Great Mentor Stands Alone

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 26, 2005

JOHN McDONALD

The Pissarro exhibition is a fitting tribute to a colossal talent, writes JOHN McDONALD.

Camille Pissarro: the First Impressionist

Art Gallery of NSW, until February 19;

National Gallery of Victoria, March 4 to May 28

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) may have spent much of the 20th century in the shadows of Monet, Renoir, Ce{aac}zanne and Degas, but of all the impressionists he is now generating the most excitement among art historians. Perhaps he had to wait his turn until the museums of the world exhausted the possibilities of Monet and Renoir shows, which have been long-term licences to print money. Unlike those artists, Pissarro never painted an icon such as Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, or a series of gigantic waterlilies that provided a direct bridge between impressionism and modernist abstraction.

On the surface, Pissarro's achievements may seem modest, but the more closely one examines his life and work, the more monumental he becomes. The Art Gallery of NSW's Camille Pissarro: the First Impressionist is set to make a contribution to the reassessment of this great painter. It is the latest, and most ambitious, in a series of international surveys put together by Terence Maloon, who has shown himself to be the most capable curator in this country when it comes to securing significant loans from overseas institutions. Even more impressive is Maloon's ability to conceptualise a show - to present an artist or an aesthetic argument in a clear and cogent manner.

This is often the difference between box-office success or failure, because an exhibition with outstanding works arranged in a brainless fashion (and here the Art Gallery of NSW has had its blemishes) is no match for a collection of secondary pieces shown with an intelligence that engages the viewer's imagination.

The average member of the audience may not be an art expert, but neither does he or she expect to be patronised by institutions that assume any old thing will serve to entertain the common herd. It is in this sense that Maloon's shows such as Classic Ce{aac}zanne and Picasso: The Last Decades have been immaculate exercises in curatorship. The presentations have struck exactly the right note, using available loans to give a surprisingly complete view of the artist.

Work for work, the Pissarro exhibition is the best yet. Not only is the composition of the show beautifully thought out, it contains a high percentage of first-rate paintings and works on paper. Indeed, two rooms of prints are not used simply as ballast, but given prominence in order to demonstrate Pissarro's credentials as one of the foremost innovators of the medium. The prints were a revelation for me and for many others I've spoken to.

To add to the prestige of the event, a symposium on the first Saturday of the exhibition brought together the world's leading Pissarro experts, including the artist's great-grandson, Joachim Pissarro, Richard Brettell, John House and Richard Shiff. At the end of the forums, a new three-volume catalogue raisonne of the artist's work was launched.

Pissarro, to an unusual degree, is an artist best viewed in a solo exhibition, or with no more than one other artist, as in the Museum of Modern Art's Pioneering Modern Painting: Ce{aac}zanne and Pissarro 1865-1885, soon to open in Los Angeles. In his choice of subjects he seemed to seek out the most humble and oblique motifs. He would apply the paint with an evenness of touch that was the antithesis of the expressive pyrotechnics one associates with van Gogh, or the broad planes of colour typical of Gauguin's work.

Harmony was Pissarro's professed ideal and his paintings are hard-won battles in which he aims to strike a perfect balance in colour and composition. Look, for instance, at a picture such as Kitchen Garden at L'Hermitage, Pontoise (1873), which shows a few stocky peasants working in a vegetable patch, a donkey, some undistinguished buildings and a featureless horizon. One may trace an elaborate network of colours, with greens, dirty yellows and small touches of pink recurring at intervals across the canvas.

Although the tonality of the work is almost monotonous, with no sharp contrasts, there is a steady, insistent fascination in reconstructing the movement of the artist's brush. The composition is simplicity itself - three broad, horizontal bands with a strong diagonal, upon which Pissarro hangs a mass of brushstrokes that nestle on the surface like a swarm of insects.

This basic procedure is repeated time and again, but with constant modifications. The major exceptions are the broadly brushed early works and the dot-filled canvases made during his flirtation with Seurat's neo-impressionism in the late 1880s. His works may be quiet in mood, but Pissarro never stopped experimenting and theorising about his technique.

If his motifs seem ordinary today, that very ordinariness was a radical gesture in the 1870s. French painting was still under the spell of the great classical landscapists such as Claude and Poussin, and the ever more debased traditions of the Beaux-Arts academies. The inflated prestige of history painting ensured that a succession of "grand machines" were forever vying for public attention with scenes drawn from Greek mythology or French military glory.

Pissarro was a lifelong anarchist who rejected the affectations of the salons and academies. His preference for peasants, rural landscapes and provincial street scenes was a way of focusing attention on the manner of painting rather than the melodrama of the subject matter. He included all the signs of modern life - the factory chimneys and railways - that were omitted by landscapists with a more idealistic bent.

The aim was to capture his particular "sensation" in a way that reflected the vividness of his immediate perceptions. He was happy to describe his paintings as "rough and coarse", as opposed to the "licked" surfaces of salon paintings that portrayed the most fanciful subjects with near-photographic exactitude.

In a letter to his son, Lucien, Pissarro suggested his own personality was no less coarse than the surfaces of his paintings. In last week's symposium, Virginia Spate quoted another letter in which he predicted that a series of bathers featuring peasant women "in all their fleshiness" was bound to offend the delicate. "But that," he added, "is what I do best."

Pissarro's Letters to Lucien is one of the most touching volumes in the history of art, being a mirror of a generous soul and a restless, inquiring mind, as well as a source of insights for every student of the impressionist movement. But the man who wrote such marvellous letters to his artist son is just as easily discovered in the canvases on view at the gallery. They emphasise the value of work: the need for sustained effort rather than moments of dazzling inspiration. The works are full of sympathy for the human comedy, for the small pleasures and satisfactions of everyday life.

Pissarro was a mentor to younger artists such as Ce{aac}zanne and Gauguin, and the driving force behind the impressionists. He is famous for being the only artist to participate in every one of the eight impressionist shows held between 1874 and 1886, writing letters to recalcitrant members who wished to sever their ties with the group. He had a gift for friendship and was able to maintain relations on both sides when seemingly everyone in France took opposing views on the Dreyfus affair. This is even more remarkable since Pissarro was Jewish and had every reason to be alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitic feeling.

It is Pissarro's humanism that provides a unifying principle for all his work. Of the 104 works in this exhibition, the majority are the landscapes and rustic scenes for which he is best known. Yet there are also still lifes, portraits, genre scenes and the most glorious room of urban pictures, mostly painted from hotel windows during the last years of his life.

These paintings, such as Fair on a sunny afternoon, Dieppe (1901) or the magnificent La Place du The{aac}a{aci}tre Francais (1898), teem with life and energy. They are exemplary paintings of modern life showing the surging activity in the streets of Paris, Rouen and other centres. They reveal both the depth of Pissarro's passionate attraction to humanity, and an absorption in the visual world that transcended all his theories about art and politics. The one and only point of comparison in Australian art is Tom Roberts's Allegro con brio, Bourke Street west (1886/1890), that underrated masterpiece which never found a buyer.

After this room of city streets and bustling crowds, one can only view the final room of portraits as an anti-climax. The self-portrait on the end wall, painted in the year of the artist's death, is a reprise of the manoeuvre in which a stunning self-portrait concluded the late Picasso show. That work, however, was a stare into the abyss, whereas Pissarro looks like a genial granddad, at ease with life and unconcerned about death.

The Picasso self-portrait brought to a stark conclusion a show in which an ageing master raged and struggled against encroaching mortality. By contrast, Pissarro seems almost concealed by his self-portrait, alongside the landscapes and street scenes into which he put heart and soul. When Picasso died he was the most famous artist in the world; for Pissarro a greater acclaim would take the best part of a century. This doesn't seem to have caused him any anxiety. In his self-portrait he looks perfectly composed, knowing his time would come.

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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