MPS MEN PORTRAITS SERIES n°4 version française
AT WORK ! English translation : Ann Menuhin
menportraits.blogspot.com © Francis Rousseau 2011-2020
MEN PORTRAITS __________________ AT WORK !
The Limburg Brothers (1380-1416) The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry (1410-1485) July Folio Musée Condé, Chantilly
This is two types of work nested in one: the first being the actual production of the Book of Hours itself which represents a work spanning over 75 years; the second being the daily activities of the Middle Ages, each described in minute detail. Duke John I of Berry commissioned the three painter brothers Paul, Jean and Herman of Limburg around 1410-11 to create this book of hours, The Very Rich Hours. Unfinished at the death of the three painters and their sponsor, all four victims of the plague, it is generally accepted that it was continued by an anonymous painter in the 1440s, and finally completed before 1485-1486 by the painter Jean Colombe on behalf of the Duke of Savoy who was then the owner of the work. This sumptuous book acquired by the Duke of Aumale in 1856, is still preserved today at the Château de Chantilly where it must remain in accordance with the terms of the legacy. This impressive medieval work contains a total of 206 folio pages, the manuscript itself consisting of 66 large miniatures and 65 small. The Calendar it contains is probably the most famous set of illuminated miniatures in any book ... and in the Middle Ages in general. This Calendar allows the reader to identify the prayer corresponding to the day of the year and the time of day, according to the activities and work detailed therein ... The month presented here is the month of July which was most likely painted by Paul de Limbourg and not by the anonymous painter, but expert opinions on this subject still diverge even today. The field work that characterised this summer month in the northern hemisphere in the Middle Ages was mainly harvesting and shearing sheep. Regarding the harvest: we see two figures who mow the wheat using a a long open sickle the handle of which is at an angle with the flat of the blade and a rod with which they separate a bundle of wheat shafts that they then cut by throwing the sickle. To carry out their task, the harvesters advanced from the outside of the plot to the center. They rested from time to time to sharpen their sickles with a stone that one of them wears on their belt. Regarding the shearing: we see two people, including a woman in a bright blue dress, who cut the wool on the back of the animals using forcec or shears. Overall (mountainous reliefs aside) the landscape is inspired by reality with, in the foreground, the Boivre river which flows into the Clain, spanned by a wooden covered access ramp that leads to the triangular castle of Poitiers, built from 1378 by the architect Guy de Dammartin for the Duke of Berry.
MEN PORTRAITS __________________ AT WORK !
A true example of thematic eclecticism, the work of Charley Garry (1891-1973) (not to be confused with his American namesake Charles Garry 1909-1991) focused on many different areas of society including the working world of his time. Having built his reputation on his paintings of Paris in the Roaring Twenties, of which he was an essential figure having become the painter of the French Cancan as well as the fresco artist of the famous Brasserie Lipp in Paris, he also discreetly became the champion of the mining conditions by literally heroising the Gueules Noirs (black maws) or miners. His mining fresco which covers the ceiling of the Carreau de Faulquemont is the only and last witness, but what a witness! Despite this, Garry the African, as a critic dubbed him, remained best known for his paintings extolling the feminine beauties of colonial equatorial Africa, and never left the subcategory of erotic painters, a category fairly despised in the 20th century , except for a few big collectors like the press boss Daniel Filipachi, for example. However there still remains this mining fresco in 5 paintings designed for the Coal mines of Lorraine.
Charley Garry (1891-1973) Charley Garry (1891-1973) Miner and jackhammer, 1935 Ceiling of the Carreau de Faulquemont Coal Mines of the Lorraine Basin
The fresco is classified and we can still see it today, although few visitors make the connection between these black faces at work and the carefree figures of the other classified fresco of Garry, the ceiling of the Brasserie Lipp! In the painting opposite, even the jackhammer held by the underground miner says a lot about the work he does and its dangers. This model became widespread in mines from 1925, replacing the ancient rivelles (pickaxe with two points) and axes used for manual extraction. Specialists will not fail to note that the model chosen by Charles Garry for his painting of Faulquemont is not equipped with a water spraying system, only the compressed air which is connected by a hose (on the left). As seen here, this tool exposed the miner to the inhalation of mineral particles that caused an irreversible and fatal lung disease: silicosis. This hit coal miners from 1925, during the generalised use of jackhammers and then cutters. Collateral health damage was not often imputed to the working instrument itself but more to the chemical composition of the coal…. which was wrong.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK !
Léon Bonnat (1833-1922) The Negro Barber in Suez, 1876 Curties Galleries, Minneapolis
Pupil of Léon Cogniet, great admirer of Ingres, the painter Lépn Bonnat was the master of the official as well as the bourgeois portrait of the end of the 19th century: the presidents of the Third Republic Jules Ferry, Adolphe Thiers, Emile Loubet, the duke d'Aumale, prominent writers and artists such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas junior or the famous actress la Pasca posed in front of his easel. A trip to the Orient in 1870 gave Bonnat a taste for picturesque and exotic scenes. The canvases which he exhibited that year at the Salon, Une paysanne Egyptienne et son enfant (An Egyptien peasant and her child) (The MET) and Le Barbier nègre à Suez (The Negro Barber in Suez) (opposite) are commented by Emile Zola in these terms: “His Barbier
nègre à Suez, shaving another negro who is seated on the ground, recalls Gérome's compositions". Zola then counts Bonnat among the artists who, "in spite of themselves" advance naturalism in the conquest of the School of Fine Arts. Today, we are still struck by the condescension of the 19th century (including Zola) with regard to the figure of the "negro". Bonnat at least sought to find out what the profession of the man we see standing was and to describe it, by painstakingly painting his barbering gesture. Zola sees him as "only one negro shaving another negro seated on the ground" uniquely worthy of interest for the colorful exoticism he arouses. The profession of this man and his ability to handle the cabbage cutter (name of his hand razor): nothing! His improvised stall in a corner of the city on a carpet thrown onto the ground for the comfort of the customer: nothing! The ingenuity of the client's posture, whose head rests confidently - and with a certain eroticism - on the most intimate parts of the barber: especially nothing! Where Zola seems to say "Move around there is nothing to see" Bonnat says on the contrary: "Stop, everything here
is worth describing: the job, who does it, the way he does it, the client and the decor… "
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK!
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. Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) Young Man at Lathe (c. 1936-37) The Brooklyn Museum, New York .
From his beginnings, and until the 1920s, the American photographer Lewis Wickes Hine had a resolutely sociological approach to his profession. Declaring that he wanted to "show things that needed to be corrected", he was one of the first to use photography as a documentary tool, as a living testimony to the state of society, announcing in advance the work he was going to pioneer in the 1930s for the Farm Security Administration. His reports in factories (opposite) contributed to a better awareness of social problems in the United States. The job described in this photo and performed by a fairly young worker, is that of a lathe operator who makes it possible to execute on a lathe the machining process known as turning. The lathe is a very old tool, the first copies of which are documented from the period of Pharaonic Egypt around 1300 before the Christian era. Its first known representation on a fresco dates from the 3rd century BC. There is also evidence of its existence on a Mycenaean Greek site, dating back to the 13th or 14th century BC, when it appears to have appeared. We also have traces, around the year 400 of our era, of examples of rotary lathes in China, where the inhabitants used them to sharpen tools and weapons already produced in an industrial way.
At the end of the 19th century, during the industrial revolution, the mechanical power generated by hydraulics and steam was applied to the lathe via the camshaft allowing faster and easier work. The metalworking lathe then became a fairly large machine tool with thicker and more rigid parts. Between the end of the 19th and the middle of the 20th century, individual electric motors mounted on each tower replaced the camshafts. From the 1950s, thanks to research by MIT and IBM,servomechanisms were coupled to the control of lathes and other machine tools via a numerical control associated with computers, a technology known as CNC (Computer Numerical Control ). In the traditional lathing profession as seen in this photo by Hine, the speed of rotation chosen according to the material and the diameter of the part, is constant. On CNC lathes a programming function (called G96 in FANUC language) allows an evolving rotation speed, dynamically recalculated with respect to the machined diameter. This feature allows you to achieve surface conditions far superior to traditional turning. Today, manual and CNC lathes coexist in the manufacturing industries.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK!
