Pissaro at an exhibition
Pissarro was born in St Thomas, in the Danish West Indies, on July 10, 1830, the child of a French-Jewish merchant. Frederic Pissarro had created a scandal when he was sent to St Thomas from France to sort out the estate of his maternal uncle and fell in love with his uncle's wife. It was years before the state and religious authorities would allow the marriage: a wrangle that clouded Pissarro's childhood and must have contributed to his embrace of atheism and anti-authoritarianism.
Pissarro was sent to boarding school in Paris for six years, and returned to work in the family business in 1847. He pursued his art in his spare time but, at 23, he rebelled, running away to Caracas in Venezuela with a kindred spirit, the Danish artist, Fritz Melbye, his first mentor. A little later, his family reconciled to his ambitions, he left for Paris to pursue his vocation. There he studied at the Academie des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Suisse and under such towering figures as the painters Corot and Courbet.
Corot, in particular, had a huge impact on Pissarro's thinking. In his catalogue essay, Maloon points out that Corot always encouraged Pissarro to maintain an open mind and trust his intuition when it came to composition. Pissarro, in turn, advised his proteges to avoid preconceived ideas, systems, formulas: "Reality had to be taken by surprise," as Maloon elegantly puts it.
Art world orthodoxies left Pissarro dissatisfied. He worked at the margins, scraping a living until almost the end of his life. He and his wife Julie had a large family and they economised by moving to Pontoise in the 1860s, linked to the capital, and the art world, by the new Paris-Dieppe railway. Pissarro was to find his subject material in the agricultural and industrialising landscapes of his neighbourhood.
Julie evidently gave him a hard time about sacrificing the family's material comfort for his art, and yet the family was a happy one. Lionel Pissarro, a Paris art dealer and Joachim's brother, points out that all five of Pissarro's sons, most of their children, and the children of Pissarro's daughter, Jeanne, followed the patriarch into the art world. "The financial struggle did not kill their interest, their passion, for art," he says, "which is a miracle almost, because they witnessed how much trouble the father had to provide the minimum for the family, without any type of luxury."
It helped, Lionel says, that Julie had come from a very poor family - originally Burgundy vignerons, their livelihood had been wiped out by the phylloxera plague that devastated the region - and she knew how to manage. And family life, as an institution, was never sacrificed.
"He turned his own family into an art school, so to speak," Lionel says. "His favourite pupils were his own children, so he was not only a father, he was a teacher to them. And as much as he educated them in art, he also tried to lead them to the same kind of free-thinking he adopted for himself. So he was the best type of guide - someone who is not only able to share knowledge but, at the same time, encourages you to independence of that knowledge."
A chance meeting with Monet and Degas gave Pissarro a sympathetic circle in which to move. His work was accepted by the Academy, but in 1863 he chose to exhibit, with Manet, Whistler and others, at the Salon des Refuses. He participated in all eight impressionist exhibitions, between 1874 and 1886, before briefly joining the neo-impressionist movement.
Pissarro was gregarious, nothing like the cliche of the solitary, angst-ridden artist. He enjoyed being part of a movement, in rapport with others. Politically engaged and a follower of Proudhon, his commitment to anarchism reinforced what must have been an innate sociability. It had ramifications for his art and for the art world. Lionel says that when diverging visions and bruised egos threatened the group, his great-grandfather would be the peace-maker, writing letters to each party, urging them to keep faith with the wider goal. Pissarro believed that the impressionists, challenging conservatism, could achieve far more as a group than each artist would be able to achieve independently.
He had a different relationship with each of his colleagues. He had enormous respect for Monet's painting, and was close to Sisley. He and Degas collaborated in their pioneering print-making.
Seurat and Signac, leaders of the neo-impressionists, were his sons' age (his son Lucien was involved with them), and Pissarro joined them for three years in the late 1880s to experiment with their techniques.
He was a mentor to Gauguin and Cezanne, yet learned from their experiments. He was revered by younger artists, but never reified into an art world institution.
In the 1860s, Pissarro developed a style of thick daubs of paint applied with a palette knife. The effect was solid: sometimes brooding, sometimes sunnily earthy. Maloon talks of once seeing a roomful of Pissarros from this period as a revelation: being made aware of the "masterful achievement" of a lesser-known period in the artist's oeuvre.
"And he just walked away from it," Maloon says. "He got interested in experimenting with painting outdoors and developing a more efficient way of noting the fugitive effect of nature."
