Peasant Art Quotes

“People fell into the error of imagining that an art which portrays the life of simple folks is also intended for simple folk, whereas the truth is, in reality, rather the opposite. It is usually only the conservatively thinking and feeling ranks of society that seek in art for an image of their own way of life, the portrayl of their own social environment. Oppressed and upward-striving classes wish to see the representation of conditions of life which they themselves envisage as an ideal to aim at, but not the kind of conditions they are trying to work themselves out of. Only people who are themselves superior to them feel sentimentally about simple conditions of life. That is so today, and it was no different in sixteenth century. Just as the working class and the petty bourgeoisie of today want to see the milieu of rich people and not the circumstances of their own constricted lives in the cinema, and just as the working-class drama of the last century achieved their outstanding successes not in the popular theatres but in the West End of the big cities, so Bruegel's art was not intended for the peasantry but for the higher or, at any rate, the urban levels of society.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque