Pissarro exhibit in Baltimore
BALTIMORE – Camille Pissarro was the only painter whose work was included in all eight of the impressionist exhibitions, and yet he's not as beloved — particularly in the United States — as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Edgar Degas.
Perhaps that's because his pictures can look quaint to the contemporary eye. But a new exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art argues that Pissarro's innovations, both in technique and subject matter, placed him at the vanguard of the Impressionist movement.
"Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape" — the first major U.S. show devoted to Pissarro in more than a decade — explores the development of his personal style and his commitment to depicting unvarnished modernity. It covers a 10-year period, beginning in 1864 and ending in 1874, the year of the first impressionist exhibition.
"Most of the Pissarro shows have been these big retrospectives, where they start at the beginning and go to the end," said Katherine Rothkopf, the BMA's curator of European painting and sculpture.
With Monet, Degas and Renoir, Rothkopf said, "little slices of their oeuvre have been studied. Whether it's the late pictures or the early pictures or the still lives, they've been sliced and diced, many of them, and Pissarro hasn't gotten quite the same attention."
Until now. The BMA show, which runs through May 13, brings together 45 pictures from museums and private collections around the world. (While the museum eliminated general admission fees last year, it reserved the right to charge admission to certain special exhibitions, and this is one of them — admission for adults is $15 (euro11).
Rothkopf got the idea for the show seven years ago, when she spotted a strange Pissarro painting from 1864, "Strollers on a Country Road, La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire," in the BMA's permanent collection.
If he hadn't signed it, she wouldn't have known that Pissarro painted the picture. It wasn't so much the subject — people walking on a path by a river in a rural town — as the technique that surprised her.
"His impressionist style is very distinctive for his broken brushwork, the sort of flickering small brushstrokes that he used that could capture light effects. This has a hardness to it and a rigidity to it," she said. Also, "the connection between the sky and the land seems somewhat false. There's no real atmosphere. The shadows aren't really there yet. He's still a work in progress."
Pissarro learned quickly, though. Two years later, the picture he submitted to the 1866 Salon in Paris, "Banks of the Marne in Winter," drew a rave from the influential critic Emile Zola. It has the atmosphere the previous picture lacks — stark, chilly and defiantly lacking in beauty.
"It is an austere and serious painting, showing an extreme concern for the truth and correctness, a bleak and strong will," Zola wrote.
Pissarro (1830-1903) actually was not French. He was born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, which at the time belonged to Denmark, making him a Danish citizen.
His parents, however, hailed from a Portuguese Jewish family that settled in France, and Pissarro attended boarding school in Paris. After some time in Venezuela, he returned to France for good in 1855, and he did much of his painting in and around small towns that were close to Paris but far removed from its bustle — Pontoise and Louveciennes.
As industrialization encroached upon these sleepy locales, Pissarro was there to document it. Smokestacks and factories were frequent subjects — as he saw it, they didn't sully the landscape as much as add an intriguing new wrinkle. And he explored these themes in the mid-1860s — several years before Monet and Alfred Sisley began doing the same.
"The whole idea of showing the industrialization of the landscape was something that his colleagues, Monet and others, were sort of given credit for," Rothkopf said. "These were much earlier pictures. Having a smokestack in the middle of the composition would have been extremely peculiar."
When Pissarro and Monet went together to London in 1870 to escape the Franco-Prussian War, Monet painted the city's great parks, while Pissarro again found inspiration in the fast-growing suburbs. "Lordship Lane Station, East Dulwich" (1871) shows a commuter train barreling past newly constructed homes, from a perspective that emphasizes progress: The train is coming right at the viewer.
Pissarro's technique began to modernize as well. He embraced the quick, snappy brushstrokes and splashes of seemingly incongruous color that came to characterize the impressionists. The style allowed him to depict, with bracing immediacy, a residential street after a snowstorm or working-class people walking along the banks of the Seine.
Peasants at work were a frequent subject — an offshoot of Pissarro's commitment to honest, unsentimental pictures and his political leanings (he had anarchist sympathies).
The painting that most upset the critics at the first impressionist exhibition — one characterized it as "palate-scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas" — is arguably the most exciting picture in the show.
"Hoarfrost at Ennery" (1873) shows a man walking on a country road just after sunrise, with a bundle of sticks on his back. Long, exaggerated shadows of unseen trees run diagonally across the frame, and the peasant appears almost trapped between them. Pissarro conjures "this incredible pattern of colored shadows," Rothkopf said.
Pissarro's celebration of laborers owes a debt to his predecessors, including Jean-Francois Millet, a landscape painter of the Barbizon school who came to prominence in the 1850s. But his technique was entirely his own.
"It combines the old and the new into such a beautiful and poetic view of the place where he lived," Rothkopf said.
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