Concerns about Kitsch in my past work....

 Here's my response to last week's readings, which have inspired some great reflections so far.

 One section of my dissertation (NYU, 2001) that I had first worked on for my MA (Tufts, 1994) was the notion that kitsch (according to Greenberg) is a modern phenomenon  "a product of rural migration to the cities and the immigrants’ eager abandonment of the folk culture they brought with them."  I was interested in the way that the imagery of French artist Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) both drew its imagery from 19th century  popular imagery and became absorbed into 20th century mass-reproduced popular imagery. 

What follows comes directly from this 15-year-old dissertation chapter, with all its awkward footnotes:

 

The Gleaners, c. 1857

After the artist’s death in 1875, as his reputation steadily grew, the Gleaners, the Sower, and the Angelus were increasingly reproduced in print form and in illustrated journals. Whereas prior to 1870, only eleven engravings after paintings by Millet had been issued, between 1870 and 1900 the number approached 150.[1]

The Sower, 1850

By the early 1890s, the visual oversaturation of reproductions of the Angelus in particular caused one print specialist to complain

The Angelus, 1859

Reproductions of the Angélus have become a sort of drivel, a nuisance, an obsession, a persecution.  One sees nothing but it.  It has been engraved small and large and re-engraved; it has been lithographed, it has been smeared into a chromolithograph, it’s been made into wood engravings for illustrated journals, it’s been put on match boxes and into tableau vivants in the reviews...We are at a moment where the Angelus has become a talisman — that where ever it goes it causes a gushing forth a flood of words, a flood of ink, a flood of gold.  We sell it, resell it, engrave it and re-engrave it, we exhibit it and there is always money.[2] 

            Originally, the Angelus was commissioned by the American collector Thomas Gold Appleton: because it was slowly painted over the course of 1857-59, Appleton lost interest and the painting was kept in Millet’s studio until its private purchase in 1860.  It was first publicly exhibited in 1865, whereupon the high seriousness of the image was parodied in a caricature by Hadol, subtitled “let us pray, my brothers, for the sick potatoes."[3] 

  The Angelus was then was shown a few times in the 1860s and early 70s; but, unlike the Gleaners, the Sower or Man with a Hoe, it received little critical attention prior to 1875.[4]   After the artist’s death that year, as the value of his work was dramatically rising, the Angelus outstripped the rest of the oeuvre by far. A furious price escalation peaked first at the 1889 Secretan sale of the Angelus  to the American Art Association: where it sold for over 580,000 francs; it was then resold to the department-store magnate Alfred Chauchard for 800,000 francs and ‘repatriated’ to France the following year.[5]  Having almost overnight become the world’s most famous, as well as most expensive picture, it was through subsequent prolific reproduction that the Angelus went on to attain status as both a religious icon and national image of France.

           
After 1890, the Angelus along with the Gleaners was so frequently reproduced in all popular forms — decorating domestic objects from tea towels to clocks to sugar bowls — as to become a hallmark par excellence of mechanically reproduced kitsch.[6] 

Only in the late 20th-century mania for all things Impressionist is there as excessive reproduction of a modern image on as many domestic surfaces as possible.[7]  It is a familiar claim that for the postmodern viewer, overly-familiar canonical images like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Last Supper, Munch’s The Scream and Van Gogh’s Starry Night have become virtually unviewable due to their loss of original Benjaminian ‘aura’ and are the subjects of endless parody (especially in print advertising) because they are so easily recognized.[8]  The Angelus was one of the first modern images to attain this excessive familiarity in the age of mechanical reproduction.

            Following the Secretan sale, biographers writing on Millet have struggled to avoid the excesses of the Angelus— but negotiate it they must in order to arrive at a vanguard recuperation of Millet’s oeuvre.[9]  Blaming its vulgarization, bastardization and its appropriation into the common domain on a popular taste for kitsch, the Barbizon painter Georges Gassies declares in 1911:

 The Angelus is the most famous work of the master...It has been vulgarized by engravings, by reproduction of all sorts.  I have seen it interpreted (and God knows how!) in carpeting, on wall-paper, in clay...horrific color post cards, of German production, that have been spread the world over.[10]

Paul Gsell echoes this sentiment in his 1928 Millet monograph:

