*The Radical Eye of Impressionism's Patriarch* By KAREN ROSENBERG He is known as the father of Impressionism, yet Camille Pissarro has always been eclipsed by his more charming brood. Last year's Cézanne and Pissarro exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, for instance, was billed as a dialogue in the mold of Matisse<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/henri_matisse/index.html?inline=nyt-per> -Picasso<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/pablo_picasso/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, but it quickly became a one-sided conversation. Pissarro on his own is not blockbuster material; his paintings have a muddy, homely aspect next to Cézannes or Monets or Renoirs. Yet for Pissarro, an anarchist and a Jew (albeit a secular one) in 19th-century France, Impressionism was about much more than the fleeting effects of light. It was about labor, the elimination of hierarchies and an idealized balance between urban and rural life.
The Jewish Museum<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/j/jewish_museum/index.html?inline=nyt-org>'s "Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country" contains few out-and-out masterpieces, but it does give us a rare look at the radical philosophies behind paintings that to a modern eye appear harmlessly bourgeois. (That most of the works in the show come from private collections suggests that anarchy is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.) Pissarro (1830-1903), the child of Sephardic Jews from Bordeaux, was born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, which was Danish at the time. Expected to work in the family's dry-goods business, he fled to Paris but eventually won the moral and financial support of his parents (who later followed him to France). His early work reflects his training with Corot as well as his island upbringing: "Inlet and Sailboat" (1856) shows two tiny but identifiably dark-skinned figures gazing at a distant vessel. Pissarro did not develop his own style for another decade or so, around the time he painted "The Brook at Montbuisson, Louveciennes" (1869), a quietly radiant, ochre-stippled autumn landscape punctuated by the slight figure of a woman collecting water. In this show the political symbolism sometimes feels forced (as when the curators single out the motif of winding paths); in the paintings themselves it never does. Rather than silhouetting his peasants against the sunset, as Millet did, or conveying the ugliness of backbreaking labor à la Courbet, Pissarro expressed solidarity with farmworkers through a heavy-handed application of paint. As one critic remarked, "Monsieur Pissarro's brush is like a spade painfully turning the earth." These qualities are most evident in several lyrical landscapes of Montfoucault, where Pissarro spent many seasons at the working farm of his friend Ludovic Piette. The subjects of "Peasant Women Shifting Straw, Montfoucault" (1875), hefting the golden bales onto long sticks, could almost be wielding giant paintbrushes. In the slippery "Winter at Montfoucault, Man Riding a Horse," painted later that same year, painter and subject seem to be ignoring each other out of mutual respect for the difficulty of each other's activity. Pissarro didn't always keep the figure at such a distance, as several gouaches of peasant women attest, but he continued to integrate it with the landscape — perhaps too much so. As the critic Charles Morice observed, "I've noticed that in Pissarro's paintings the human figures, quite precisely, have the same import as the vegetables beside them." Pissarro's association with labor became even more pronounced during a brief Neo-Impressionist phase. In the mid-1880s, amid growing social unrest in Paris, he became fascinated with the leftist writings of Félix Fénéon and with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac's Pointillist approach. Even as he distinguished his and Seurat's "scientific Impressionism" from the "romantic Impressionism" of Monet, he managed to unite what was by then a fractious group for a final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Pissarro's Pointillist paintings did not sell well, but he had other reasons for abandoning the movement toward the end of the decade. The exacting technique, he felt, detracted from the immediacy and individuality he so valued. "How can one combine the purity and simplicity of the dot with the fullness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity and freshness of sensation postulated by our impressionist art?" he wrote to his son Lucien. Pissarro's late landscapes retain the Pointillists' interest in optically mixed color; several early 1890s views of flooded trees at Éragny, where he had purchased a house with a garden and meadow, juxtapose daubs of red and green, orange and purple, to brilliant effect. The show ends, too quickly, with a selection of Pissarro's cityscapes. (Although he painted some 300 of these scenes, they make up only a fifth of the show.) The shift to an urban context had something to do with a recurring eye infection that kept Pissarro indoors for much of the day, as well as the isolating circumstances of the Dreyfus affair (which further polarized what was left of the Impressionists). From his window at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/louvre/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, Pissarro made many paintings of the Avenue de l'Opéra; in the one on view, from 1898, specklike couples promenade into a foggy sky. He also took trips to Dieppe, Le Havre, London (represented by several uncharacteristically sunny views of Kew Gardens) and Rouen. A comparison of his "Wharves, Saint-Sever, Rouen" (1896) and Monet's cathedrals is especially revealing: Pissarro stayed in Monet's former room overlooking the Pont Boieldieu, but it was the locale's "great commotion of carriages, strollers, stevedores, boats, smoke, haze in the distance, full of life and movement," not only its atmospheric sheen, that seems to have captivated him. Pissarro emerges from this exhibition as an artist who never quite resolved the conflict between labor and sensation, but one whose subtly anti-authoritarian stance propelled painting into the next century. His stylistic progeny may have produced more beautiful pictures, but "père Pissarro" is the true revolutionary. "Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country" is on view through Feb. 3 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/arts/design/14piss.html?_r=1&oref=slogin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
