You hear the ringing of the Angelus, muffled by distance. It's crystalline voice and material of the Church which calls to prayer.

Angelus of Millet

Millet met admirably in his painting the elements necessary for an understanding of the dignity of manual labor in the placid and happy atmosphere of true Christian virtue.

Not all moments in the life of the field are. Millet portrayed in what we would call a happy instant, a highlight of moral and material beauty. But the picture has the merit of teaching men to see, scattered in the routine of everyday rural life, genuine and frequent reflections of the Christian face of souls and things in a truly animated by the Holy Church.

The attitude of the spirit of Millet, who communicates to whom he contemplates his masterpiece, this return to God, and to the reflections of the spiritual beauty and material that the project creation. A psychological critique of the table, to be exact, should deplore hardly any excess sentimentality. Could do the same praise of the box Yves Alix, also inspired by the life of the fields

Le Maître des Moissons - Alix

The author did not realize he did not feel, did not accept his vision of farm work anything so that it becomes worthy of being performed by a child of God. This table was not the spirit that dominated the field and ennobled.

It was the stuff that entered the spirit and demoted him. The paper printed material in the bodies brutality as it outlaws. Physiognomies exhale a state of mind that recalls the tavern and the concentration camp. If the characters of the second plan does not seem so hard, if they were able to mourn, her tears would be of gall. If they were able to moan, his moans would be like the grinding of gears. The sadness, evil, the cacophony of colors, forms and souls is exhaled by the voice of the character in the foreground. It is not clear what he said, if a threat or a blasphemy. Yves Alix met and exaggerated and distorted to delirium aspects where work is an atonement and suffering, and the land an exile, said a meticulous fidelity - and almost enthusiastic - what the human soul is most heinous and lower, to present the whole as real and normal aspect of daily life, spiritual and professional worker.

Consequently, while the Millet's masterpiece stands a prayer, Yves Alix nightmare bad breath off a revolution.

If God allowed the angels to beautify the land and life, they would do in the sense become more frequent, longer lasting, more beautiful aspects Millet sought to observe and gather. If allowed to disfigure the demons and the creation of men, they submitted, in the soul and body, and the aspects of things, characters and environments as Yves Alix box.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira