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Pissarro's Pointillist Impressionism
| Article
# : |
10608 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
1,608 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
There are two notable features to the marvelous exhibition The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro's Series Paintings, which was seen in Dallas and Philadelphia and this month goes to the Royal Academy in London; two things, that is, aside from the fact that it is extraordinarily beautiful.
One is that the exhibition gives us an approach to the concept of painting in series that is altogether different from the sequential paintings by Claude Monet in the 1890s, works that most famously took as one of their subjects the facade of Rouen Cathedral. (This phase of Monet's work was explored in a superb exhibition three years ago at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a show that also traveled to the Royal Academy. See "The Many Ways of Looking at Monet," THE WORLD & I, May 1990, p. 200.)
The second, perhaps more interesting, and certainly more surprising thing we learn from The Impressionist and the City is the creative use to which Camille Pissarro managed to put his brief foray into the divisionist, or Neo-Impressionist, painting style of the late 1880s. This episode of his work seemed to have been permanently interred with his return to "orthodox" Impressionism by the early 1890s, the point at which this exhibition begins.
At a time when Impressionism seems to be the favorite, and most overworked, subject for museum exhibitions (largely, alas, because of its ability to attract crowds), this is one example of the genre that is eminently worth the effort. It does what art exhibitions are supposed to do: It entertains, to be sure (there's nothing wrong with that), but it also greatly enlarges our understanding of the artist and the whole Impressionist enterprise.
Organized by Richard Brettell, former director of the Dallas Museum of Art and a Pissarro authority who in recent years has given us a number of important studies of the artist, The Impressionist and the City takes as its subject the paintings Pissarro made of Paris, Rouen, Le Havre, and Dieppe during the last decade of his life, from about 1894 to 1903. These are pictures in which the artist repeatedly painted the same subject (or "motif," as he called it), but in a slightly different way each time.
The exhibition's title is intended to highlight the apparent contradiction inherent in this choice of subjects. An artist who had focused on rural scenes virtually his entire life was suddenly directing his attention to urban thoroughfares and boulevards, the to and fro of crowds of
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