John Neagle (1796-1860) Pat Lyon at his Forge (c. 1826-27) The Boston Museum of Fine Arts
This portrait of the famous American businessman and inventor of the first fire pumps and fire trucks, Patrick Lyon, is very unusual. It is one of the only portraits which shows a person of this importance directly and personally engaged in the manual labor (in this case that of the forge) which made him famous. When he commissioned John Neagle to paint his portrait, Patrick Lyon was already a rich and prosperous man, but it was on the condition sine qua non that the artist painted him as a worker in front of his tools of the trade that the order was confirmed. The painter was both surprised and intrigued by this request; indeed at the beginning of the XIXth century, in the very young United States of America, the personalities who had succeeded in business and who could afford to commission a portrait of themselves, generally preferred to be represented in the fine suits of a businessman surrounded by the precious objects that their fortune had allowed them to amass rather than as a blacksmith, underground miner, fabric merchant or worker! When the painter asked his sponsor the reason for his request, Patrick Lyon replied: "I am
not a gentleman, I never have been and I see no reason to be represented as such. I am a blacksmith, a worker and I represent myself at work in front of my forge. Show in this painting that the task of the workers is noble and I will be satisfied ... ". This contempt for the establishment had a very specific reason: at the beginning of his career, Lyon had been accused - wrongly - of a robbery at the Bank of Philadelphia whose headquarters were located in the premises of the Masonic Lodge of the city . Lyon was imprisoned for 3 months under very severe conditions for this false theft! After this incident which left a lasting mark on him, he became a hero among the city workers and made it a point of honour to always be described as an honest blacksmith at work rather than as a member of a higher class which he associated with injustice and lies. This is also the reason why Pat Lyon insisted that the painter Neagle include the prison in which he had been so harshly detained in his portrait, in this case the dome of the prison chapel, in the upper left of composition, behind the apprentice. The unusual character of this portrait was highly regarded in its time and would definitively launch Neagle's career, still a young artist (29 years old), by bringing him numerous commissions. This portrait still remains today, moreover, his most famous work.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK !
Long considered an amateur painter, collector and patron, Gustave Caillebotte appears today as one of the major figures of the Impressionist group. Famous for his compositions inspired by Haussmann's Paris, he devoted a significant part of his production to the evocation of gardens. He painted his first studies "sur le motif" or in the open air in the family home of Yerres, before acquiring a property at Petit Gennevilliers where he created a sumptuous garden and built a greenhouse. Like his friend Claude Monet, with whom he shared a passion for horticulture, he favored the evocation of the plant universe. This painting makes it possible to judge the extent of his vegetable garden which required the employment of at least two gardeners. The glass bells of the model seen here, acting as individual mini greenhouses, were used to protect salads and hasten their development.
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) The Gardeners Private collection
Watering was then still practiced with stainless steel watering cans as we can see them represented. In the art world, Caillebotte's talent was little known, except in the United States where his first exhibitions met with immediate great success. The Americans even consider him as one of the founders of the realist school, illustrated for example in the 20th century by the painter Edward Hopper. In Europe, Caillebotte, best known for having been the patron of impressionist painters, was rediscovered as a painter in the 1970s on the initiative of American collectors. Retrospectives of his works are now frequent. Fortunately, he did not need to sell his paintings to live. His descendants still own almost 70% of his works. Some of his paintings are at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK!
Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) Galley slave at work, 1585-90 Jan Krugier Foundation
The man represented in this drawing by Annibale Carraci is a galley slave, that is to say a man working on a galley, a fairly small warship. In the sixteenth century, each galley counted on average 260 galley slaves disposed 5 men per bench, a figure that increased to 450 men and 7 per bench on a Réale (the galley of the general of the fleet) or a Patronne (that of the lieutenant general ). There were three categories of galley slaves: so-called "Turkish" slaves, volunteers or "benevoglies" and convicts or "forcats". Turks were bought in the slave markets of Livorno, Venice or Malta and most often came from Africa. There were no holds barred in this trade in human beings, some were captured at sea like the fishermen off Tunisia or during voyages on land like the Muslim pilgrims en route to Mecca. There were also Guineans, but they were quickly decimated by the cold. For a time, lacking African manpower, American Iroquois were captured and sent to the galleys, the Turks nonetheless represented a stable workforce of 20%. The volunteers or benevoglies, were, for their part, beggars who received a meagre pay for this cursed profession but lived in the same deplorable conditions as the others, crammed into the "chiourme" or the hold of the ship without any hygiene . Just as in Imperial Rome and in the Middle Ages, they were recruited for very targeted and time-limited war campaigns. As conditions became more and more harsh over the centuries, they were replaced by convicts. The convicts went to the galleys by court order to serve a sentence known as the "penalty of the galleys". It was equivalent in France, according to the criminal law practiced under the Ancien Régime, to a sentence of forced labor. Immediately upon sentencing the convicts were sent to the royal galleys to row for more or less long periods or until they died. The same penalties were applied by the Republics of Venice and Genoa, and the Spanish and Ottoman empires, but the kingdom of France, especially under Louis XIV, was the most zealous at this work.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK ! Vladimir Aleksandrovich Seróv (1910-1968) Portrait of a worker, 1960
This picture was painted precisely the year when growth officially started to slow in the USSR. In this year 1960, the USSR was led until May by Marshal Kliment and from May on by Leonid Brezhnev whose legendary authoritarianism led him twice to the head of the Supreme Soviet, from 1960 to 1964 and 1977 until his death 5 years later. 1960 is therefore the year that the authorities chose to commission from the official painter of the regime, Vladimir Serov, President of the Academy of Fine Arts, this propaganda portrait showing a muscular and very serious hero-worker, grappling with a mysterious notebook that demonstrates his willingness to both follow the Plan's instructions to the letter and to be a good servant of the Party! In the USSR, the interwar period and the post-war period were periods of significant economic growth, growth which the regime attributed to the alliance of five-year planning and forced labor. And indeed, if we believe the figures (still questionable considering they are from the authorities of the time!): Between 1913 and 1989, per capita income was multiplied by 4.6, in the USSR, against 3.3 in Great Britain, 3.8 in the United States, 5.1 in France or 5.4 in Germany. When the economic growth slowed down, just as this picture was being painted, the all-powerful Communist Party in the country saw this slowdown as a temporary and transient epiphenomanum.
In reality, those responsible for the Plan appeared incapable of foreseeing economic problems. Worse: while the very concept of a planned economy seems difficult (if not impossible) to implement in the context of a rapidly changing capitalist world economy, internally, the Administration of Planning turned out to be literally paralysed by bureaucracy. The Nomenklatura, very corrupt, proved to be much more attached to its own privileges than to the service of the State or the Party! As early as 1979, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov published in the official press a series of articles which alarmingly explained that the Americans were at least two generations ahead in the fields of electronics and especially computers, and that "it will never be possible for the USSR to catch up with them in these areas". In the 1980s, the USSR therefore launched the emergency development of a microcomputer sector (DVK series computers and Elektronika-0). But nothing would do the trick! The Soviet economy, almost exclusively dependent on arms production and the military and space industries, would literally collapse in a few years. In 1992, a year after the breakup of the USSR, the country reported an inflation of 2,520% following the deregulation of most of the prices which had been fixed by the administration. The thoughtful air of this worker in front of his plan illustrates the lies of this propaganda.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK!
