Impressionism's Oak-Tree Uncle

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Boston, a definitive retrospective of Camille Pissarro

In art, each generation has to reinvent the past: to construct its own Watteau, even its own Leonardo. The new outlines never quite coincide with the old. This is true of modern art, too, which itself has become old; and it even applies to impressionism, the most accessible, popular modern movement of all. Sometimes later styles "reinterpret" earlier ones, as abstract expressionism fostered the present veneration of the late works of Monet.

Then there are some artists whose reputations gratuitously disappear and subsequently rise again, wobbling in and out of historical focus. The outstanding example of these, among the impressionists, was Camille Pissarro (1830-1903).

Pissarro was the least spectacular of the impressionists. An eye used to Monet (and Monet is what many people believe impressionism was all about) will be apt to find Pissarro conservative--more of a tonal painter, almost, than a colorist.

There has long been a tendency to repeat, without checking it against the pictures, Gauguin's irritable verdict that Pissarro was a good second-rater, "always wanting to be on top of the latest trend ... he's lost any kind of personality, and his work lacks unity." So although there has been no lack of Degas shows, Monet retrospectives, homages to Cezanne and museum tributes to Bazille or Caillebotte, Pissarro has remained less known--an irony, since, with his peculiar steadfastness and probity, he was the linchpin of the impressionist group.

Now, at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the long process of rehabilitating Pissarro has begun with the first retrospective of his work ever held in the U.S.: 81 paintings and 113 drawings and prints, as well as souvenirs of his life, assembled by a team of five art historians (two French, one English, two American). Already seen at the Hayward Gallery in London and the Grand Palais in Paris, this is the definitive show of an artist without whom the workings of the French avant-garde between 1870 and 1900 cannot be fully understood.

Pissarro was one of the avant-garde's oak-tree uncles: a man of enormous solidity and forthrightness, blunt in speech, loyal to his friends and open to younger artists. He loved to organize, teach, and argue and work with other painters, and the list of artists who owed him some part of their self-knowledge was long.

Cezanne, nine years his junior, called him "a man to consult, and something like le bon Dieu"--meaning not the vengeful God of judgment but a kindly and paternal deity, the supervisor of hearths and gardens: in a word, the god of growth.

Mary Cassatt remarked that "he could have taught stones to draw correctly."

Though immersed in the metropolitan culture of France, Pissarro lived at an angle to it. He was not only an immigrant --he had been born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, the son of a well-off storekeeper--he was also a Jew. In this sense he was twice a stranger in France, and his clan loyalty, his commitment to the tiny republic of the family, his extreme probity and political radicalism were connected, one may surmise, to his sense of outsidership. More than anything else, he loved painting.

That was why he could continue to praise Degas, while in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, Degas, like the anti-Semite he was, brutally snubbed him. Painting could not heal everything, but it represented for Pissarro a corrected world, all relations manifest, all unities achieved, hopeful, measurable and decent.

A whole tradition of French landscape runs through Pissarro's work. He is a link between the weighty, materialist vision of Courbet and the molecular analyses of impressionism, and the best of his landscapes possess an unremitting gravity of construction. Everything in a painting like The "Cote du Jallais," Pontoise, 1867, is, so to speak, freighted with scruple, rendered dense by inspection--the blue air and clouds no less than the swatches of plowed and seeded field and the massed trees. Its low tones and construction by horizontal bands make one think of Corot, but its directness of handling points forward to the impressionist "moment."

Through the 1870s, Pissarro's surfaces would become more agitated, broken and silky. In one of his small masterpieces, The Climbing Path, L'Hermitage, Pontoise, 1875, he gave a view of roofs through a dappled grid of tree trunks the sort of beautiful abstruseness one associates with Cezanne. But always there remained an Arcadian sense of order--a confidence in reasonable appetite, one of whose physical manifestations was the fruitful, vaporous and lovingly cultivated landscape of the Seine-et-Oise.

In the mid-1880s, Pissarro's work took a sharp turn toward pointillism, or "neo-impressionism," the dissection of light into swarms of tiny colored dots, which had been developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. So complete was his conversion and so short-lived--it lasted only five years--that it is hard to think of another artist of comparable talent and sincerity who was ever changed so sharply by men 30 years his junior. Certainly Pissarro was not scrambling onto a bandwagon:

the growing vogue in Paris at the time was for occult imagery, Rosicrucianism, superstition, nuance--anything but the aim of pointillism, which was to state and quantify visual sensation as "objectively" as possible.

The work of "these chemists who pile up little dots," as Gauguin contemptuously named the pointillists, was to the 1890s what constructivism would be to the 1920s: the house style of Utopian socialism in its various forms. Pissarro was a fervent anarchist, and his dot-crusted scenes of idyllic rural labor (as stylized and unreal, in some ways, as any 18th century pastoral) are attempts, not always successful, to convey an ideal vision of social dignity based on freely shared work. In this he was the heir of Millet as well--though he certainly did not know peasant life as Millet had. But by the mid-1890s, with his bustling market scenes and views of Rouen cathedral rising from a choppy, tiled sea of roofs, he had returned to a less schematic form of painting.

Indeed, the view of cities as social condensers had a fundamental importance to Pissarro's way of imagining the world. He was not merely interested in rural life for its own sake, as a refuge or an idyl; he wanted to paint the relationships between country and town, the social fabric of France itself, epitomized in the market square. He was also fascinated by townscape in itself: the hustle and bustle of Baudelaire's "ant-swarming city," with its shuttling traffic, its plunging perspectives, its bird's-eye views of impersonal transactions. Writing in 1898 of the view from his hotel window over the Place du Theatre Franc,ais in Paris, he said: "Perhaps it is not aesthetic, but I am delighted to be able to paint these Paris streets that people have come to call ugly, but which are so silvery, so luminous and vital. This is completely modern."

Those who believe impressionism viewed the world through rosy bourgeois lenses should ponder Pissarro's commitment to "our modern philosophy, which is absolutely social, antiauthoritarian and antimystical ... a robust art based on sensation." Political decency does not, by itself, make good art. Yet one senses that in Pissarro, the man and the work were of whole cloth -- and that their wholeness contributed to the honesty of his search and the vigor he displayed, especially as a draftsman, below the changing levels of style. Never too polished, never arbitrarily crude, Pissarro's plain visual speech now turns out to have been one of the real achievements of French 19th century painting -- "The act," as his friend Emile Zola wrote, "of an honest man . ''

-- By Robert Hughes

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