The most surprising image in the Constantin Meunier retrospective currently running at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels is a mental one: the social realist Meunier setting off to explore Wallonia’s industrial hinterland in the company of arch symbolist Xavier Mellery. We know what Meunier got from the experience, but where are Mellery’s portraits of steelworkers and miners, glassworks and pitheads?
There is no immediate answer — this is Meunier’s show, after all. But perhaps the association goes some way to explain the symbolist pastels that Meunier produced during the mid-1890s. The subject is still industrial but the colours and odd juxtapositions of characters are a world away from the conventional notion of Meunier’s art.
L’hécatombe de l’Agrappe (nd). Source: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo: Vincent Everarts Photographie
This is one of the few unexpected moments in an exhibition that has a pleasant feeling of déjà vu but little new to say about a well-known chronicler of 19th Century Belgium’s working class. His early work is unremarkable, although it is interesting to see the deep roots of his religious imagery and, less creditably, a strong line in sentimentality. This runs from the humorous scenes from bourgeois life he produced early on, when struggling to support his growing family, right through to later paintings of courting miners.
In addition to writing about Meunier’s Flemish connections, for Flanders Today, the exhibition inspired me to look a little further into Meunier’s depiction of hiercheuses, the women who worked in the mines. This was triggered by the audio guide, which mentions the popularity of this subject in the late 19th Century, adding that Meunier’s approach differed from the unsavoury treatment by artists such as Armand Rassenfosse, a follower of Felicien Rops.
It turns out to be a fascinating subject, explored at length by Patricia J Hilden in a 1991 paper in The Historical Journal. She considers Meunier’s figures to be part of a broader movement in Belgian society to deal with troubling role of women in the mines.
Hiercheuse à la lanterne (ca 1886). Source: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo: J Geleyns/Ro scan
“In this unusual transformation of real subjects into an artistic image, the sexuality of the ‘real’ hiercheuses — imagined to be particularly uncontrolled underground — was tamed, not by forcing women miners into the separate world of the home, or even by restricting them to surface work, where the light of day might prevent untoward sexual promiscuity, but rather by aestheticizing them into asexual, pre-pubescents. In other words, virtually every portrait of these hiercheuses shows a youthful figure almost entirely lacking overt female sexual characteristics.”
You only have to look at photographs of hiercheuses to see that Meunier is playing fast and loose with reality. Yet Hilden also quotes one contemporary who clearly found his images seductive. A similar view appears in one of Theo van Gogh’s letters to his brother Vincent, concerning a Meunier hiercheuse at the 1889 World Exhibition. “She’s chatting with a young lad before going underground. They’re dressed the same, but she’s definitely feminine…”
Vincent replies, regretting the fact that a painter he considers superior to himself has treated subjects he wanted for his own. (And if you are having trouble with the Walloon ‘hiercheuse’ try Vincent’s ‘scloneuse’, which I think is Picard dialect. The Van Gogh letters site valiantly translates this into English as ‘thrutcher’).
Hiercheuse descendant à la fosse (nd). Source: Charleroi Museum. Photo: Alain Breyer
I can hardly look at Meunier’s hiercheuses with 19th Century eyes, but I’m inclined to think that they are idealised but not asexual. As Hilden points out, the hiercheuses dressed in a distinctive way, wearing trousers and short jackets, while other working class women generally wore skirts. Surely there would have been a frisson in being able to show, with legitimate reason, an idealised female form in these close-fitting clothes? The bare-breasted hiercheuses painted by Rassenfosse may be earthier, but both artists are essentially doing the same thing.
Hilden mentions a number of other artists who depicted hiercheuses in the period in question: Pierre Paulus, Henri Marechal, Alex-Louis Martin, Leon Vandenhouten, Marius Carion and… Xavier Mellery. So maybe that trip to the Black Country paid off after all.
Constantin Meunier (1831-1905) Retrospective, until 11 January 2015 at the Museum of Fine Arts Brussels
text © Ian Mundell 2014
Unnumbered Impressions 