Gustave Roud (1897-1976) Swiss farmer, 1940 "Peasants Bodies" Photographic print on paper Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne
The "Corps de Paysans" series is an important, even essential, part of Gustave Roud's photography. Generally posing with his chest bare, the young peasant in the field expresses an imagery of manly power. Far from the photo journalism of the countryside, these series show a repetitive shooting protocol with different models. The peasant celebrated in the photograph stands out from the literary figure of Aimé, insofar as he looks more like a Greek statue or an athlete than the intercessor angel. Model par excellence, Fernand Cherpillod allowed the photographer to set up a peasant aesthetic close to agricultural athletics or a man above all attuned to the land. Taking off at the end of the thirties, this aesthetic, then deployed for decades, maintains close links with practices of the time: low-angles, the background of the sky, the choice of the model itself-- young , muscular, beardless or hairless. The celebration of the peasant is accompanied by an aesthetic of desire that certain scenes with shadows or objects eroticise. But these scenes, few in number, most often give way to the fascination of the athletic body as such, in a silent epic of the lone reaper. * We know Gustave Roud (1897-1976) mainly for being one of the most eminent Frenchspeaking authors in Switzerland, recognised above all for his poetic prose. In recent years, however, his work as a photographer has returned to the forefront, so much so that Gustave Roud is considered today as one of the great European writer-photographers of the interwar period and the immediately after the war. Far from being simply a writer who had fun illustrating his literary endeavours, Gustave Roud had an intense photographic activity, from the age of 16 until the end of his life. This work was never exhibited during his lifetime. Despite posthumous exhibitions at the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, as well as the publication of a catalog (Terre d'ombres, Slatkine, 2002), his status as a photographer has long remained marginal. After his death, Philippe Jaccottet, who was responsible for managing his work, wanted to maintain this distance between the written work and the photographic work. However, if Gustave Roud himself had insisted on preserving and transmitting this abundant photographic work, accomplished with determination and rigour, there's no doubt that his intention was to make it known to the public. If he had wished otherwise, he could have simply destroyed it. He was careful not to do that. * Extract from the instructions for the Gustave Roud.com site
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK !
The profession of barber has existed since the highest Egyptian antiquity and probably long before, from the time when a person first had the idea of making a profession of the maintenance of hair as well as male facial hair (beard, moustache, side whiskers, eyebrows ...). The profession of barber is quite close to that of a hairdresser, which is why the two could coexist (as we can see in this painting). However at the origin it was the barber who was more specialised than the hairdresser. He had to know how to shave closely (in the direction of the hair) and shave "clear cut" (in the opposite direction of the hair), but also, when he was a barber-surgeon, to practice bloodletting and small operations of surgery, to pose suction cups and dressings, and even to pull teeth. Minimum hygiene conditions were not always evident!
William Roberts (1895-1980) The Barber’s Shop 1946
This is the reason why the sign signaling barbers' shops to the public always symbolized the stick that the patient had to squeeze to make his veins protrude. He could also occasionally squeeze it to avoid screaming out in pain, but that's another story! In France, it was not until 1691 that a royal edict separated the profession of surgeon from that of barber then named respectively Barber of the Long Robe and Barber of Short Robe. In the 18th century, the profession of barberwigmaker experienced a considerable boom throughout Europe, including Russia. The barber was then sometimes responsible for preparing and powdering the wigs of his noble clients. In the 19th century, comfort appeared with imposing rocking chairs mounted on jacks; thus installed, the client waited, a warm, scented towel covering his
face, for the barber to propose either his thumb or a spoon, this being introduced into the client's mouth to swell his cheek and facilitate shaving. The status of barber disappeared in 1989 in Europe as well as the title of Master Barber, but it must be noted that we have never seen such a flowering of barber shops in big cities since the profession officially disappeared ! A sign of the younger generations' craze for this profession ... especially as the beard itself has made a massive return to the world since the beginning of the year 2000.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK!
