From High On The Barricades

The Age

Saturday February 4, 2006

PETER HILL

Beneath the beauty in Camille Pissarro's paintings lies a revolutionaryspirit that led the Impressionists toprominence, writes Peter Hill.

'I DON'T THINK PISSARRO really understood cricket," Dr John House tells me as we stand in front of a painting of an English cricket scene at Hampton Court Green. You can almost feel him puzzling over the rules of this strange game, wondering when it will end and why so many of the players appear to be standing around doing nothing.

Dr John House, professor of art at London's Courtauld Institute, is in Sydney for the opening of the exhibition and the one-day conference that accompanies it. It comes to Melbourne early next year and is not to be missed. Go several times is my advice. What makes it such a great show?

First, it is large - a genuine blockbuster, should one wish to use the term - with 105 important works assembled by curator Terence Maloon from the world's leading museums. The Tate, the Metropolitan, and the Musee d'Orsay have all contributed generously, as have many private collectors. Second, it puts Australia's four Camille Pissarro paintings into context for the first time - two from the National Gallery of Victoria and one each from the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of NSW. Third, and perhaps most significantly, it expands the popular vision of the artist as being primarily a landscape painter and shows he was a great portrait painter, and a painter of crowd scenes and intimate interior compositions.

Who was this artist and why was he so important? He was the only painter to exhibit in all eight impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886. He was a revolutionary who experimented with pointillism and divisionism, breaking the observed world into dots of colour that mixed in the human eye rather than on the canvas or palette. He was a great influence on Cezanne, and by extension on the cubism of Braque and Picasso and the fauvism of Matisse.

There is one painting that for me was a revelation. It is called The little country maid (1882) and shows a young girl brushing the floor of a domestic interior as a child eats at a table. There are intimations here of Van Gogh's expressionism and of Bonnard's later Intimism. Don't be put off by the pleasant, almost "chocolate box", title. This is a wonderful work, a hymn to colour, and the daring act of a revolutionary describing the visual world from the top of the barricades.

Like all good revolutionaries, Pissarro paid tribute to those he had overthrown, writing that "The basis of our art is unarguably the French tradition. Our masters are Clouet, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, the 18th century with Chardin and the group of 1830 with Corot."

When we look through the reverse telescope of history, some elements of picture making do not seem revolutionary to us at all, but were quite shocking in their day. The excellent catalogue to this exhibition tells us that one of the main art critics of the time, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, "thought portraiture was inappropriate for peasants, small children and women - peasants because they belonged to the land where they lived and worked, children because their personalities were underdeveloped, and women because they invested too much vanity and artifice in changing their appearance. As John House put it, Castagnary believed that 'the only true individual is the successful bourgeois male'."

Through all of his working life Pissarro overturned such ridiculous but entrenched notions, as he did the technical mechanics of painting - democratising the picture surface as forcefully as he democratised content and composition. And it did not go unnoticed. Art criticism was big business in those days and the potential audience critics had for their opinions was almost as limitless as that enjoyed by the 21st-century blogger. In 1870, the catalogue tells us, "there were an estimated 36 daily newspapers in Paris alone; by 1880, this number had grown to about 60."

Just as young Australian artists today want to win a Samstag scholarship and complete their studies in New York, London, or Dusseldorf, in Pissarro's day the career path for an ambitious young Parisian artist was to exhibit in the Salon, or, if unsuccessful, in the Salon des Refuses, established by Emperor Napoleon III in 1863. But exhibiting and selling was not enough - one had to be reviewed.

In 1866, the 26-year-old Emile Zola, whom Pissarro had met through Paul Cezanne, reviewed Pissarro's Banks of the Marne in winter from that year's Salon.

"Mr Pissarro is an unknown of whom, no doubt, nobody will speak. It is my duty to shake his hand heartily before I leave. Thank you, sir, your landscape refreshed me for a good half-hour in the great desert of the Salon. I know that you were admitted into it very grudgingly, and I sincerely congratulate you for that. However, you ought to know that you will please no one, that they will find your picture too bare, too black." Then after asking "Why the devil did you make the signal blunder of painting solidly and studying nature honestly!" Zola ends his review by saying, "You are a clumsy fellow, sir - you are an artist that I like."

In the same week that the Pissarro show opened in Sydney, The New Yorker magazine (November 7, 2005) arrived on the shores of Australia containing a beautifully written essay about the friendship - and later disagreements - between Cezanne and Zola. It describes - and I knew nothing of this beforehand - how Zola died of asphyxiation in the middle of the night because of a blocked chimney. Odd enough in itself, but the plot thickens because of Zola's involvement in the then headline-making Dreyfus Affair. Rachel Cohen writes that "Fifty years later, a man wrote to Liberation and told the story of an anti-Dreyfus friend who had confessed on his death bed that he and his roofing crew, while working on the building next door, had blocked Zola's flue, returning early the next morning to remove the block."

I mention this anecdote to show how France in the late 19th century could be both absurd and dangerous. Artists, writers and anarchists were often bundled in together through their revolutionary tendencies, and a series of anarchist bombings in Paris created a climate that we can identify with today - from suicide bombers to the introduction of laws of sedition.

Where this affected Pissarro was through his standing as a revolutionary artist, and because he was not a French citizen. He could be deported at any time. All his life he held a Danish passport. But it gets stranger still, because he never lived in Denmark. Pissarro was born in the Danish West Indies in 1830. His father was a Jewish shopkeeper, originally of Portuguese descent, but with French connections. So for the first 12 years of his life Pissarro grew up in an exotic Caribbean environment before being sent to study outside Paris at a school in Passy. From here he started to make regular visits to the Louvre and other French museums - developing his own talents at drawing.

He returned to St Thomas when he was 17, showed no inclination to enter the family business, and jumped on a ship for Caracas with a Danish painter called Fritz Melbye who he'd met in the West Indies. "I abandoned all I had," he later said, "and bolted to Caracas to get clear of the bondage of bourgeois life."

Eventually his parents agreed he could become a painter and in 1855 he settled in Paris.

Imagine a young artist today, setting off after art school, getting involved in artist-run spaces such as in Gertrude Street in Melbourne or Transmission in Glasgow, sharing studios and debating long into the night. It was like that with Pissarro.

In the early months he painted scenes from memory of the West Indies. But he also studied the work of Corot, attended private lessons at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and later the Academie Suisse.

When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, Pissarro left for London and there (in addition to painting cricket scenes) teamed up with Monet.

"Monet and I were very enthusiastic over the London landscapes," he wrote later. "Monet worked in the parks, while I, living in Lower Norwood, at that time a charming suburb, studied the effects of fog, snow, and springtime."

He was fascinated and excited by the work of the English artist Turner and once complained: "Isn't it stupid to have no Turners in the Louvre."

Eventually he was able to go back to Paris and found that his studio had been trashed by Prussian soldiers and paintings destroyed.

When he looked for a house for his ever-increasing large family (he had eight children), the estate agents' cry of "Position! Position! Position!" was everything. But it didn't come easy. He looked at properties in different towns and villages. One was a house and garden in L'Isle-Adam but "I found the country hideous, stupid bourgeois houses! How could a painter stay there?"

He eventually found what he was looking for in a place called Pontoise. But he wasn't after a double garage, an indoor pool or a granny flat. He wanted a surrounding environment that would, and did, translate into the wonderful paintings that you can see in this exhibition. One of his greatest admirers was English artist Walter Sickert. The catalogue essay tells how he wrote of the final "position" Pissarro found for himself.

"It is still easy for the traveller, who only passes through Pontoise to see the nourishment that the little orchards, bristling with bunches of leaves in the sun, the wood of old palings, the modest houses built of soft stone called moellon, diapered with black by smoke and with white by the droppings of pigeons, tinged with green by lichen, the linen hung out to dry by homely women in faded blue cotton gowns, must have been to Pissarro's talent."

Other artists gathered around him - notably Cezanne - and very soon Pissarro was thinking that perhaps there could be an alternative to the Salon. Along with Renoir, Monet, and others, he formed the idea of a society of artists. It all came together in January 1874. Three months later they held their first exhibition. This is now widely accepted as the first Impressionist exhibition and it included the work of Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and, of course, Pissarro. One of his daughters, only nine years old, died a week before it opened. Money was always a problem, almost to the end of his life. He was shattered by the public and financial response to the show. "Our exhibition goes well. It is a success," he wrote with bitter irony to the critic Theodore Duret. "The critics destroy us and accuse us of not having studied; I am returning to my work, it is better than reading the reviews."

His finally achieved some kind of financial stability in 1891 when the dealer Georges Bernheim wrote to him "Your moment has come!" In his early 60s, Pissarro had become an overnight success.

The centrepiece of this Australian exhibition contains a room filled with a series of paintings he made of the city - buildings and crowds and boulevards becoming like one giant animal under his relentless stroking of the brush. He spent some time holed up in a hotel near the Gare Saint-Lazare, interrogating the modern city from the viewpoint of a balcony. And when the last anarchist bomb exploded in that station during rush hour, he had to take refuge, at home in Pontoise, for fear of deportation or imprisonment - his crime: not being a French citizen.

Pissarro's great-grandson is now a curator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He flew to Australia for the opening and delivered a fascinating paper at the conference. In the Art Gallery of NSW he launched - and it was a world launch - the new and enormous catalogue raisonne of the artist's work.

And his own catalogue essay leads us into the next phase of Pissarro's life - that of neo-impressionism and pointillism. You see, the old revolutionary overthrew Impressionism itself. He was on the side of youth and discovery, and never happier than when glimpsing a new view of the world from the top of the barricades.

But let the last word go to Cezanne who summed up his old mentor when he said in 1902, "As for old Pissarro, he was a father to me, a man to consult and something like the good Lord."

peter.hill@unimelb.edu.au

Camille Pissarro, Art Gallery of NSW until February 19. NGV International Melbourne, March 4-May 28.

© 2006 The Age

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