Some gifted artists are justifiably garlanded with honours for their work, while others of comparable talent might be shunned by polite society for being ‘difficult’ in their subject matter and beliefs. The French painter, Maximilien Luce, placed himself defiantly the outcast camp during the late 1800s.
Growing up in working-class Montparnasse, Luce became an ‘anarcho-socialist’ in political outlook. Luce was not an ‘armchair activist’ but saw himself as a dedicated fighter for the French working class. He was known to authorities as a notorious ‘trouble-maker’ and was jailed for forty-two days on suspicion of illegal revolutionary activities.
On the other side of his life, Luce progressed from being an apprentice wood engraver in Paris in the 1870s to being a full-time artist in the 1880s. He was committed to exposing the gritty realities of French industrial life to a bourgeois audience that had a preference for idealised images of nature, elevated social scenes and comfortable domesticity.
The Art of Labour
With his political perspectives in mind, Luce’s art ran the risk of becoming merely crude propaganda. Fortunately, Luce was far too accomplished an artist to fall into that trap. He was attracted to the then-outrageous new styles of impressionism and pointillism, which valued conveying the light-infused essence of a scene, rather than aspiring to near-photo realism.
In 1896, Luce combined the new artistic styles with his political values to create a striking painting, Cheminées d’usine or Factory Chimneys. Luce used highly-visible short stabs and dots of paint to create an outdoor scene where the air and dim light is heavy with grime. This is a coal-powered industrial scene, with glowing furnaces in the background being fed by the train-delivered coal that is being shovelled and barrowed by the workers in the foreground.
In art pigments, brighter or lighter colours draw the subject forward towards the viewer. In this case, it’s the first two chimneys in particular that dominate the painting, emphasising the looming power of capital and industry, dwarfing the straining workers. The unusual curved banding on the front chimney accentuates the projection, mass, shape and solidity of the structure. It’s difficult to tell whether the diffused natural light glowing behind the front chimney is shrouded sunlight or moonlight from an early morning start or a late evening finish to the working day. Such is the alienation of nature and humans from the unnatural impositions of the grim industrial world.
While Luce was despised by the Parisian art establishment for his supposedly distasteful subject matter and his advocacy of the workers against capital, his commitments – although not his painting style – were to find a reflection of sorts in a distinctly different time and place.
The triumph of socialist Bolshevism in Russia and the creation of the Soviet Union initially enabled wide-ranging artistic freedoms. But with the emergence of Stalinist totalitarianism, by the 1930s Soviet art was subjected to a brutally enforced orthodoxy that extended infinitely beyond the exclusionary snobbery of the French art establishment of the 1890s.
The only style of painting allowed in the Soviet Union was called Socialist Realism. This style of art celebrated muscular industrial and agricultural workers building socialism. Being the subjects of officially approved Soviet art, these workers were presented not as Luce’s shadowy, downtrodden wrecks, but as robust, indomitable figures gazing confidently into the socialist future. Although Soviet art was supposedly ‘realist’ it was often cartoonish and overtly propagandistic in its exaggerated poses. And there was certainly no scope in official Soviet art for the kind of non-realistic or impressionistic painting techniques used by the likes of Maximilien Luce.
The Soviet Realist painting Collective Farmer from 1930 approaches caricature in its depiction of a female agricultural worker, having a massively-muscled physique bearing sheaves of wheat, with her bright clothes billowing in the fresh breeze and with a rosy-cheeked face tilted confidently towards the supposedly imminent and radiant world of socialist prosperity. So, while Factory Chimneys depicts the worker being dominated by the world, in Collective Farmer we see the heroic and almost mythical figure of the worker dominating the world.
Luce’s Factory Chimneys is in the collection of the Petit Palais in Geneva, Switzerland.
By Brad Allan, writer and wine tasting host in Melbourne, Australia and frequent visitor to France…
