The people's painter: Exhibit of works by 'father figure of French Impressionism'
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Although he might have less name recognition than Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro was a central figure among French Impressionists. From his role in forming a collective of those artists in the early 1870s to his support of younger painters to his own multifaceted work, Pissarro came to be regarded as a father figure of Impressionism and its hallmark evocation of light and movement through mixed colors, rather than through detail.
Pissarro, who was born in the Caribbean but spent most of his adult life in France, was much more than an influential painter. He was also an avid reader and committed observer of politics who wrote about the dark side of capitalism, and who celebrated the life of ordinary men and women in his work. He explored numerous artistic styles, including Post-Impressionism, and his family and friends were frequent subjects.
To offer a more complete portrait of Pissarro - not just as an artist but as a man - the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown has opened an exhibit that brings together the threads of his life. "Pissarro's People," which runs through Oct. 2, features 90 works that focus on his engagement with the human figure and the inspirations for his humanism.
Before a recent tour, the exhibit's curator, Richard Brettell, an art historian and Impressionism expert who teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas, joked that he had initially struggled to come up with a suitable title for the show, ending up with a rather long-winded one that sounded like a dissertation topic.
Then, George Shackelford, curator of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, suggested "Pissarro's People."
"That perfectly sums up what the exhibit is about," Brettell said. "Pissarro was committed to the idea of portraying everyday life and the people around him, and his work was informed by his utopian ideals, his belief that capitalism was fundamentally flawed and would eventually be replaced by a more equitable society."
The exhibit includes Pissarro's "Les Turpitudes Sociales," an anarchist tract composed of 28 stark drawings of urban poverty and capitalistic excess, with accompanying rhyming text. Pissarro created the work in private, and even today it has remained largely out of public view, rarely included in any major exhibition of the artist's work, Brettell says.
"I think it needs to be considered along with his more well-known paintings and drawings," said Brettell, who noted that the French police kept a dossier on Pissarro for years because of his political activities, which included contributing drawings to anarchist publications. Though most scholars have treated Pissarro's art and politics as separate categories, he added, "I think it's important to see the connections between them."
"Pissarro's People," which was three years in preparation, draws on the works of 46 lending institutions and collectors, including museums across Europe, the United States and other locales; one of the painter's most famous paintings, 1882's "The Harvest," a depiction of workers bundling wheat, comes from a Japanese museum. Many pieces in the exhibit were borrowed from private collections, said Clark senior curator, Richard Rand, "including some not seen in many, many decades, or ever, so we're pretty excited about that."
The exhibit has an introductory gallery that Rand says is designed to set the tone for the main show, which is displayed in several rooms. That first room includes a number of blown-up photographs of Pissarro with his family, posed on hay bales in the countryside north of Paris where he lived, and it lays out the four central themes of the exhibit: Pissarro as a worker, a radical, an Impressionist and an outsider.
Family man
Pissarro was born in 1830 on St. Thomas in the Caribbean to a French father of Portuguese-Jewish descent and a Creole mother. He spent part of his boyhood in boarding school in Paris and settled in France in 1855, but he never became a French citizen. He also lived in England and Venezuela.
One constant was his family. He and his wife, Julie Vellay, had seven children, and "Pissarro's People" features paintings and drawings of all of them - the first exhibition to do so, Clark officials say. Rand, as he led a tour through the main galleries, pointed to a series of paintings and sketches that Pissarro did of perhaps his favorite child, Jeanne-Rachel, nicknamed Minette, who died of tuberculosis in 1874 at age 9.
Rand noted that some of the paintings of the solemn-faced girl appear unfinished - Pissarro was known as a deliberate worker who would often develop a painting over numerous sittings - and suggested that "it may have been difficult, maybe impossible, for him to go back to these emotionally after she died. You can feel the sorrow in a way, even if that's projecting on our part. It's really a very poignant display."
Taking part in the tour were three French natives with direct ties to Pissarro and the Impressionist period, who helped put the exhibit together. Joachim Pissarro, an art historian who teaches at Hunter College in New York City, is a great-grandson of the painter, as is his brother, Lionel Pissarro, an art dealer with a Paris/New York firm, Giraud Pissarro Ségalot. Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, an art historian and writer in France, is a great-granddaughter of Paul Durand-Ruel, an art dealer of the Impressionists, including Pissarro.
Joachim Pissarro, the former curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, said he was struck in particular by one aspect of his great-grandfather's legacy - his almost exclusive use of family, friends and ordinary people as the subjects of his portraits.
"He was radical in that he wanted to stay away from the grand, theatrical tradition of portrait making," Pissarro said. "Portraits traditionally were made of the great monarchs, the cardinals, the aristocrats, but Pissarro breaks away and decides to paint people from the crowd." The artist was influenced in that sense by the mid-19th-century French artist Gustave Courbet, Pissarro added, who also painted ordinary people.
In fact, Joachim Pissarro said, his great-grandfather took things a step further. Unlike his peers, Pissarro did not produce portraits of his fellow artists, outside of a few exceptions, including one he did of his good friend Paul Cézanne. "He basically refused to paint the leading figures of the intelligentsia in France."
Instead, he filled his canvases with images of rural and village life. His subjects were often female workers in the fields - harvesting crops, sowing seeds, tending livestock or resting - or women at country markets. Pissarro did not romanticize rural life, as previous generations of painters had, says Brettell; rather, his paintings were straight-ahead works that attempted to show the rhythms of rural life "and the basic dignity of work."
Variety of mediums
Rand, the Clark curator, also noted that the museum's exhibit showcases the variety of painting mediums Pissarro used, including oil, tempera, watercolors and gouache. He was a skilled and varied printmaker, possibly the best of the Impressionists, Rand said: "It underscores the fact that he was one of the most experimental painters among the Impressionists in terms of technique ... he was always searching for different ways to portray the world around him."
Pissarro, who died in 1903 of complications related to eye infections, would go on to experiment with Neo-Impressionist styles such as pointillism. Many of his later paintings were of Paris street scenes; his eye problems eventually forced him to paint primarily indoors, which he did from a window of his Paris apartment.
But the artist will be remembered in particular for his colorful landscapes and warm portraits of everyday life and people, Rand noted. "Despite all the focus [in "Pissarro's People"] on his family, his political views, the new ideas, we don't want the public to forget that this is an Impressionist show, which offers an opportunity to engage in some wonderful art."
"Pissarro's People" will be on view through Oct. 2 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, located at 225 South St. in Williamstown. Through Aug. 31, the museum will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Beginning Sept. 1, the museum will be closed on Mondays. Admission is $15 for adults and is free for members, children under 18 and students with a valid ID. For information, call 458-2303 or visit www.clarkart.edu/.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