Pissarro was interested in finding a way in which those outdoor sketches might be reconceived as ambitious, substantial, solid compositions - not characteristics usually associated with impressionism. Rather we think of the dancing effect of light, resolved by the viewer at a distance from the canvas, which the later pointillists would take to the nth degree. Indeed, by the '70s, his paintings begin to shimmer with colour: the vegetable greens are greener, the women's dresses bluer, the clouds paler. By the early 1880s, when he painted The banks of the Viosne at Osny which has hung in the NGV since 1927, Pissarro's engagement with light imbues even a winter landscape with quiet joy.
His paintings maintained an extraordinary dignity throughout his stylistic experiments, a sort of belief in the rightness of the world. Maloon refers to the "density of them, the materiality of them". Light may have been broken down, but only to be reassembled to deliver the world as he saw it. "Impressionism was seen at that time as almost a sort of anti-composition," Maloon says, "and what Pissarro was also doing was also seen as a kind of non-composition. Of course, we look at him now and see it was totally composed."
Pissarro was a bridge from romanticism to the sensibility of modernism. He was less interested in what was going on in his own mind and more interested in the materialist investigation in hand. "It's not that he is in denial about subjectivity." Maloon says. "He talked about painting nature according to your sensation, but it's very much tempered by fidelity to the way things look."
That fidelity can be seen in comparison with colleagues who seem to us now to have been pushing further into the modernist era. "His relationship with Cezanne is interesting because in many ways he's a more conventionally skilled artist than Cezanne ever was," Maloon says. "'He has this superb ability to show the spatial relationship of things. He perfectly organises something in aerial perspective, for example, whereas Cezanne bungles it all. But the fact that it all comes apart in Cezanne's hands makes those paintings of Cezanne's look more modern ..."
Maloon, a noted Cezanne scholar, went to work on his impeccable contacts and assembled 105 works, paintings and prints, lent from as far afield as the Tate in Britain, the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan in New York. Hung together, they illustrate what attracts Pissarro's admirers: his scrupulous observation of reality, his lifelong fascination with light and its unity with what it illuminates, and the quiet dignity of his world view.
What's more, they track his wide-ranging changes of direction, his powers of self-reinvention, and his embrace of technical challenges and the ideas of other artists, including those of younger people who considered him their mentor. Before Picasso and Matisse, there was no precedent of a great artist who didn't stick with a style throughout his career. Pissarro's restless quest, Maloon says, was "a kind of autocritique".
"I had two very valuable realisations a long time ago," he continues. "One was that he was his own man. He wasn't a less gifted, or less glorious, version of Monet, or a more substantial version of Sisley; he was a different kind of painter. I also realised he'd had, throughout his life, a very self-conscious interest in the problems and possibilities of composition."
Pissarro was sent to boarding school in Paris for six years, and returned to work in the family business in 1847. He pursued his art in his spare time but, at 23, he rebelled, running away to Caracas in Venezuela with a kindred spirit, the Danish artist, Fritz Melbye, his first mentor. A little later, his family reconciled to his ambitions, he left for Paris to pursue his vocation. There he studied at the Academie des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Suisse and under such towering figures as the painters Corot and Courbet.
Corot, in particular, had a huge impact on Pissarro's thinking. In his catalogue essay, Maloon points out that Corot always encouraged Pissarro to maintain an open mind and trust his intuition when it came to composition. Pissarro, in turn, advised his proteges to avoid preconceived ideas, systems, formulas: "Reality had to be taken by surprise," as Maloon elegantly puts it.
Art world orthodoxies left Pissarro dissatisfied. He worked at the margins, scraping a living until almost the end of his life. He and his wife Julie had a large family and they economised by moving to Pontoise in the 1860s, linked to the capital, and the art world, by the new Paris-Dieppe railway. Pissarro was to find his subject material in the agricultural and industrialising landscapes of his neighbourhood.
Julie evidently gave him a hard time about sacrificing the family's material comfort for his art, and yet the family was a happy one. Lionel Pissarro, a Paris art dealer and Joachim's brother, points out that all five of Pissarro's sons, most of their children, and the children of Pissarro's daughter, Jeanne, followed the patriarch into the art world. "The financial struggle did not kill their interest, their passion, for art," he says, "which is a miracle almost, because they witnessed how much trouble the father had to provide the minimum for the family, without any type of luxury."
It helped, Lionel says, that Julie had come from a very poor family - originally Burgundy vignerons, their livelihood had been wiped out by the phylloxera plague that devastated the region - and she knew how to manage. And family life, as an institution, was never sacrificed.
"He turned his own family into an art school, so to speak," Lionel says. "His favourite pupils were his own children, so he was not only a father, he was a teacher to them. And as much as he educated them in art, he also tried to lead them to the same kind of free-thinking he adopted for himself. So he was the best type of guide - someone who is not only able to share knowledge but, at the same time, encourages you to independence of that knowledge."
