The Dignity of Our Labor
- RMG
- Nov 15, 2018
- 4 min read
That picture of Geoffrey Owens that floated around a few months ago got me thinking about how we value labor in the twenty-first century. I'm sure you saw it: the Cosby Show actor is behind the cashier's counter at a New Jersey Trader Joe's, punching a produce code into his register. His paunch pushes through his blue TJ's t-shirt and his hair is graying. I grew up watching the Cosby Show, and his character, Elvin Tibideaux, was always clean cut, smoothly-styled in that late 80's kinda way where button down sweater vests were cool and clothing hung just a little looser than it needed to. But to see the actor, miles away from Hollywood, and even farther away from my childhood, really brought home the stark utility of life and work. The picture is almost a work of art in the way that it makes you think about your own role in the world, and what you need to do to pay the bills. Nineteenth-century French painters drove at this feeling that images of life and work can arouse in us. Edgar Degas was particularly good at this.
His painting "The Milliners" hangs in the Getty and conveys that same feeling of utility. I went to see it a few weeks ago, and it had a lot to say. Two women are seated at a work table in a millinery, or hat maker's, shop. One of the women sits in
shadow as she threads a hat. Her head is cocked to her right just a little bit, but her face is relaxed, as if she's thinking about the job, but not more than she has to. The other woman is a different story. She sits facing the opposite direction, but her hands have stopped. She holds some strips of pink fabric: the start of a new hat. She sits with a deep heaviness that looks like the quietest, most still thing in the world. But the whole painting takes place in her face.
She's paused before starting the new hat, but why? Most of the painting is in shadow, but not her face. Her face is the most detailed and well-lit piece of the picture. I can't know for sure, but she looks much older than the other woman. Her makeup looks caked on, like it's trying to hide something. Her face has settled into a frown, and she stares blankly into space. It looks as if she's considering her past and her future, and all she sees in her mind's eye is that work table, and threading hat, after hat, after hat. She's disconnected from her work, and that says everything about when this picture was painted.
Paris in the mid-nineteenth century was ground zero for the modernization of work and the capitalist economy hyper-drive. Degas painted this at about 1882, 34 years after waves of violent laborer revolts swept through European industrial centers. Industrialization was the reason for that 1848 Revolt. The mechanization of the workplace made laborers cheap and their craftsmanship invisible. But it also made those industries that were mechanized wildly profitable, textiles, in particular. Add to this the rise of the department store, where shoppers could find a variety of home products and chic goods under one roof. This had a profound effect on the millinery industry.
Hat making was historically a woman's territory. But after 1840, when mechanization took hold of the textile manufacturing process and department stores made selling fashionable goods a winning enterprise, men displaced women in the millinery leadership structure. As wealthy male investors assumed control of companies and fashion houses, female laborers filled up the workshops in the backs of stores. The weight of this new economy was carried most by the low wage worker. The awareness of this new reality seems to register in the heavy expression of Degas' milliner. Degas and his French peers weren't the only ones to depict the utility of work, but their approach contrasts sharply with prior pre-industrial European cultures.
The Dutch have the quirky distinction in the history of art of being the first culture that painted pictures of regular people for regular people (in any large-scale sense, anyway). By regular I mean middle class because the other thing that distinguished the Dutch from their European and historical neighbors was their creation of the west's first middle class society governed by a republican political system. Middle class people made up the Dutch art market, not monarchs or a high-ranking clergy. And true then as is true now, people like to see pictures of themselves, or at least people that they could imagine themselves being. This meant more pictures of laborers than you would find in other European cultures of the era.
Gerard ter Borch was a painter who made a career giving the public pictures of itself. In A Horse Stable (c.1654), also at the Getty, a woman looks in on a man as he grooms a riding horse. Unlike Degas' milliner, the groomer's expression is calm, his mouth is parted and his face is relaxed. With his right hand
on the animal, he leans into the movement of his left hand. My sense is that his hands are not just practical instruments, but his connections to work that is an extension of himself. His identity and reputation as a skilled laborer are attached to work that isn't anonymous or intended for a mass audience. His audience and customer is right here in the room with him. This is probably her stable, attached to her house. We see his individuality in much the same way that she does: present in the room and attached to the service he sells.
Between the eras of the ter Borch and Degas paintings, industrialization expanded the western economy. The value of the laborer to his or her job changed, often alienated. In fact, nineteenth-century social critics like Karl Marx and Max Weber worried about this endlessly. The individuality of the groomer's effort in 1654 became obscured by the products for sale that surrounded Degas' milliner in 1887. All labor has value, but maybe the milliner knows better than most what it feels like to see the individual dignity of that labor slip through her (and our) fingers.
Images
Sources
Raymond A. Jonas, Industry and Politics in Rural France: Peasants of the Isere, 1870 - 1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
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