Page 33 - Gallery 19c Volume 3_Les Types de Paris_digital_Neat
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“F OR THOSE . . . DEFEA TED IN     More politically provocative are the works of Raffaëlli,
 THE GREA T BA T TLE OF LIFE”  the definitive painter of the Parisian banlieue (cat. no.
 19). Often dressed in the hand-me-down garments of
 “Nothing seems simpler than painting peasants,   the bourgeoisie, his solitary workers suggest the social
 ragpickers and laborers of all kinds, but—no subjects   aspirations of the downtrodden laborer, and the class
 in paintings are so difficult as these commonplace   fluidity that was borne by the Revolution of 1789.  23
 figures!”  —Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Théo    Raffaëlli’s understanding of such subjects may have
 van Gogh, July 1885, in The Complete Letters of    owed something to personal experience: after repeatedly
 Vincent van Gogh, 3rd ed., Boston, 2000, vol. 2, p. 400  advising artists to paint only the things they knew
 (“I feel that no artist should paint what he does not
 Intersecting the bustling urban pathways and alongside   24
 the boulevardiers and the parisiennes they painted was the   thoroughly understand”),  he attempted to explain the
 empathy he felt for his subject matter. “My life has not
 darker reality of Parisian city life. Between 1875 and
 1884, under the stricter laws of the early Third Republic,   been an easy one,” he wrote, “for I was brought up in
 luxury until I was fifteen, when within a few years my
 more than 75,000 people in France were convicted of
 begging, with over 110,000 charged with vagabondage.  19   family lost its entire fortune and I became acquainted
 with the most grinding poverty. Then came the war . . .
 Such staggering numbers reflected the waves of migrant
 peasants and tenant farmers that were descending   At that period I painted with the greatest sincerity my
 hopelessness, my bitterness, my anger, my madness.
 upon Paris, the victims of rural depression and
 dispossession,   as well as a growing number of foreign   It follows then that my art was a violent art, somber,
 20
 bitter, hopeless. I was at that time consumed with the
 refugees displaced by recent wars. Fernand Pelez’s
 Sans Asile (Homeless) attempts to document one of these   greatest pity and commiseration for those who had been
 defeated in the great battle of life.”  Despite these
 25
 families, shattered by current economic and political
 events (cat. no. 17).  The artist’s pointed allusion to the   sentiments, and the profound influence of his past,
 21
 Raffaëlli went on to warn against conflating an artist
 abandonment of this mother and her children (there is
 no father figure here), and the careful individualization   too closely with his work: “If you paint workers, you are
 [considered] a communard-anarchist-socialist-realist-
 of each tragic, unsmiling face, cleverly elides the broader   26
 issue of bourgeois social responsibility and emphasizes   revolutionary . . . and déclassés, you are one yourself.”
 Ironically, then, and despite his epic book, it is Raffaëlli
 instead the need for Christian charity and compassion,
 and the notion of the deserving poor.     who offers the clearest—if not only—challenge to
 22
 the efficacy of the label, the category, and the “type,”
 through these words and the dignified subjects of his
 deliberately equivocal works.














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