The human figure is central to the work of the Belgian painter Anto Carte. At the beginning of his career, he represented mythological characters but fairly quickly, his painted work chose themes which became his favorite, such as figures done in the style of Brueghel . The world of work also was a great inspirabon for him, in parbcular that of the coal mines of his nabve borinage, and that of peasants, workers and mariners. The boatman or sailor painted here with his typical cap of a river navigator had to pilot a barge or a convoy pusher or tug cruising on the network of European inland waterways. The sailor generally lived on board his boat, and had no home or property on land. He lived in the confined space of the cabin, the largest volume being reserved for the hold and commercial freight. When the great canals were pierced and navigabon on the rivers began to evolve into a regular trading acbvity, enbre families secled on board the boats, taking up the same trade - and somebmes the same boat - from father to son. Before the arrival of the engine, the boats were towed along the towpaths that doubled each channel and allowed drad animals (horses, donkeys) to provide the mobve force necessary for the movement of the boat.… it was not uncommon for the sailor himself and members of his family to join in the hard work given the strength of their biceps and their hands, shaped, as we can see in this painbng, to handle the big ropes.
Anto Carte (1886-1954) The boatman, 1938 Private collections
Over the centuries, the corporabon of mariners ended up establishing its rites, its codes, its patron saints, its gathering places and even its capital. This corporabon was very powerful because of its role in the supply of goods but also in the transport of travelers by river or lake. With the development of the railroad and then of the road, the profession represented only a rather limited number of members living in a slightly marginal way which the public oden admired during their tricky handling of their barges in the locks. The slowness of river journeys distanced the children from the schools of the Republic, condemning them - when they were not placed in boarding schools - to resume their parents' trade. The crew of a barge was quite small and generally included: the boatman, his wife (boatman too), a single child, and somebmes, a sailor. Having no mechanic on board, the boatman had to be able to carry out minor repairs on the engine, the electrical installabon or the taps. Unbl the mid-twenbeth century, living condibons were difficult on board, electricity and running water were not present on the barges before "accumulator baceries" were ficed on the ships.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK!
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) The Navvy Charcoal drawingn
The pickaxe with two spades and the shovel were the working tools par excellence of the navvy as well as the underground miner. At the time when Vincent Van Gogh drew this person, the work tools were not supplied by the employer but were shaped by the worker's own hand. If he wanted to be able to exercise his profession, a navvy must have his own tools and not have to rely on his employer to provide them. His work tool was an important part of his wealth. The same was true for all of his work clothes. The rest of his wealth was made up of his hands, his health and his ability to do the job well. Employed for one task at a time, with no guarantee that there would be a second, these precarious workers were called day laborers.
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Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) Surgery, circa 1949
While the status of surgeon was highly respected in Anbquity and during the Middle Ages, it fell into obscurity at the dawn of the Renaissance. Truly relegated to a lower caste among caregivers, surgeons were excluded from university medical studies ... and this for at least 4 or 5 centuries. In the 19th century, great progress was made in relabon to health needs, types of injuries as well as in the polibcal, religious or technological context. Hygienics and the illusion that one day one would be able to cure everything, were then at their peak. In the 20th century and especially ader the First World War, during which surgery performed miracles, the status of surgeon regained its former splendour. Thereader, technological advances in prosthebcs, prophylaxis (with the advent of anbbiobcs in the 1950s) and anesthebcs would propel surgery to the most presbgious level in the pracbce of modern medicine. Today in the majority of cases, the surgeon operates on his pabents in the operabng room of an operabng theater, in a sterile atmosphere and under strong lighbng reproducing daylight at its zenith.
He operates using numerous instruments, including the computer, in the case of non-invasive surgeries, that is to say not requiring the opening of the pabent. As this table by Barbara Hepworth shows, the surgeon was and is always surrounded and assisted by a large team: anesthesiologist , nurse, anesthebst, operabng room nurse, medical imaging simulator and even … surgical robots. In the lacer case, the robots are always placed under the control of the surgeon who acts, according to the terminology used, as a Master, the robot hence being qualified as a Slave. We also speak of surgeries, for acts performed by dental surgeons in collaborabon with dental assistants. Dico for stomatology ( the care of the oral cavity, teeth included, pracbced by a stomatologist surgeon). Episiotomy, a surgical procedure performed by the gynecologist or midwife during childbirth, can be performed directly on the pregnant woman lying on a work table or even at home.
