Your passion and approach to Art has re-inspired me to achieve more and SEE.

John

As John notes, the haystacks were not the only light studies by Monet. In fact some of them are in this same gallery. As I circle the room to the right I see the London scenes of the bridges of Waterloo and Charing Cross and, on a single canvas, the House of Parliament, also in the background of one of the bridge studies. The light in the urban scenes is diffused by fog and maybe (they were painted in 1900) industry. There is a definite difference between the diffusion of light in the London studies and how the light is filtered by the mist in “The Seine at Giverny.” Finally, to see the two views of the church in Vetheuil from across the Seine – one, early in the day, the other, late – is to give new meaning to the photographic concept of “waiting for the light” as did the varied “exposures” of the haystacks and the bridges. The exhibition brochure says Monet once asked “”How many shades of how many colors are there within the nuances of light in this simple tree trunk ?” I’d like to work for this guy. As a focus-puller, I love it when we’re not rolling and “waiting for the light”. It’s the only time in the cinematographic process I can’t make any mistakes. Once we’re rolling, my job is fraught with danger. Maybe that’s why Iike the Impressionists so much: they’re all little blurry to start with.

Chicago is very lucky to have these light studies of Monet. John finds that ” it should be no surprise, given the richness of the Art Institute’s holdings, that nine of them were bought by Chicago collector Bertha Honoré Palmer.” There should be no surprise, either, about the richness of the collector. When she married Potter Palmer in 1870, it was the merging of two prominent Chicago families who had already made millions from real estate in a city only 35 years into its incorporation. [Movie trivia: John Bailey shot scenes in Chicago for Paul Schrader's "Light of Day" at the Get Me High Lounge at 1758 North Honore, a street named after Ms. Palmer's father.] Although, due to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Honorés lost their mansion and the Palmers lost a luxury hotel just days after it opened, both families raked in millions more selling land to rebuild the burnt-down city. While her robber baron of a husband was at work, Ms. Palmer made good use of her time. Besides collecting the French Impressionist paintings in question, she also collected many others which anchor the Chicago Art Institute’s incredible collection. She was also a member of the Chicago Women’s Club, the incubator for Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop and Lucy Flower, Chicago socialites turned social activists. Their work to improve state and local facilities for children of the immigrant poor resulted in legislation against child labor, for compulsory public education and led to the creation of the first juvenile court in the United States. In spite of her sympathy for the lower classes, Bertha Honoré Palmer received this letter from Mary “Mother” Jones, a social activist and labor organizer from the other side of the Chicago’s el tracks. Ironically, Mother Jones lost her home in the fire of 1871, too.

Letter to Mrs. Potter Palmer from Mother Jones, January 12, 1907

Dear Madam:

    By the announcement of the daily press I learn that you are to entertain a number of persons who are to be present as representatives of two recognized classes of American citizens-the working class and the capitalist class, and that the purpose of this gathering is to choose a common ground on which the conflicting interests of these two classes may be harmonized and the present strife between the organized forces of these two classes may be brought to a peaceful and satisfactory end.

       I credit you with perfect sincerity in this matter, but being fully aware that your environment and whole life has prevented you from seeing and understanding the true relationship of these two classes in this republic and the nature of the conflict which you think can be ended by such means as you are so prominently associated with, and with a desire that you may see and understand it in all its grim reality, I respectfully submit these few personal experiences for your kind consideration.

     I am a workman’s daughter, by occupation a dress-maker and school teacher, and during this last twenty-five years an active worker in the organized labor movement. During the past seventy years of my life I have been subject to the authority of the capitalist class and for the last thirty-five years I have been conscious of this fact. With the years’ personal experience – the roughest kind best of all teachers – I have learned that there is an irrepressible conflict that will never end between the working-class and the capitalist-class, until these two classes disappear and the worker alone remains the producer and owner of the capital produced.

       In this fight I wept at the grave of nineteen workers shot on the highways of Latterman, Pennsylvania in 1897. In the same place I marched with 5,000 women eighteen miles in the night seeking bread for their children, and halted with the bayonets of the Coal and Iron police who had orders to shoot to kill.

        I was at Stanford Mountain, W.Va., in 1903 where seven of my brother workers were shot dead while asleep in their little shanties by the same forces.

        I was in Colorado at the bull pens in which men, women and children were enclosed by the same forces, directed by that instrument of the capitalist class recently promoted by President Roosevelt, General Bell, who achieved some fame for his declaration that ‘in place of Habeas Corpus’ he would give them ‘Post Mortems.’

         The same forces put me, an inoffensive old woman, in jail in West Virginia in 1902. They dragged me out of bed in Colorado in March, 1904, and marched me at the point of fixed bayonets to the border line of Kansas in the night-time. The same force took me from the streets of Price, Utah, in 1904, and put me in jail. They did this to me in my old. age, though I have never violated the law of the land, never been tried by a court on any charge but once, and that was for speaking to my fellow workers, and then I was discharged by the federal court whose injunction I was charged with violating.

       The capitalist class, whose representatives you will entertain, did this to me, and these other lawless acts have and are being committed every hour by this same class all over this land, and this they will continue to do till the working-class send their representatives into the legislative halls of this nation and by law take away the power of this capitalist class to rob and oppress the workers.

      The workers are coming to understand this and the intelligent part of that class while respecting you, understand the uselessness of such conferences as will assemble in your mansion.

Sincerely yours, for justice, 

Mother Jones

So thanks to John Bailey for his alfalfa bale – “as mundane an image as you can imagine”, indeed. As has always been my personal experience with him, he has taken me places I hadn’t expected to go. And if you’re puzzled as to how I got to Mother Jones , ask yourself as you look at the Monets, “Who stacked all that hay anyhow?”

-Pete Kuttner