The History Of Dislocation: Jf Miller And Comments In China Study

As one of the most representative French artiest in the mid- and late19th century, Jean-Fran(?)ois Millet is world famous for his works such as The Sower,The Gleaners, The Angelus etc.However,from the mid-19th century to present,Millet and his paintings in art criticism and professional research are always controversial.In Millet's time,the left interpreted him in the view of social and political revolution, while the right placed the idyllically poetized understanding upon him.This conflict caused by the differences of social classes and basic values lasted to the 1860s.Since then,Alfred Sensier,Millet's main sponsor and his first biographer,"deified" him as a devout and gifted "peasant painter",and this view was widely accepted by French, American middle class and the masses,and then spread to other countries including China.This kind of view dominated the art criticism and research until the mid-20th century,when Marxism and the development of social art history brought a change. On one hand,the western critics and art historians tried to use these methods to break "Millet's myth" by re-verify the original materials;on the other hand,the contemporary or earlier Chinese critics,under the influence of ideological atmosphere and certain political events after the founding of new China,in a similar perspective, uniformly molded Millet as a realistic "hero" who sympathized the socialist revolution and the laboring people.All the researchers believed that the Millet they described were true,however,there is actually no such absolutely true Millet.All reviews and researches are inevitable based on certain implicit or explicit purposes of the authors,the specific social,political and cultural context,even the personal experiences of the critics and art historians will affect their research.Benefit from the progress of the social art history theories and Foucault's research on knowledge,this paper sorts out the historical development of Millet research,and at the same time,is more focusing on the relation between "writing" and its "context",analyzing different texts by different critics and researchers,comparing their commons and differences, and the macro- to micro-,explicit- and implicit- factors behind them,which resulted in the same or different views towards Millet,forming this or that or even completely opposite kind of"Millets".