can only imagine the madame, hands red and stiff, nails encrusted with dirt, saying to the monsieur, “Mon Cher, perhaps it’s time you got a real job!”
Putting Beauty to Work for Policy Change
In the late 1990s, we discovered that Connecticut was losing a higher percentage of its farmland than any other state. As part of a public education campaign, the Connecticut Food Policy Council that I was working with convened a conference to address the topic. After hearing about cost of services studies, the fine points of zoning regulations, the economics of farming and farmland, and the arguments of developers, one person in the audience meekly raised his hand, and in a soft voice asked, “What about beauty? Does that matter when we’re asked to choose between farmland and a new subdivision?” The 150 people in the room murmured their assent.
That day launched a yearslong campaign to protect the state’s remaining farmland and enhance its food and farming enterprises. Open air painters were enlisted to capture the seasons and changing light on fields and barns; chefs, brewers, and vintners were solicited and challenged to create and display the beauty of the harvest; celebrities volunteered to inspire audiences with the power and majesty of the land (the memory of Meryl Streep’s kiss on my cheek lingers to this day). Yes, lobbyists were hired and legislators were hammered with all the arguments that could be mustered. And in the end, good policies emerged that embodied the love of beauty and saved thousands of acres.
Waxing sentimental about a beautiful farmscape might seem easy for non-farmers whose only source of callouses and sweat may be a vigorous pickleball game. But farmers have an aesthetic sensibility too, albeit one that is more rooted in the earth. Robin Chesmer is a Connecticut dairy farmer who operates a 900-acre farm and became a leader in the state’s effort to preserve nearly 50,000 acres of farmland. One day he described for me how he puts his love for the land into practice by turning it into a canvas: “Doing contours over the fields with my tractor, alternating hay with corn with fallow earth; finding the right shape and pattern across the slopes is as much an artistic expression as it a means to control runoff and erosion. There is a blend of art…it’s as much beauty as it is business.”
As a gardener I’m motivated by Pissarro’s Vegetable Garden, Overcast Morning, Eragny (1901).
I want my rows neat and tidy separated by distinct bands of brown earth unchoked by weeds; I want splotches of flowery color highlighting my borders and enlivening the scene in contrast to the varying green shades of vegetable plants; I want myself and my willing workers walking slowly among the plants, picking something for dinner; at the edges and nearby I want fences, church spires, and buildings expressing their human bond with nature. Call it a sustainable and harmonious juxtaposition of activities where one footprint is not so large that it intrudes on another.
Beauty matters, even in the cauldron of political, environmental, and economic conflict. A tree in the Catskill Mountains, a rolling meadow laced by a stone wall in the British countryside, a well-mowed field in Connecticut, or a haystack in the setting sun of 19th century France awaken emotions that too often lay dormant. Like Ezra Briggs, we may never hike those hills nor sit admiringly in those fields, but we sure as hell don’t want them turned into data centers. To that end, breathtaking exhibits like DAM’s Honest Eye give us access to a world of inspiring beauty that we might otherwise never see. They may also goad us into action to ensure that natural beauty is there forever.
*I wish to express my gratitude to the Denver Art Museum and its partners for their preparation of The Honest Eye – Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism. For more information see The Honest Eye – Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism – The Shops at the Denver Art Museum