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Gerardo Sacristán Torralba (1907-1964) Farmers from Haro Private collection
This is a portrait of a father and his two sons returning from the fields after a day's work. In the father's sack, you can see the horn cap attached by a red collar which is very characteristic of the Zahato or goat skin gourd, a traditional accoutrement of Basque shepherds. Is usually carried over the shoulder by the red cord that goes around it. In this painting the Zahato is slipped into the father's bag. He also carries on his shoulder the olive wood shepherd's staff. One of the sons carries a heavy basket filled with fruits and vegetables (carrots and apples) which he is bringing back from the fields. His brother (the resemblance is too striking for him not to be) closes the grouping by peeking at the landscape of olive groves bordering the river. All three are wearing the berets typical of Basque shepherds, in knitted and felted wool. It is a circular, flat headdress, usually adorned with a leather inner crown that was traditionally knitted, crushed and prepared "at home". It is worn here in exactly the same way by the father and his sons. A behavioral family mimicry that is also found in the way that both father and son keep their fists tightly clenched against the objects they hold, probably as a sign of attachment to their property. Although no one smiles and faces bear the marks of the harshness of working conditions at the time, the painting represents an agricultural and pastoral Spain that did not yet practice the intensive industrial agriculture of the 21st century. Considered one of the great Spanish portrait painters of the 20th century, Gerado Sacristan Torralba was very little exposed during his lifetime. He did not like the exercise of presenting his works to the public particularly as he painted almost in secret. As for these portraits which were mostly private commissions, he believed that it would have been indecent to show them in public. They are still found today in private collections from Spain and the south of France.
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Raymond Rochette (1906-1993) Les chauffeurs (The Stokers) Private Collection
French painter Raymond Rochette began by painting pictures of the landscapes of his native Morvan, scenes from rural life and many portraits of anonymous people. From Morocco, where he performed his national service, he brought back luminous landscapes, but during this period he also wrote to his parents: "I think it would be interesting to paint men at work, sweating, red with the huge machines, the dust and vapour ”. Oddly enough, Rochette is marked - to the point of being fascinated - by the world of heavy metallurgy which he discovered during a factory visit during his childhood. In 1949, thirteen years after his first request, he finally obtained authorisation to enter a factory and paint there. Quickly accepted by the workers, he represents them tiny next to the machines that dominate them, or in the center of his paintings, always captured in a gestural precision worthy of a reporter. He never tries to idealise them, he simply paints them "at work" as one would have said then. So in this painting from the 1950s, he paints the stokers. They are in fact metallurgical stokers who had the task of "charging" the incandescent ovens, that is to say, supplying them with fuel. As we can see here, the stokers of the 1950s worked in extreme conditions, with bare hands, bare heads, in work clothes called "warming suits" which did not isolate them at all from the unbearable heat of the ovens. We also notice that they were wearing simple wooden clogs! This painting by Raymond Rochette therefore exposes these almost inhuman working conditions and it is in this that it is an essential testimony of his time. The stoker's workplace still exists in modern metallurgy, although it is increasingly being replaced by robots. When human beings still perform this function, they must wear personal protective equipment and devices: shoes, gloves and fireproof coveralls, goggles and protective masks ...
