Exhibitions: Prints & Drawings by Jean François Millet (Mrs. Henry H. Benedict and Mrs. George W. Davidson Collections)

May 13, 1937: On Friday, May 14th, the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Brooklyn Museum will open a comprehensive exhibition of the prints and drawings of Jean Francois Millet. It will remain on view through June 27th. The prints shown are from the collections of Mrs, Henry Harper Benedict and Mr. and Mrs. George W. Davison, Some have never been exhibited before and are not included in the Delteil catalogue. All are impressions of the highest quality, rare first and second states and trial proofs taken before the edition printed by an American art dealer, The etched work of Millet is complete except for one item of which only two proofs are known. Two of six lithographs are shown, four of six woodcuts and two heliographs or clichés verres. Several original cancelled plates will be exhibited. The loan material is supplemented by items from the Brooklyn Museum Collection.

Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1937 - 1939. 04-06_1937, 103. View Original

May 26, 1937: Looking at the prints of Jean Francois Millet, on exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum through June 27th, one is possibly surprised to find them essentially modern in feeling. The work of Millet was for a long time surrounded by a sentimental aura which might well have obscured his work from appreciation in a day which prefers hard full lights to mists and likes to feel that it has acquired a realistic view of human life. We prefer to think that we abhor the doctrine of refuge in romance, of flight from the city to the wilderness, a flight of which Millet was guilty. But he fled also from the manners, sophistications and dishonesties of the polite bourgeoisie to the unsmiling labors of the peasantry, and thus became a forerunner of the contemporary idealization of those engaged in manual labor, if not precisely devoted to it.

It is not alone by subject that the Millet prints achieve contemporary interest. They have the rapid, nervous, emphatic line of modern draftsmanship, the expressionistic emphasis on essentials of form and mood, the refusal to state the obvious, the scorn for labored perfection of detail that is still so puzzling to superficial observers.

Much of the emotional strength in the work of Millet springs from the veracity and sympathy with which he draws the lines of force in human action, the understanding with which he selects action which has human significance. This is so rare a quality, perhaps because draftsmen are so seldom really men of action, that it demands study for complete appreciation. The weight and curve of shoulders, the dynamic balance of the figure, the bend and thrust of limbs, the usual three quartering view which best expounds the complete mechanism of the body, the almost diagramatic use of structural lines within the figure. These characteristics may be observed, and they are not tricks, but the swift record of essential elements of action with the strength of work and feeling in it. Compare the relaxed or static poses so wearily plentiful in the figure drawing of mediocre artists, or compare the most vital study of action and gesture to be found in contemporary art, that in the modern dance, and one begins to perceive how much weakness in the effect of drawing is a weakness in the power to experience and record action and kinetic feeling, how surely the knowledge and understanding of action produce a significant style. It is perhaps worth pointing out that even landscape and still life are barren of interest when they are recorded by the sort of camera eye which fails to stress the anatomy and action of form in things which are not human. It is no accident that makes us speak of the limbs of a tree. Nor is it accident that the landscapes of Millet have such strength of human interest.

The prints shown at the Brooklyn Museum are from the collections of Mrs. Henry Harper Benedict and Mr. and Mrs. George W. Davison. Some have never been exhibited before and are not included in the Delteil catalogue. All are impressions of the highest quality, rare first and second states and trial proofs taken before the edition printed by an American art dealer. The etched work of Millet is complete except for one item of which only two proofs are known. Two of six lithographs are shown, four of six woodcuts and two heliographs or clichés verres. Several original cancelled plates will be exhibited. The loan material is supplemented by items from the Brooklyn Museum collection.

Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1937 - 1939. 04-06_1937, 115-6. View Original 1 . View Original 2