Farm Food: Folk and Fine Art

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees, 1889

Harvests, Real and Metaphorical 

Mariella Gualtieri, Olive Harvest

harvest: Middle English, from Old English hærfest [ see kerp- in Indo-European roots.]

"Harvest" is both a noun and a verb, a time or season and a course of action. Harvest time vs, we harvest apples in September. Also, the term is widely employed in Christian dialogue, as in " a harvesting of souls" [See Matthew 9:37].  Generally, it is  a positive notion, though in the paragraph below it is sharply pejorative. A literary publication in Melbourne, Australia, is harvestmagazine [writetoharvest@gmail.com]].

Edward R. Murrow

 on CBS, 1961

The show in issue was Harvest of Shame, an hour-long study of the plight of the U.S. migratory worker presented last November 25 on CBS Reports. Deliberately scheduled for the day after Thanksgiving, the documentary drew for turkey- stuffed Americans a stark picture of the field hands who rove about the country, living in makeshift squalor, and selling their labor for an average of $900 a year. Moving in shirtsleeves among the film's subjects, Narrator Murrow reached heights of personal indignation, as when he quoted one migrant-hiring Southern farmer: "We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them."

Below: American artist Eastman Johnson:

 

Eastman Johnson ,Cranberry Harvest, Island

of

Nantucket,, both 1880

A

Above: Arnold Kramer, "Folk" painter and often referred to in Minnesota as "Grandpa Moses", Corn Picker [From the Irene Parsons Collection, Southwest State University, Marshal, MN]

Grant Wood, Spring Turning, 1936

. Corn sees strong eroticism in the landscapes; she writes that Wood is painting the Mother Earth in her nearly human form. The hills are anthropomorphized, she explains, clear examples of "rounded thighs, bulging breasts, and pregnant bellies" (90). Whether Wood actually intended the land to be taken anthropomorphically or not, it is true that through all of the landscapes, natural geometry is based on curves, ovals and circles, where man-made geometry is sharply defined, linear and cornered. Interestingly, people exist between these two extremes; although farmhouses are sharply lined affairs, the farmers themselves are rounded and fluid.

Harvest and food-gathering themes have long been strongly presented in the arts of many cultures and eras.

While  the ancient rock and cave art  represent hunting and gathering, agricultural memories are broadly preserved and interpreted in song, literature, film and painting. Much of America's harvest themes appear in popular culture.


Hymns and Other Songs:

William Billings (1746 - 1800)

"An Anthem for Thanksgiving: O Praise the Lord of Heaven"


William Billings, the first American published composer of psalms and hymns and the inventor of “fuguing songs”, born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 7, 1746. He died in 1800. He is the composer the patriots' favorite, "Chester," and the harvest song anthem.


Billings also published songbooks that were popular during the Revolutionary War. Some of his melodies were adapted by the Continental Army as marching tunes [See William Schuman's New England Tryptic].


"Bringing in the Sheaves", 1874, by Knowles Shaw:

Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

"Bringing in the Sheaves" is found  also at the end of Losing Battles (1970) by southern American writer, Eudora Welty., who presents the novel as dialogue, shifting with each character's recalling and re-telling family events.


Popular & Classical Forms:

And then there is "Shine on Harvest Moon ( for me and my gal)". by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth, 1931.

And America's most prolific regionally-oriented classical artist, Aaron Copeland (1900 - 1990)  Copeland's "The Tender Land" (Autumn), which was, over time, presented as a chamber piece, a 3-act opera, and as a piano concerto (1952 - 54).  See Also the CD, A Celebration of the American Farm", 1998..
  See also Jay Ungar & Molly Mason, "Harvest Home" (1998. Contemporary Country Music)


Painting: Regional, Fine and Folk:

Equally dedicated to the theme of  a regions were Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood

 Below: Thomas Hart Benton, Louisiana Rice Fields, 1928 

 Arnold Kramer,  Minnesota's "Grampa Moses (

Grant Wood, Seed Time and Harvest, 1930s

The Author comments:

In a former life, I was fortunate to be able to apply my graduate study in folklife to interesting projects in the "public sector".  That's a code word, rare these days, for state or federally-funded research in folk art,  ethnic studies, ethnography, and vernacular architecture, often presented as an art exhibit , a publication or a documentary film.  For me, one of the best of all was a survey of the food traditions from twelve of the major ethnic groups in Minnesota (The Minnesota Ethic Food Book, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986).

Researching and writing the chapter about the Scandinavian communities took me to the edges of the state, to counties near the Red River and others bordering Iowa, into the bleak northern Iron Range and, of course, the Twin Cities.

In the far-western Chippewa County village of Milan (settled in the late 1880s by Scandinavians (and with a population today around 350), I met Karen Jensen.

Born a Danish American but drawn to Norwegian and Swedish traditional arts, Jensen carries an international reputation in the Dala tradition and rosemaling, once all but defunct in America but revived with the help of Federal Arts Project artists working under the WPA in the 1930s. 

Several of her paintings (rendered in a Dala style), were narrations of local stories having to do with farm food: butchering and cooking. 

 So ...folk art or genre painting?

Below: Karen Jensen, The Day the Rommegrut Ran Out, 1985

"It was a disaster!"

The painting depicts a tented booth in a May Day fair at a point when the favorite of all dessert puddings, Rommegrut, was completely sold out.
The pudding is a pan-Scandinavian specialty, along with lefse, lutefisk
Calls for the special sour cream found on Norwegian farms. Here heavy cream is substituted.  In Lutheran church basement kitchens, one would find the porridge being stirred with a well-used tvare, an implement hand made from the ends of an evergreen tree [see The Minnesota Ethnic Food Book, 1986, p. 119].

Rømmegrøt (Sweet Cream Porridge) Recipe

• 1 gallon Heavy whipping cream
• 4 c. flour
• 2 Tbsp. sugar
• 1 Tbsp. salt About milk
• 1 egg, well beaten

Put cream into a large 10-qt. kettle. Put milk in to a 4-qt. kettle over medium heat. Bring cream to a boil over medium/moderate heat and boil cream for 20 minutes; sift in flour gradually to prevent lumps while stirring. Continue cooking over moderate heat, stirring to bring out butterfat; remove butter as soon as it forms and save. Add scalded milk gradually, stirring until mixture is smooth. Add salt and sugar and cook about 5 minutes more. Stir in one well beaten egg. Serve hot with drawn butter fat, sugar, and cinnamon. Can freeze any leftovers. You need to add warm milk when reheating in a microwave or a saucepan until the right consistency. Serves 25
From the Gjenvick-Gjønvik Archives © Larry & Deann Gjenvick

Jensen's studio itself is a beautiful piece of art.  The bathroom is decorated with many rosemaled pieces of furniture, paintings in a Swedish style, and smaller pieces of decorated furniture and with painted murals on the wall.  The studio was built with logs taken off the property in order to add-on to the original home.

Lodging is available at the Trestuen Studio.  Available are two beautifully decorated bedrooms and this writer has slept in one of them. Cozy!. 

Jensen in known throughout the Midwest and continues to paint in her Rosemaling style in Milan, MN  56262

 Jennie Cell, Butchering Day, circa 1955-1960

Jennie Cell  [b.Born: Charleston, Illinois, 1905.  Died: Charleston, Illinois, 1988].  Her two best works are Butchering Day and Pruning Day, 1955-60.
Both hang in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Cell's Butchering Day, appears in Victor Turner's Celebration: A World of Art and Ritual, Smithsonian Institution's Office of Folklife Programs, 1982, in the section, "Celebrations of Increase".  p 177.

Cell, Pruning Day

And in Other 

Times, Media and Cultural Settings:

Film: 

"Bitter Rice"  (1949, (in Italian) directed by  Giuseppi De Santis and starring Vittorio Gassman and Silvana Mangano (below).This actress became, fr my generation, as erotic as the subsequent Jane Russell in "The Outlaw" 1946.

Hay harvest at Eragny - Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissaro (1830 - 1903)  Hay harvest at Eragny, 1889

 

Also, Beet Harvest, 

The vast landscape has been built up in horizontal planes; in the foreground lies the harvested wheat, while in the background the purple-blue mountains rise up into the turquoise air.

Van Gogh was not interested in simply painting a pretty, sun-drenched landscape, but in capturing the essence of country life. The various stages of the harvest are depicted in the central plane: there is a haystack, ladders, several carts and, to the right, a man with a pitchfork. Although they appear rather small, Van Gogh considered both the farmers and their labors to be an essential part of his picture.

Van Gogh himself gave the painting its title: La Moisson, the harvest. In his early work in Nuenen, too, the artist had sought to illustrate the various facets of peasant life (see The Potato Eaters).