Who doesn’t know this scene?  We have seen it in engravings, in chromos, it can be found on apartment curtains, on embroidered armchairs, on the wax ceilings of popular restaurants.[11]

Even Robert Herbert, writing on the Angelus for the first major Millet retrospective of 1975 notes that

it is perhaps impossible for modern viewers to look upon it without feelings of unease.  We remember too well the music-boxes, tapestries, dinnerware and other popular forms by which it became the property of the collective unconscious.[12]

             Although the reception of the Angelus in America has been extensively documented in several essays by Laura Meixner,[13] in most Millet scholarship, the painting is a blind spot, a phobic object that is occluded in order to protect the originality of the oeuvre from the polluting influences of its excessive and regrettable popularity. Two French scholars have recently noted the iconic status of Millet’s most reproduced images in essays written for a special number of the journal Ethnologie français. The sociologist Jean-Claude Chamboredon includes the Gleaners in a study of French social iconology: unlike popular culture that is ‘populaire d’intention,’ he writes, the Gleaners was transformed into a sort of a popular icon, thus it can be classed as ‘populaire par destination.’[14]  Héliane Bernard, whose art historical writing concerns the mythic construction of the French countryside in the early 20th century, makes the point that the Angelus in 20th-century France is a Barthian “parole mythique” that stands for an imaginary standard of French rustic life.[15]  But these are rare examples of a critical approach to this important image. 

            Rather than attempting to reclaim its former avant-garde uniqueness, the present text investigates the epiphanic and mythic qualities that were once attributed to the Angelus. Repositioning the image historically in the French fin de siècle context of spiritual longing, popular devotional practices and national religious movements in France means also historicizing the modernist recoil from its popularity and proliferation.  The impulse to categorize the popular reception of the Angelus as excessive and fetishistic —or just downright disrespectful — behavior (improper for such a formerly unique and expensive art object) can read as a particularly modernist cultural pattern that reinforces binary divisions of class, gender and national identities while opposing ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of art.  

Reading Religiosity in the Angelus

            Two peasants, presumably man and wife, stand at dusk by a meager harvest of potatoes.  The flat landscape resembles the plain of Chailly, just outside the hamlet of Barbizon. In the distance, a church spire breaks the horizon. The female figure clasps her hands in prayer; the male bows his head, hat in hand. Although this is the best known religious image of the modern era, no angels, saints or holy figures are represented: simply the spectacle of daily prayer glows at dusk as the evening bells ring.[16]   

            Sensier’s biography, published in 1881, was the most influential account of Millet’s life and artistic project. It introduces the reader to the Angelus in a personal anecdote of religious epiphany, providing personal access to Millet’s transcendent, poetic vision.[17]  His version of Millet closely follows the Romantic topos of the individualist artist who, as the philosopher Charles Taylor writes, offers his public

epiphanies where something of great moral or spiritual significance becomes manifest... The artist is an exceptional being, open to a rare vision... but this also opens the artist to exceptional suffering.[18]

Fin-de-siècle popular interest in the details of Millet's life, the phenomenal press that the Angelus received (and the multifarious forms that its reproduction took) were all intimately bound up, as Taylor suggests, with modern notions of the artist as one who feels more deeply than we are able, who suffers to attain a higher truth, and makes visible either the process or the product of his costly enlightenment.[19]

            Because Sensier was working to depoliticize the criticism of Millet's imagery (in part to increase its marketability), his treatment of the painting’s subject matter combines personal, sentimental anecdote with moments of ‘universal’ peasant experience, rather than a social reading of the laboring classes.  To this end, Sensier cites a passage from a letter Millet wrote in 1865 to his young friend Siméon Luce:

the Angelus is an image I made while remembering how while working late in the fields, my grandmother would never fail to make us stop our work at the sound of the bells to say the Angelus for the poor dead, most piously and with hat in hand.[20]

To this reading Sensier then adds a tale of his own initial viewing of the painting upon which he cries: "it is the Angelus!" and the artist replies,

...it is, indeed.  You can hear the bells…I am contented; you understood it.  It is all I ask.  Then, my dear fellow, you must try to sell this picture.[21]

Having transported the ‘Sensier’ of this tale to a highly legible state of devout peasant consciousness, filtered through his own memories, the artist’s ‘intentions’ move rapidly from achieving a legible narrative to negotiating its commercial viability, neatly conflating success in terms both epiphanic and economic.

