Bietenoogst, which was finished in 1890, may be considered a pivotal work in the oeuvre of Emile Claus. The painting was exhibited to the public at the Brussels Salon of 1890. It subsequently traveled to Paris and Munich, where Claus received a gold medal. Claus had the canvas set up in his studio up to his death. It was donated to the town of Deinze by his widow in 1942.
Bietenoogst demands to be inhabited, at roughly three meters high and five meters wide. One cannot just gaze from the outside. Five figures in the foreground have complete physical authority. Bent at the waist, arms working, and bodies committed entirely to the act of pulling beetroot from the earth. The weight of the harvest communicated through the sheer size of the bodies on canvas. This is not a romantic picture of rural labour. It is instead a scene of energetic agents engrossed in tiring work. A cart and cow retreat into the distance, and beyond is a flat Flemish landscape. The eye wanders back, persistently, to the foreground and the figures whose labour fills it. Again, the subject is not the landscape. It is the tiring, repetitive, bodily act of agricultural work.
The work was created in 1890, right after Emile Claus's early years in Paris in 1888, when he had firsthand experience with the French Impressionists (Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, etc.) and his style started to decisively change from realism to a greater engagement with color and light. The figures in Bietenoogst have a solidity and descriptive weight that sets it apart from Impressionism proper, despite the palette being brighter than what rigorous naturalism allows and the brushwork being more lively. Where Monet, in a painting like Haystacks (1890s), allows form to dissolve under the pressure of changing light; the stacks becoming almost interchangeable vessels for atmospheric colour; Claus keeps his figures grounded and legible. The light serves them rather than consuming them. Realism marches towards light, not yet arrived. Although colour is given more weight than strict naturalism would allow, Claus has not yet completely abandoned the descriptive function of paint. The lighting is diffuse and with no identifiable source. All is legible, but none is dramatically spotlighted. Such is what makes Bietenoogst a transitional piece. The luminism that will characterize Claus’s mature work (consider the glowing, almost sourceless light of Zonnegloed (1905), and its dissolution of form into atmosphere) is not yet present but the conditions for it are being constructed. The preoccupations of luminism in naturalist dress: the interest in how light behaves over a field, over bodies in motion, over the skin of a vegetable pulled from dark soil.
Claus had settled on the banks of the Lys at Astene from 1883, at the encouragement of writer and champion of peasant life Camille Lemonnier, and it was there he began tempering his naturalism with luminism. Bietenoogst belongs to the series of large-format peasant paintings of harvesters, communicants, fishermen and haymakers that this environment produced. He had a sustained commitment to Flemish agricultural life as worthy subject matter. The scale of this commitment carries a socio-political dimension. Monumental scale in 1890 belonged to history painting of mythological subjects, battle scenes, and the deeds of great men. Claus appropriates that scale for peasant labour, and the gesture is not neutral. In the 1880s and 1890s, Belgium was in the middle of a significant social crisis. To portray agricultural workers heroically was to make a claim about whose lives merited monumental attention. Claus was not at all a political painter in any conceptual sense; his engagement with peasant life derived from empathy and proximity, not from ideology. Nevertheless, Bietenoogst was also part of a larger reorientation of subject matter, shared with Jules Bastien-Lepage and Constantin Meunier in Belgium, toward the dignity of physical labor.
Bietenoogst recalls the realism of Claus’s earlier career and anticipates the luminism he would fully realize by the founding of Vie et Lumière in 1904. Where Monet’s interest in light was fundamentally fleeting (capturing the moment before it fades) Claus was attracted to light as a state of extension, a thing that fills rather than winks. The figures in Bietenoogst are not impressionistic dissolving presences but solid, legible, physically committed to their task. That commitment to presence would not be abandoned by the luminism to come. It would simply shift it from the human figure to light itself.
This artwork represents a very powerful transition from the idealized, romanticized depictions of rural labor towards its actual physical reality and human dignity. By painting ordinary Flemish peasants on a canvas like this, which was traditionally reserved for historic, noble, or mythological subjects, Claus had elevated the grueling, and repetitive act of agricultural work to something heroic in itself and worthy of attention.
