Responses to the land: Millet and Goldsworthy
Two National Galleries in the month of October
In October this year, I visited the Millet exhibition in the National Gallery, London, and the Andrew Goldsworthy exhibition in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh. I suppose it’s a bit of stretch to place these two artists beside each other, one from the mid 19th century, and the other from the late 20th/early 21st, but I was struck by the fact that these artists, both with exhibitions in October, focussed on ‘the land’. Both of them are also deemed important enough to be in prestigious national galleries, with one of them still being alive.
I always think I’m going to see the art, but it seems that the first thing that hits me is the way that the art is presented, in terms of its architectural and spatial context. In London I was surprised to find the Millets in a very small room. The paintings were also smaller than I had imagined they would be; the walls of the room were dark blue, and there was no natural light. In Edinburgh, Andrew Goldsworthy had a whole building, with a number of large rooms. The walls were white, flooded with light from above, and his work was huge.
Though Millet’s paintings were small, the frames seemed enormous. Their ornate, decorative flourishes seemed weirdly incongruous in the context of Millet’s focus on the harsh realities of the lives of rural farm workers.
Then there were the cameras. Of course we’re all snapping away these days, and I’m no exception. I found myself focussing on the way that people were interacting with the paintings; how long they spent with each one, what they were doing. Despite the fact that many were likely to have seen ‘The Angelus’ reproduced in art books over and over, they were photographing it. Photographing the original. So that when they looked later they could see exactly what they’d seen in art books, over and over again.
The paintings themselves were magical. Farm labourers, shepherdesses, water carriers, faggot-gatherers; subject matter that at the time was politically uncomfortable for art collectors and critics, and a way of painting that seemed to be decades or more ahead of its time. Bodies and faces were subtley reduced to simple forms, in contrast to the detail that would have been common in painting then. There was a unexpected softness to the forms, both in chalk and in paint; a looseness which captured the structure of underlying muscle and bone, and the flexibility and fluidity of movement. I realise how radical he must have been, and now understand his influence on the early Impressionists (and, of course, Van Gogh).
The blue of the trousers; a glowing protest against long traditions of raw umber, burnt sienna, deep blacks. I was looking at The Gleaners afterwards (not in the exhibition), and marvelling at the colour in the women’s headscarves.
I noticed the pink oversleeve for the first time, which also appears in The Angelus:
In terms of colour, form and feeling, I found Millet’s work utterly arresting and moving. Having said that, it was a strangely romantic portrayal of poverty and the hardships of working the land. The paintings were so beautiful and soulful, and yet he was painting something that he knew from his own experience to be difficult, rough, and unpleasant (he came from a farming family). It was a strange disconnect.
Andy Goldsworthy was not so romantic. I had never read anything that Goldsworthy had to say about his work before this exhibition, but I had seen plenty of it. My impression was that he was interested in aesthetics - in beauty, in the shapes, colours and forms that he found naturally occuring in the landscape - adding, subtracting, bringing things together in ways that emphasised the wonder of the forms that he found.
I deliberately didn’t read the guide that I was handed at the entrance, wanting to experience everything without any prior knowledge of his intentions.
The first thing that hit me was the sheer scale of everything. The Scottish National Gallery is a mighty, privileged space, entered under huge Greek pillars, and the exhibition began at the top of a long flight of white marble steps. You walked up the steps on either side of a long carpet made from discarded sheeps wool, and the first thing you saw was a screen of taut, rusty barbed wire stretched between two pink marble columns.
To the right, a room containing a cathedral of reeds stretching from floor to ceiling, towards a naturally-lit cupola in the ceiling.
To the left, a room covered from wall to wall with rough stones. Further in, a long thicket of tangled branches running the length of another huge room, with a reed star stretching into the full expanse of the wall at one end, and a similarly large fern and thorn snake covering the wall at the other.
A wall of sundried, red-ochre mud took something you’ve seen beneath your feet many times and lifted it up to the vertical; bigger than a Rothko, impossible to ignore. You were forced to take in the patterning of its cracks, the wonder of its hue.
There were just two oblique references to warm-blooded creatures. The first was three large pieces of buckled paper, bearing random patterns made by the dripping of blood and snow from a hare that he killed on a road one night. He filled the hare with snow three times, capturing what ran through it as the snow melted.
The second reference to living creatures was the room carpeted with stones, which, I read later, had come from 108 graveyards in the UK. At the funeral of his ex-wife, he noticed a small pile of stones to one side, and found out that every time someone is buried, stones such as these are displaced from the land in order to make room for the body. Like the hare, the reference to living beings came through a focus on their finitude, the fact that they were no longer here.
I realised it was the same with the discarded sheeps wool at the entrance; the wool was a record of living animals, and of the farming practices of human beings, but what was actually present was the ghost of these things.
There was a smaller room downstairs filled with photographs and videos of his work outside with the land, the work we all know him for. For some reason I couldn’t engage with any of it; the rooms were crowded and there was no space to stand back and take in what felt anyway like simply a record of something that wasn’t actually present (in the sense that the photo was just a trace of what had been made in the landscape).
Experiencing these enormous istallations of natural materials in white rooms, I felt a coldness. There seemed to be no life, no breath of animal, no call of bird, no human touch.
The exhibition leaflet referred to ‘an influential body of work that speaks of our relationship with the land’. I couldn’t feel that relationship, only the strangeness of the high-ceilinged white rooms being filled with rocks, mud, blood, and piles of sticks.
I watched a short video of Andy Goldsworthy afterwards, where he talked about ‘responding to the building’, and I found that interesting. Apparently when they offered him the exhibition they assumed that he would want to use the grounds of one of the galleries, but he said, no, I want to come into the building.
A write-up in The Week claimed that, although immensely popular, Goldsworthy ‘has never been given full credit by the art establishment. …Goldsworthy’s work is simply too ‘easy to love’, too rural and too popular to be fashionable; and its apparent simplicity is misinterpreted as a lack of profundity’. Was he simply delighted to have finally received this institutional seal of approval, to be able to finally claim his space, right in the heart of its bricks and mortar? Or, could he have been secretly laughing up his sleeve, playing with the whole thing by arranging ferns and thorns, mud, reeds and branches upon these hallowed floors and walls; dripping the blood of a dead hare onto paper and placing it carefully on a wall, as if it was a painting?
I most definitely did Andy Goldsworthy a disservice by not reading the explanations in the exhibition leaflet as I was going round. He’s a wonderful and sincere artist, and when I read what he had to say about the thinking behind everything, the impulses that prompted what he presented, it all made quite a different kind of sense.
I guess it was a very conceptual exhibition. When he explained, I saw differently. And perhaps he was super-clever here, because he didn’t fall into the ugliness of the dirty sheepskin that I saw in the same gallery many months ago, for the sake of making a conceptual point. He kept his focus on aesthetic concerns, as he worked with the ideas he wanted to express.
Nonethless, something felt hollow for me. He said that he responded to the building, as he has always responded to the land. But responding to the land, as a warm-blooded creature who is a living, breathing part of the reality of earth, scent and sky, is not the same as responding to an elitist building. The exhibition was visually impressive, but I kept asking myself, what are those dead sticks and stones doing inside these white walls? Nature is a totality; when you stand in a forest you’re experiencing a field; sound, colour, texture, fragrances, sensation on your skin. Your physical body is open and knows that all of it is kin.
When Andrew Goldsworthy stands in the field, arranging fallen leaves into exquisite patterns and forms, he’s responding to this totality, with eyes and ears, limbs and heart. Responding to an elitist, institutional building? That becomes a conceptual exercise. There’s no totality, no whole stretching away beyond the limits of human perception. Everything stops at the white walls, which are smooth and bare, as nothing ever was in the ever-emerging natural world.
For me, Millet’s paintings - total illusions created with paint on canvas - glowed with the pulse of life; they vibrated with colour, conjuring bodies moving across the fields, rooted in the earth. Andy Goldsworthy brought in actual pieces of the land; cut branches, real red earth, and arranged them into shapes amongst white walls. Even after I read his explanations, I found it hard to connect to what he had made.
There are considerable, for me, advantages to living in the countryside but one thing I really miss is the closeness to galleries and art exhibitions.
I really enjoyed this visit - I mostly have a kind of visceral response to art, rarely able to put into words the why and what of it so it was very interesting reading your thoughts about it.
Thanks for this text, I had a lovely time reading it. It sparked a few thoughts. It’s not a strange thing to bring together Millet and Goldsworthy, on the contrary. They both have a relationship with the land. One focuses on the human body’s work there and the other focuses on his own body, the creative work of the artist, in its relation to it. Being sensitive to context, and where the work is shown can provoke a different way of receiving it, especially when the work is made entirely of vegetal and organic material. I don’t know if I’d describe the Edinburgh gallery as “elitist”, perhaps more as a traditional space with a history. (Do we pay to go? I can’t remember). In that sense, it has so many paintings and sculptures representing natural phenomena (such as the Angelus does in another similar space) through human romantic, fearful, extractive, adoring sentiment that Goldsworthy bringing in nature itself may be a stab in its removed place from ecosystems? I’m not sure he is very conceptual, he seems to be more ritualistic and reactive to the environment he observes. Which resonates with your impression: perhaps you sensed that his ritual extracted from the phenomena that sparked it is artificial. I wondered about that too: but then I also thought why is a building removed from nature? Why is nature “out there”? Isn’t it everywhere? Aren’t we nature? I loved the work around the ceiling light because it brought attention to nature in the building: light. And the barbed wire does speak of separation, possession of the land. I haven’t visited the show but I suspect that this friction you felt and described so well may very well be the strong point of it, be it intentional or not. Thanks so much for your account of it and of your own journey. As ever, a delight.