            Millet’s comment to Luce, that the image evokes memories of praying for the departed, not only loads the image with personal meaning, but also positions the praying peasant couple as intercessors between this world and the next: a role played in the Catholic past by the Virgin and saints.  Théophile Silvestre had similar remarks in 1867 on the religiosity of the painting:

the evening Angelus sounds in Millet’s sky. Dusk slowly descends upon the plain.  The last rays of the setting sun form a sort of halo around these two good praying folk, to the distant ringing of the village bells of which the steeple can be seen in the distance, vaguely blurred in the somber space ... the legs of the peasant seem to be two stakes planted in the earth, his eyes half-shut, his head bent toward the earth, his says the Ave Maria, and his wife, an Elizabeth, responds with lips and heart to each verse of the angelic salutation.[22]

Silvestre suggests that the peasant couple are surrounded by a sort of halo, a symbolic light that causes the landscape about them to glow with the intensity of their piety.  These anonymous modern saints participate in an unconventional devotional image that invites the viewer’s contemplation rather than empathy or participation.  The tremendous success of the painting as a religious devotional image follows Flaubert’s prediction that art in the modern world would displace religion as a way of sating human yearning for the ideal and eternal.[23]  

Women, Kitsch and Catholicism

             In traditional histories of modernism, mass culture is rendered trivial and inauthentic when compared to the individualist, vanguard production of the [almost always male] avant-garde.  Thomas Crow neatly summarizes the familiar Greenbergian position in which vanguard art is

inseparable from some integrated community comparable to the kind that sustained traditional high art; the latter [kitsch] is peculiarly modern, a product of rural migration to the cities and the immigrants’ eager abandonment of the folk culture they brought with them.[24]

Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the class-specificity of ‘taste’ is instructive in the examination of the binary divisions that are so often made in the denigration of the popular.[25] John Codd has aptly summarized Bourdieu’s main argument that

aesthetic distinctions, artistic perceptions and judgements of taste, implement  classificatory schemes (codes) incorporating conceptual oppositions homologous to the oppositions that constitute the social world.  For example, the opposition between heavy and light (as in heavy/light music) serves to distinguish bourgeois from popular tastes.  Likewise, the oppositions between high (sublime, elevated, pure) and low (vulgar, low, modest), fine (refined, elegant) and coarse (heavy, fat, crude, brutal). Light and heavy, free and forced, right and left, are homologous, Bourdieu suggests, to the oppositions constituting the field of social classes (bourgeois, popular; dominant, dominated).  Thus, the very social construction of artistic perception is enshrined in the very language through which it is conveyed and is embodied in the aesthetic disposition of individuals.[26]  

Bourdieu’s model, however, does not include gender in these ‘distinctions.’ Realist literature abounds with instances in which the consumption of kitsch mass culture follows both class and gender lines.  Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, as Andreas Huyssen notes, is the quintessential parody of female consumption of popular culture—including the Angelus bells ringing in the evening—whether it be the bourgeois journal L'Illustration or the lachrymose chromolithographs that instruct her childhood:

instead of following mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carried.[27]

Huyssen points out that although Emma's interests in mass culture — pulp literature and sentimental piety (the province of the female reader) — are characterized as trivial, provincial kitsch, the author 'Flaubert' is always maintained in an authorial position of masterful, elite modernity.[28]  Thus Madame Bovary operates within a larger 19th-century cultural genre that opposes feminine mass culture to masculine modernism and its avant garde. The present text argues that this cultural mode was operative in the critics’ condemnation of the kitsch appeal of the Angelus in the interest of upholding the uniqueness and masculinity of the rest of Millet’s oeuvre.