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Vincent Van Gogh, The Harvest, 1888

Stadt Land Fluss (in German) ["City, Country, River"]. Director: Benjamin Cantu, 2011.  Tracks in great detail the work of two farming apprentices in a rural German area.  Well reviewed in the gay media.

Serebriakova: Harvest, 1915 

 

:Zinaida Serebriakova (1884-167) was born near Karkhov, Ukrain and is held as one of the earliest female painters to be held in high esteem.  Harvest, 1915. is a fine example of pre-revolutionary Russian painting interpreting "harvest".

   

MALEVICH: Taking in the Rye, 1911.

Kazimir Malevaich Taking In the Rye, 1911 [Russian Cubo-Futurist or Supremist art]

(1909 - 1920s) .  The Futurists were fascinated by new visual technology, in particular chrono-photography, a predecessor of animation and cinema that allowed the movement of an object to be shown across a sequence of frames. This technology was an important influence on their approach to showing movement in painting, encouraging an abstract art with rhythmic, pulsating qualities. 

Malevich, Girls in a Field, 1928-32

GONCHAROVA: Harvest, 1922

Working within the same style of the Moscow Salon,  including folk themes and abstraction, Natalia Goncharova painted her version of Harvest, 1922

Sergei Gerasimov: Collective Farm  Harvest Festival, 1937.

Socialist-Realism, serving as encouraging propaganda for the masses, tended to present life as it should or might be, rather than true reality.  Here, the harvest is over (the unbelievable toil, often without proper machinery, is over), and the party begins

among healthy, beautiful and eager workers.

Literature:

 Willa Cather grew up on the Great Plains and frequently mentioned harvests in her fiction.
 Book 4.Chapter 3:

  ON THE FIRST OR second day of August I got a horse and cart and set out for the high country, to visit the Widow Steavens. The wheat harvest was over, and here and there along the horizon I could see black puffs of smoke from the steam threshing-machines. The old pasture land was now being broken up into wheatfields and cornfields, the red grass was disappearing, and the whole face of the country was changing.



















My Antonia by Willa Cather
(1875-1947)


John Steinbeck (1892 - 1968),  "The Harvest Gypsies", in sequential installments, in The San Francisco News, 1932-1938.  The idea for “The Harvest Gypsies” began in 1936 when The San Francisco News commissioned John Steinbeck to write a series of articles in order to document the lifestyles of the large number of Dust Bowl refugees who were migrating west to California hoping to find employment as agricultural laborers. Intrigued by the assignment, Steinbeck immediately purchased an old bakery truck to travel in and planned his route into middle California’s agricultural district, determined to live among the workers and experience their plight firsthand. What he found there shocked and outraged him, and his anger erupted as he composed the articles that became a seven-part journalistic series. [Citation:
Meyer, Michael J.. "The Harvest Gypsies". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 January 2008
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23075, accessed 10 February 2012.] Academics and Folk Art: :  So many of the 1970s  folklore academics were riveted on the necessity to searchout, identify and define their subjects, a left-over from the botantical/biological sciences of the 19th century. Many publications were largely devoted to their findings, strove toward meaning, but seldom was the research pushed beyond, into "art", per se. 
That was separate. 

Today, I can easily recall structures and artifacts from my field notes, that could be termed "installations" by any contemporary fine art museum.

In the realm of folk arts of the recent decades two approaches held sway. One, epitomized by American antique enthusiasts and curators at Winterthur, focused on the unique, even "quaint appearance" of forms, whether the maker was known or unknown. As Simon J. Bronner wrote in his excellent study,  Following Tradition,  (1998), " In a sense, many antiquarians defined folk art for what is was not." Collections at Winterthur Museum reflect the strongest of this approach.

The other approach is one that I used in a University of Minneapolis museum exhibit, Circles of Tradition.  Coming from theories in anthropology and folklife [regional ethnogpraphy] , we focused on artists as members of a particular culture group, community and a tradition. Good examples include the blacksmithing and religious artifacts of the Hmong from Laos, Native American and German American basket makers, and Norwegian American quilters.  Context was important.  Sort of like Deconstructivest criticism.  We grappled for "meaning," and Henry Glassie said, "Meaning is to approach."

Today,  visual culture, diminishes the aruments of such and such a narrative or image was folk or non-folk. The earliest and very perceptive article that I found on the subject is  "The Non-Folkness of the Folk and the Folkness of the Non-Folk" by Charles Seeger (Pete and Peggy's dad), an essay included in Folklore and society: Essays in honor of Benj. A. Botkin (Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1966, pp. 1–9).