A chance meeting with Monet and Degas gave Pissarro a sympathetic circle in which to move. His work was accepted by the Academy, but in 1863 he chose to exhibit, with Manet, Whistler and others, at the Salon des Refuses. He participated in all eight impressionist exhibitions, between 1874 and 1886, before briefly joining the neo-impressionist movement.
Pissarro was gregarious, nothing like the cliche of the solitary, angst-ridden artist. He enjoyed being part of a movement, in rapport with others. Politically engaged and a follower of Proudhon, his commitment to anarchism reinforced what must have been an innate sociability. It had ramifications for his art and for the art world. Lionel says that when diverging visions and bruised egos threatened the group, his great-grandfather would be the peace-maker, writing letters to each party, urging them to keep faith with the wider goal. Pissarro believed that the impressionists, challenging conservatism, could achieve far more as a group than each artist would be able to achieve independently.
He had a different relationship with each of his colleagues. He had enormous respect for Monet's painting, and was close to Sisley. He and Degas collaborated in their pioneering print-making.
Seurat and Signac, leaders of the neo-impressionists, were his sons' age (his son Lucien was involved with them), and Pissarro joined them for three years in the late 1880s to experiment with their techniques.
He was a mentor to Gauguin and Cezanne, yet learned from their experiments. He was revered by younger artists, but never reified into an art world institution.
In the 1860s, Pissarro developed a style of thick daubs of paint applied with a palette knife. The effect was solid: sometimes brooding, sometimes sunnily earthy. Maloon talks of once seeing a roomful of Pissarros from this period as a revelation: being made aware of the "masterful achievement" of a lesser-known period in the artist's oeuvre.
"And he just walked away from it," Maloon says. "He got interested in experimenting with painting outdoors and developing a more efficient way of noting the fugitive effect of nature."
Pissarro was interested in finding a way in which those outdoor sketches might be reconceived as ambitious, substantial, solid compositions - not characteristics usually associated with impressionism. Rather we think of the dancing effect of light, resolved by the viewer at a distance from the canvas, which the later pointillists would take to the nth degree. Indeed, by the '70s, his paintings begin to shimmer with colour: the vegetable greens are greener, the women's dresses bluer, the clouds paler. By the early 1880s, when he painted The banks of the Viosne at Osny which has hung in the NGV since 1927, Pissarro's engagement with light imbues even a winter landscape with quiet joy.
His paintings maintained an extraordinary dignity throughout his stylistic experiments, a sort of belief in the rightness of the world. Maloon refers to the "density of them, the materiality of them". Light may have been broken down, but only to be reassembled to deliver the world as he saw it. "Impressionism was seen at that time as almost a sort of anti-composition," Maloon says, "and what Pissarro was also doing was also seen as a kind of non-composition. Of course, we look at him now and see it was totally composed."
Pissarro was a bridge from romanticism to the sensibility of modernism. He was less interested in what was going on in his own mind and more interested in the materialist investigation in hand. "It's not that he is in denial about subjectivity." Maloon says. "He talked about painting nature according to your sensation, but it's very much tempered by fidelity to the way things look."
That fidelity can be seen in comparison with colleagues who seem to us now to have been pushing further into the modernist era. "His relationship with Cezanne is interesting because in many ways he's a more conventionally skilled artist than Cezanne ever was," Maloon says. "'He has this superb ability to show the spatial relationship of things. He perfectly organises something in aerial perspective, for example, whereas Cezanne bungles it all. But the fact that it all comes apart in Cezanne's hands makes those paintings of Cezanne's look more modern ..."
Maloon, a noted Cezanne scholar, went to work on his impeccable contacts and assembled 105 works, paintings and prints, lent from as far afield as the Tate in Britain, the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan in New York. Hung together, they illustrate what attracts Pissarro's admirers: his scrupulous observation of reality, his lifelong fascination with light and its unity with what it illuminates, and the quiet dignity of his world view.
What's more, they track his wide-ranging changes of direction, his powers of self-reinvention, and his embrace of technical challenges and the ideas of other artists, including those of younger people who considered him their mentor. Before Picasso and Matisse, there was no precedent of a great artist who didn't stick with a style throughout his career. Pissarro's restless quest, Maloon says, was "a kind of autocritique".
"I had two very valuable realisations a long time ago," he continues. "One was that he was his own man. He wasn't a less gifted, or less glorious, version of Monet, or a more substantial version of Sisley; he was a different kind of painter. I also realised he'd had, throughout his life, a very self-conscious interest in the problems and possibilities of composition."
posted by professor rat at 3:15 AM
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