            The social context of the religious revival may also have contributed to the critical condemnation of the Angelus as popular and feminine. Framing the period in which it was painted (1857-9) was a major revival of Catholicism that was aided by several purportedly miraculous appearances of the Virgin in France.  These theophanies included the vision of the Miraculous Medal in the 1830s in Paris which inspired the creation of the now-ubiquitous devotional medal, the La Salette miracle of 1846 which came in the midst of disastrous crop failures, and four years after the pope pronounced the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, the apparition of the Virgin to Bernadette at Lourdes in 1858.[29]

            In response to the visions and their social messages, revived traditional devotional practices (including miracle cults) exploded in rural France. Many of the ‘seers’ of visions stated that Mary had chosen France as the place to establish and confirm her own Immaculate Conception, and that if France were to return to its old, pre-revolutionary ways of piety it would regain its most favored nation status with heaven.[30]  But if the common people continued to blaspheme, ignore Sunday and violate laws of abstinence, rural famines and agricultural disasters would increase and global destruction would follow; only contrition and conversion would bring an end to the misery.   The re-Christianization of the rural populace and the expiation of France's collective sin against pre-revolutionary monarchic order motivated the Church’s official promotion of Marian miracles and devotion to the Virgin's cult.[31]

           Popular imagery quickly arose to represent the three sanctioned visions of the Miraculous Medal, La Salette and Lourdes. Significantly, this imagery frequently breaks with traditional canons of devotional imagery that had represented the Virgin as an iconic, apotropaic figure rather than a literal presence in a narrative framework.[32]  Yet in the 19th-century visions, Mary appears as an 'image' to all her those who ‘saw’ her: the Miraculous Medal vision actually prescribes the devotional image that is meant to honor it.  The other, more public visions also spawned countless souvenirs, including prints and more medals.

A very literal relationship between the devout and the religious image was thus fostered by the use of new popular religious imagery.[33]  Later in the century, reproduced images of the Angelus fit into just this niche of popular culture. The subject matter of the Angelus relates directly to the revival of the Cult of the Virgin in the mid 19th century, for the evening prayer that names the painting refers specifically to the angel’s annunciation of the incarnation of Christ to Mary.[34] 

             Devotion to the Cult of the Virgin was much more common among French women than men.  This gender divide was evident in the numbers of bourgeois and lower class women who made pilgrimages to Lourdes and La Salette; Marian theophanies, too, were almost entirely received by young women.[35]  In his reading of the Angelus, Robert Herbert notes that although the female figure is bent in prayer, her male counterpart simply waits for her to finish, while fidgeting with his hat.[36]  Alphonse Legros’s painting the Angelus of 1859 is similarly populated only by devout women and a small male child.[37]

            When Realist writers, like painters, turn an eye to traditional religiosity, it is gendered almost strictly feminine.  Popular devotion to the Virgin (which increased steadily throughout the latter half of the 19th century) is described in many texts as partaking in a melodramatic, unevolved sentimentality conflating romantic love with Catholic piety.  The Goncourt Brothers write that "religion for women is not the kind of discipline to which men submit themselves; it is a loving effusion, an excuse for romantic devotion."[38]  Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, raised on pious vignettes, whispers her confessions as if to her lover, and finally dies after kissing her crucifix: "pressing her lips on God made Man, she laid on it with all her expiring might the greatest kiss of love she had ever given."[39]  Zola underlines the inappropriateness of Marian piety for men when his character Father Mouret is told by an older priest that worshipping Mary amounts to “theft of devotion due to God...such adoration soften[s] souls, put[s] skirts on religion, create[s] a pious sentimentality unworthy of strong men."[40]  He continues in his warning that this practice is not only seductive, but ultimately feminizing: "religion is not a girl; you can't put it in flowers and lace...beware of your devotion to the blessed Virgin."[41]   

            The condemnation of idolatrous religious practices as cheap and dangerous resounds in Octave Mirbeau’s 1889 commentary on what he saw as inherently false consciousness and fetishistic worship of the Angelus in the nationalist hysteria surrounding its sale to an American collector:

this thing and its bells have become sacred truths and fetishes; patriotic dogmas against which it is dangerous to protest...this cult [of the Angelus] is so beyond the rites of ordinary adoration that deify painters that a spiritual confusion has set in.  One no longer knows if the Angelus is a painting, if Millet was a painter; if the first isn’t a territory violently ripped out of the French patrimony by an enemy, and the second a general who died defending it... The Angelus has now taken on aspects of a huge stone woman seated on a pedestal, covered with inscriptions, crowns, floral offerings, enameled oriflammes, surrounded by a stirred-up throng.[42]