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Paul Cézanne painted around 900 paintings and 400 watercolours himself destroying himself a large part of his work. Many portraits of men dot his work, using as models art critics, friends, collectors, members of his family but also peasants, housekeepers and agricultural workers of the Bastide du Jas-deBouffan , the family home where he lived and painted for 40 years. His gardener, whose full length portrait is seen opposite. was one of these favorite models. He was a robust fellow who is often found standing or sitting around the table in the famous series of Card Players, which brought together several other agricultural field workers. Taking up a tradition of the Le Nain brothers (1597-1677), Cézanne thus represented simple people, anonymous people with whom he liked to live, sharing a piece of cheese, figs, nuts and a glass of wine ... Around 1870, about twenty years before these paintings were painted, the French peasantry had just gone through a particularly difficult period from an economic point of view. Three factors combined to lead to this major crisis: 1. The fall in the price of products which had led to an amputation of peasants' incomes and a fall in land rents.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) Peasant standing with folded arms, c. 1895 The Barnes Foundation
2. The end of certain agricultural activities eradicated by progress, such as the production of organic dyes (madder in particular) now replaced in the textile industry by chemical dyes or the arrival on the market of agricultural products from the colonies (oil , wine) or from the New World (Argentine meat)… 3. Finally, in the same period: phylloxera, a disease which affected and decimated all French vineyards; bacterial devastation all the more serious since the vines played a major socioeconomic role in developing the poorest lands. Peasant revolts arose everywhere in Languedoc and in Provence from the end of the phylloxera infestation and for many years after. This crisis of the 1870s brought about deep and lasting changes in the peasant world which organised itself to face up to the difficulties. It was the start of industrial protest unions. At the same time, urban influence penetrated the countryside through military service, the railroad, rural emigration, the press and schools. Politically this period was marked by the advent of the Republic. which having taken the side of the peasants' cause they then greatly contributed to consolidating the Republic's power.
1892 - The MET Museum, New York
1892 - The Barnes Foundation
1895 - Courtauld Institute, London
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ AT WORK!
Winslow Homer (1836-1910) The Woodcutter, 1891 Private collection
The American painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910) is best known today for his sailors. Largely self-taught, he is considered to be one of the major painters of the American nineteenth century and one of the main figures of American realism. Born in Boston, he first entered a lithography workshop in his hometown as an apprentice. In 1859 he began his career as a painter in New York, opening his first studio. During the American Civil War, he worked as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly magazine, and produced numerous drawings of battles and scenes of war, sketched on the fly, while he followed the northern armies on the battlefields. In 1867, he decided to travel to France, a country then renowned for the liveliness of its artistic life and for its art schools. During this trip, he met the landscape painters of the Barbizon School (Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet…) who would have a decisive influence on him and his way of understanding the landscape. Upon his return to America in the 1870s, he began to paint rural landscapes and scenes of country life, like this lumberjack scanning the horizon after finishing his work. The rendering of sumptuous colors (sky and sea) and the accuracy of the details, become distinctive features of his art. His work, full of vigour and realism, his expressiveness dedicated to praising the spectacle of nature had a decisive influence on a number of American painters of the 20th century, even though Winslow Homer never had students and never, never tried to found any school.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ At WORK!
As surprising as it may seem today, until the 18th century, napping was an integral part of the working day. In the countryside in particular, it was the ideal and essential moment of rest when the sun was at its zenith. But the era of industry and urbanisation as well as the imperatives of profitability of the 20th century delivered a fatal blow to the nap, suddenly considered as the very expression of the most heinous laziness! Decreed unproductive in the West, the nap would henceforth be considered a luxury, or even worse, a time stolen from work. It was even called a health hazard and "vice" by 19th century hygienists, only because it allowed you to fall asleep in the middle of the day! If the nap was a vice, then it was the best shared vice in the world!
Thus in Spain where the official working hours adapted to the climate have always left time to take a good nap resuming activity around 3 or 4 pm. In China, napping, called hsiuhsi, is a right enshrined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (article 43). In Japan today, many companies have set up spaces on their premises to ensure their employees nap (more or less compulsory). Business leaders have realised that napping has the virtue of increasing employee productivity rather than decreasing it! So here is the nap now promoted to the rank of tool for productivity at work, and adorned with all the virtues including that of increasing employee performance by simply cutting the day in half !! Who would complain? Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) The Siesta, 1877 Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
MPS n°4 MEN PORTRAITS SERIES ©Francis Rousseau 2011-2020 htpp : //menportraits.blogspot.com English translation : Ann Menuhin
THAT’S IT… Next one, the next month.