By comparing its iconic status to a ‘huge stone woman’ surrounded by offerings, Mirbeau accuses the public of idolatrous ‘golden calf’ devotional behavior, as if this painting were a miracle-working icon of the Virgin.[43]  Mirbeau blames the economic fetishization and excessive reproduction of the Angelus for causing the ‘real’ image to disappear:

The Angelus no longer exists.  It has disappeared under the gold that paid its ransom.  And it is this gold that has hypnotized one and all that adore it, groveling, this gold that puts into their veins the vulgar frisson of the merchant. It is artless, it is no more French than it is American.  It is nothing more than heaps of gold, and around these heaps of gold are the gleaming eyes of the fawning covetous.[44]

Mirbeau makes connections between capital and fetish that resound with Marx’s roughly contemporary concept of commodity fetishism: the false consciousness of capitalist obsession with the market value of material objects, conflated with the older, colonialist regard of the ‘fetish’ as the receptacle of irrational, misplaced religious beliefs.[45]

            The violence of Mirbeau’s attack may originate from the assumption (or degeneration, as he would have it) of the Angelus into an explicitly feminine realm of popular culture.  Because this image was printed, woven, emblazoned and cast into and onto so many domestic objects, it must have had a particular attraction for its female consumers (assuming that there is some agency in the acquisition of popular culture). This appeal may have accrued via a reading of the Angelus as an image of ideal domestic partnership.  The two figures in it form an archetypical couple who play out many Millet dramas. In Going to Work (1850-1) they are at the beginning of the workday and the basket that later holds potatoes is empty; in Planting Potatoes (1861-2) a baby appears in a similar basket. When depicted at home, before the hearth, as in the pastel Winter Evening (1861), they both work at domestic tasks by dim candle light. At other times of the day, Millet's peasant women work both inside and outside of the home: caring for children, drawing water, washing laundry at the river, minding animals, or gleaning for bare subsistence.  Yet we also have images of female harvesters working alongside men, faggot-gatherers working as hard as male wood-cutters.  Men and women do not work together in his popular prints of the seasons, but they both labor in public spaces, and seem to be working at equally strenuous tasks.

            The reproduced image and decorated knickknack was the province of the bourgeois household, wherein the lady of the house prided, indeed, defined herself by not working.[46]  Could such a viewer have read her own domestic piety as somehow analogous to that of the peasant woman's: as natural 'work' alongside her 'breadwinning' bourgeois husband?  The Angelus, reproduced as domestic kitsch and marketed as a commodity appealing specifically to female desire would hardly have sold so famously had it asserted difference and opposition rather than speaking to a longing for a type of partnership that existed in the recent, agrarian past.[47]  Read as lamenting ways of life lost to modernity, reproductions of the Angelus were put to use in making mechanically reproduced, nostalgic souvenirs which, as Susan Stewart writes,  “simultaneously transform nature into art as they mourn the loss of ‘pure nature’ at a point of origin.’[48]  Stewart’s psychoanalytic approach to the souvenir applies particularly well to the kitsch manifestations of the Angelus:

the delicate and hermetic world of the souvenir is a world of nature idealized; nature is removed from the domain of struggle into the domestic sphere of the individual and the interior...[49] 

At the very radical end of this trajectory, fetishization of the Angelus was taken to an overtly Freudian level by Salvador Dali who, via his paranoiac-critical method, imbued the image with overtones of castration anxiety, cannibalism and paranoiac displacement.[50]  Dali writes that his interest in the Angelus was piqued, one day, upon seeing a tea set in a shop window that was decorated with vignettes based on the painting. His response can be read as a typically avant garde appropriation of low or popular subject matter:[51] yet in this case, the image originated in the vanguard singular, multiplied in the popular, descended to the level of the domestic motif, and was appropriated and recycled in Dali’s obsessive Surrealism. In The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus: Paranoiac-Critical Interpretation (purportedly lost on a train and recovered years later), Dali puzzled over the attraction/repulsion of the Angelus, its excessive and ubiquitous popular appeal, the personal dark narrative and imagery it inspired in the author, and the psychological profile, attained from Jacques Lacan, of the unemployed railroad worker, “MT” who, in 1932, walked into the Louvre and stabbed the canvas in a fit of iconoclastic rage.[52]

 

---

[1] Christiane de la Fortelle, La Diffusion de l’Ecole de Barbizon par l’estampe de reproduction.  (Memoire de l’Ecole du Louvre) n.d. (c. 1976) p.2.

[2] “L’Angélus reproduction est devenue une scie, un râbachage, une obsession, une persécution.  On n’a plus vu que lui.  On l’a gravé en petit et en grand et regravé; on l’a lithographié, barbouillé en chromo, on l’a taillé sur bois pour les journaux illustrés, on l’a mis en boîte d’allumettes et en tableau vivant dans les revues…Nous voici au moment où l’Angélus devient un talisman qui partout où il passe fait jaillir un flot de paroles, un flot d’encre, un flot d’or.  On le vend, on le revend, on le grave, on le regrave, on l’exibe et toujours l’argent” H. Beraldi in Les graveurs du xixe siècle. v. 5 (Paris, 1891). Quoted in Fortelle, p. 2.

[3] This caricature appeared in La Vie Parisienne 1865. Reproduced in the exhibition catalogue Barbizon au Temps de Millet. (Barbizon, 1975) p. 284.

[4] See Herbert, 1976 p. 89.

[5] See Herbert, 1976 pp. 88-90.

[6] A vast display of Angelus kitsch is can be found in the exhibition catalog Bilder Sind Nicht Verboten. (Dusseldorf, 1982).  The British couple who owned the objects proposed an exhibition of their collection in conjunction with the Hayward version of the Millet retrospective in 1976 but it never materialized because of their demand for full color reproductions in the Hayward catalog. As per conversation with Robert Herbert, June 1998.

[7] Museums are certainly complicit with this sort of reproduction. The 1999 Mary Cassatt exhibition at the MFA Boston, for example, forced visitors, upon exiting the exhibit, to pass through a gift shop display of Cassatt imagery reproduced upon almost every type of domestic object.

[8] See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations  (New York, 1968) pp. 217-52.

[9]  This pattern begins at the artist’s death.  An anonymous writer signing his piece the “Le Masque de fer” in 1875, for example, cites Baudelaire’s famous condemnation of Millet and admits that a few of his paintings, including the Angelus may be of inferior quality. Le Figaro 22 Jan. 1875.

[10] “L’Angelus est le plus célèbre tableau du maître...Il a été vulgarisé par la gravure, par des reproductions de toutes sortes.  Je l’ai vu interprété (et Dieu sait comment!) en tapisserie, en papier peint, en terre cuite...D’épouvantables cartes postales en couleur, de fabrication allemande, l‘ont répandu dans le monde entier.”  Georges Gassies, “Barbizon au Louvre” Brie et Gâtinais n.1-2 (1911).

[11] “Qui ne connait cette scène? On la voit reproduite en gravure, en chromo, on la retrouve sur les rideaux des appartements, sur les broderies des fauteuils, sur les toiles cirées des restaurants populaires.” Paul Gsell, Jean-François Millet  (Paris, 1928) p. 300

[12] Herbert 1976, p. 87.

[13] See Laura Meixner, "Jean-François Millet's Angelus in America" American Art Journal, Autumn, 1980, pp. 78-84, An International Episode: Millet, Monet and their North American Contemporaries.  Memphis, Tenn. 1982; "Popular Criticism of Jean François Millet in Nineteenth-Century America," Art Bulletin  (March 1983), pp. 94-105;  "The Best of Democracy: Walt Whitman, Jean-François Millet, and Popular Culture in Post-Civil War America." Mickle Street Review Camden NJ v.12 1990 pp. 31-48; and her recent book: French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society 1865-1900. (Cambridge MA, 1995).

[14]Chamboredon, “L’edification d’un nation: Naissance, diffusion, circulation de quelques motifs iconographique” Ethnologie française, XXIV (1994, 2) (Special issue: Usages de l’image) pp. 194-5.

[15] See Hélaine Bernard “L’Angélus de Millet: Conditions d’un discours mythique (1856-1993)” in Ethnologie français XXIV, 2 (1994) pp. 243-53.

[16] See Alain Corbin Les Cloches de la terre translated by Martin Thom as Village Bells: Sound and meaning in the 19th-century French countryside. (New York, 1998).

[17]  As McWilliam and Parsons write, this was the primary source for the fostering of a sentimental, pious reading of Millet and of the Angelus in particular. See McWilliam and Parsons, “Le paysan de Paris.’”

[18]Charles Taylor Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, (Cambridge MA, 1989) pp. 422-23. 

[19] On the role of biography in the marketing of modern painting see Green “Dealing in Temperaments.”

[20] Cited in Herbert 1976, p. 87.

[21]  Sensier / de Kay, p. 132-2.

[22] “c'est l'Angelus du soir, qui sonne dans le ciel du Millet.  Le crépuscule descend insensiblement sur la plaine.  Les dernieres lueurs du couchant font une sorte d'auréole à ces deux bonnes gens priant, aux tintements lointains de la cloche du village, dont la flèche se voit là-bas, vaguement estompée dans l'espace assombri... les jambes du paysan semblent deux piquets plantés en terre, les yeux à demi-fermés, la tête courbée vers la terre, il dit l'Ave Maria, et sa femme, une Elizabeth, répond des lèvres et du coeur à chaque verset de la salutation angélique.” Untitled article by Silvestre in the Figaro transcribed in MFA Boston manuscript of Millet reviews formerly belonging to Quincy Adams Shaw. Also cited in the Livre d’Or pp. 137-8

[23] Jane E. Marston, "Narration as Subject in Flaubert's La Legende de Saint Julien L'Hospitalier," Nineteenth Century French Studies  14/3-4 1986 p. 344

[24] Thomas Crow “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London, 1985) p. 238.

[25] See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge MA, 1984).

[26] John Codd “Making Distinctions” in An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory ed. Richard Harker, et al (London, 1990) p. 141.

[27]  Dacia Mariani cites this passage and suggests that Flaubert (quite transparently and viciously) modeled Emma Bovary’s taste for popular culture on his that of his long-time lover, the poet Louise Colet.  See Mariani Searching for Emma: Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovary translated by Vincent J. Bertolini, (Chicago, 1998) p 14. On Louise Colet see Francine Du Pleissix Gray, Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet (New York, 1994).

[28] Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, 1986) p. 46.

[29] For details concerning these visions see Loreto Echeverria and Nicholas Perry, Under the Heel of Mary (New York, 1988), Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth Century France (New Brunswick NJ, 1983), and Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje  (Princeton, 1991).

[30] Kselman, p. 85.

[31] See Eugène Olivier, "La Cathèdrale de la Revolution à nos jours." Monuments Historiques 153 (1987) p.19, Kselman, pp.93, 113, Andrea Dahlberg, "The Body as a Principle of Holism: Three Pilgrimages to Lourdes" in Contesting the Sacred, (New York, 1991) p. 31.

[32] L'Imagerie populaire française: Gravures en taille-douce et en taille d'épargne, edited by Nicole Garnier (Paris, 1990) p. 20.

[33] This type of visual culture has always tread a line between teaching what is to be adored and providing an object of idolatry.  For many historical examples of this response see the many essays by David Freedberg in his collection The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response  (Chicago, 1989).

[34]  Here is one version of the prayer:

            The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.

And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.

Behold the handmaid of the Lord.

And the Word was made Flesh.

And dwelt among us.

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.

That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord,

Thy grace into our hearts; that, we to whom the

Incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an Angel...

[35] The medieval Cult of the Virgin has often been cited as having elevated the status of women, particularly noble women. Feminist historians have questioned this notion, showing the repressive social control of women implicit in devotion to the Virgin and female saints throughout the history of Christianity. See Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, 1984). p. 2, Marina Warner, Alone of all Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. (New York, 1976) and Barbara Corrado Pope, "Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century," in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, edited by Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance Buchanan, Margaret Miles (Boston, 1985) pp. 173-200.

[36] Herbert relates this difference to the low percentage of male attendance in mid-19th century church services, and the traditional binary pairing of woman with religion rather than industry. Herbert 1976, pp. 87-8.

[37] See Nochlin Realism p. 89-90.

[38] Quoted and translated by Emily Apter in "Mystical Pathography: A Case of Maso-fetishism in the Goncourts' Madame Gervaisais" in her collection of essays: Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca, 1991) p. 125.

[39] Translated in Nicolas Hernandez,  "Emma, Ana and Religion: A Comparative Study of Madame Bovary and La Regenta" Platte Valley Review. v.9, n.1 (1981).

[40] Emile Zola. The Sin of Father Mouret translated by Sandy Petrey (Lincoln, 1980) p. 69.

[41]  Zola, Father Mouret, p. 63.

[42]  “cette chose et ces cloches sont devenues des vérités sacrées, et fétichistes, des dogmes patriotiques, contre lesquels il y aurair danger de protester...Ce culte [de l’Angélus] est si exigeant, si en dehors des rites d’ordinaire adoration par quoi sont divinisés les peintres, qu’une confusion s’établit dans les esprits. On ne sait plus si L’Angélus est un tableau, si Millet fut un peintre; si le premier n’est pas un territoire violemment arraché par l’ennemi, à la patrie française, et le second un général mort en la défendant...L’Angélus prend maintenant les aspects d’une grosse dame de pierre, assise sur un piédestal, couverte d’inscriptions, de couronnes, d’offrandes fleuries, d’oriflammes emmêlées, avec autour d’elle, une foule vibrante” Mirbeau L’Écho de Paris 9 July 1889. Reprinted in Octave Mirbeau: Combats esthétiques 1877-1892, edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet (Paris, 1993) p. 387.

[43]  This response to monumental sculpture was current in the many monumental statues of the Virgin that had been erected by public subscription all over the French countryside. See Anne Pingeot, "Les Vierges Colossals du Second Empire," in La Sculpture Francaise au XIXe Siècle Paris, 1986.

[44] “L’Angélus n’existe plus.  Il disparaissait sous l’or dont on venait de payer sa rançon.  Et c’était cet or qui les hypnotisait, lui et les autres, cet or qu’ils adoraient, prosternés, cet or qui avait mis dans leurs veines un frisson vulgaire de marchand.  Il n’avait plus d’art; il n’y avait plus de France, plus même d’Amérique. Il n’y avait plus que des tas d’or, et autour de ces tas d’or, des yeux luisant de convoitises, et des échines courbées de respect.” Mirbeau, L’Écho de Paris 9 July 1889, in Michel and Nivet, p. 389.

[45] For an intelligent analysis of Marx’s (evolving) concept of fetishism and its relationship to religion, see William Pietz “Fetishism and Marxism: The Limits of Theory in Marx” in ed. Pietz and Emily Apter Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, 1993) pp. 119-51.

[46]  See Bonnie G. Smith Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century.  (Princeton, 1981) p. 97.

[47] For a detailed study of the work day of the French peasant couple see Martine Segalen Mari et Femme dans la société paysanne (Paris, 1980) translated by Sarah Matthews as Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century. (Chicago, 1983).

[48] Stewart On Longing  p. 143

[49] Stewart On Longing p. 145.

[50] Salvador Dali, The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus: Paranoiac-Critical Interpretation  translated by Eleanor R. Rose (St. Petersburg FL, 1986). Stewart also relates the souvenir to sexual fetishism: “The souvenir generates a narrative which reaches only ‘behind,’ spiraling in a continually inward movement...here we find Freud’s description of the genesis of the fetish: a part of the body is substituted for the whole, or an object is substituted for the part, until finally, and inversely, the whole body can become object, substituting for the whole.”  Stewart, p. 135.  Also see Fiona Bradley, “Dali as Myth-Maker: The tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus,” in ed. Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley, Salvador Dali A Mythology. (Liverpool and St. Petersburg, FL, 1998).

[51]  Pierre Bourdieu writes on this cultural pattern: “the ‘rehabilitation’ of ‘vulgar’ objects is more risky, but also more ‘profitable’, the smaller the distance in social space or time, and the ‘horrors’ of popular kitsch are easier to ‘recuperate’ than those of petit-bourgeois imitation, just as the ‘abominations’ of bourg taste can begin to be found ‘amusing’ when they are sufficiently dated to cease to be ‘compromising’” Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 61-2.

[52] See Didier A. Chartier Les Créateurs d’invisible ‘de la destruction des oeuvres d’art’  (Paris, n.d.) n.p.