First Impressions
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
L.A. Weekly
DECEMBER 30 -- JANUARY 5, 2006
First Impressions
Tales from the Pissarro world
by DOUG HARVEY
Blockbuster art shows are supposed to be, by definition,
spectacular and sensational. Designed to appeal to the
broadest possible range of the art-consumer population (and
hopefully herd them through in record numbers), they usually
focus on a handful of reliable big names and avoid any
nuanced or thought-provoking curatorial strategies that
might impede the swift and superficial absorption of what is
essentially a walk-through participatory theatrical event
with You as the star -- and really fancy props. "I can't
wait to repeat this snippet of art historical gossip from
the audiotour to my friends at Pilates."
Which is just the first extraordinary thing about
"Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro
1865–1885," now entering its homestretch at LACMA. Organized
by New York's MoMA as last summer's follow-up to its more
conventionally bustery "Matisse Picasso" show, "Cézanne and
Pissarro" follows few of the genre's conventions. I suppose
Paul Cézanne is a big name in certain circles (though if
Hollywood's never done a biopic, he remains what is known as
an "artist's artist"). But Pissarro? Is that like the
Bizarro-world Picasso, except that instead of everything
getting all cubist and weird it goes the other way because
Picasso’s already all cubist and weird? Exactly.
While Cézanne is rightly lauded as the painter whose
insistence on the autonomy of the formal and material
qualities of painting was the central guiding concept of
Modernism, Pissarro is generally known -- if at all -- as a
pleasant, minor, Impressionist landscape artist whose
frothy, atmospheric canvases epitomize the innocuous
prettiness that has allowed what was once an extremely
controversial upheaval of artistic conventions to morph into
a multimillion-dollar fridge-magnet, oven-mitt and
wall-calendar industry unto itself.
In fact, Camille Pissarro had very little in common with
this stereotypical reading. Both his work and his influence
were wide-ranging and profound, and his role in the history
of early Modernism was arguably as great -- if not as widely
acknowledged -- as Cézanne's. This corrective may be the
hidden agenda underlying the LACMA show, which was organized
by Joachim Pissarro, who -- in addition to being a
well-respected curator -- is the artist's great-grandson.
Happily, the argument isn't made through didactic academic
discourse (although plenty of that's available if that's how
you roll), but through the judicious arrangement of 30-some
canvases by each artist, documenting the two decades when
their friendship and mutual influence were at their height.
The two first met when Cézanne, rebellious son of a
conservative banker from Aix-en-Provence in the south of
France, ditched his law studies to pursue painting in Paris
in 1861. Pissarro, born on the West Indies island of St.
Thomas to a French Jewish father and Creole mother, had made
a similar decision a few years earlier, and was already
hanging out with many of the artists with whom he would
eventually form the Societé Anonyme des Artistes (Peintres,
Sculpteurs, Graveurs etc.) -- the group which would be
derisively labeled as the Impressionists by art critic Louis
Leroy. In spite of his rustic manners, Cézanne fell in,
bonding particularly with fellow outsider Pissarro.
Over the next 24 years, the pair maintained a close
friendship. They often worked together in the countryside
outside Paris, and even when circumstances (the
Franco-Prussian war, for example) kept them out of contact,
they remained one another's number-one fans. This history of
mutual admiration is laid out in the most concrete way in
"Cézanne and Pissarro," visible to the naked eye in the
shifting, playful, experimental dialogue spelled out in
color, form and surface -- and, not incidentally, in a
reordering of humanity's relationship to the world. Although
the Impressionists' unpolished surfaces and plein air
improvisations were at least partly a specific "Fuck you" to
the stuffy government-sponsored Salon de Paris and its
narrow conventions, they came to embody a radical
reconsideration of man's place in the order of things, often
in an explicitly political sense.
Pissarro in particular believed in a fundamental link
between the visual innovations of his community and his
lifelong anarchist convictions. But most of the
Impressionists sided with their resident mythographer Émile
Zola in 1898 when he published his open letter "J'accuse,"
which exposed the rigged conviction and imprisonment of
Capt. Alfred Dreyfus and eventually brought down the
corrupt, anti-Semitic Second Republic. Degas and Renoir
sided with the authorities -- along with Zola's childhood
chum Cézanne, who excommunicated the novelist after his
unflattering fictionalization in 1886's L'oeuvre. Cézanne
had a habit of cutting off old friends -- he severed ties
with Pissarro in the late 1870s for unknown and
hard-to-imagine reasons.
Pissarro was renowned for his personal generosity, warmth
and equanimity and for his unwavering support for
progressive political causes. He had devoted tremendous
energy to mentoring Cézanne and championing his work -- not
to mention running interference for his sociopathic
personality. Cézanne was bad-tempered, paranoid,
self-aggrandizing and apolitical. It always bugged me that I
liked his paintings so much more than Pissarro's. But then
I'd never seen so many together in one exhibition.
As I moved through the LACMA exhibit, reveling in the
exquisite tag-team choreography of painterly technique --
slathered on with a palette knife, poked at with a dry
brush, scribbled, scumbled, smeared and encrusted -- I
sensed a structural dissolution of individual authorial
voice equivalent to the complex geometric compositional
fragmentation and utopian aspirations for which Cézanne was
ultimately given credit. The bottom line, though, was that
Pissarro could have done what Cézanne did. He was just too
well-adjusted.
What makes Pissarro's work seem less virtuosic than
Cézanne's (apart from a hundred years of marketing) is that
Pissarro wasn't constantly striving to make a single great
work that would triumph over all his detractors, all his
peers, and his dad. The same confidence that allowed
Pissarro to be compassionate allowed him to try anything in
his work, even when it meant straying from an increasingly
hard party line, and losing his place in history.
Historicism is authoritarian, and Cézanne's Modernist
pyramid scheme finally crumbled when Clement Greenberg's
predictions of the Apocalypse didn't pan out in the 1960s.
But Pissarro's approach is as valid now as it was then --
because it's about art serving personal and transpersonal
evolution as opposed to the accumulation and maintenance of
power through celebrity. Late in life, when Cézanne finally
began to receive the acclaim he craved, it didn't make him
happy. But his happiness is palpable midway through
"Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro
1865–1885," when he was tramping around Pissarro's home in
Pontoise, far from neurotic familial and competitive
contexts, immersed in a creative anarchistic community of
two, engaged in an experimental pas de deux that would
ultimately transform the world. That's immortality.
Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865–1885 |
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. |
Through January 16
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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"Don't just question authority,
Don't forget to question me."
-- Jello Biafra
chris
Dan Fox wrote:
> Dan - this is a terrific review. thanks for posting it. please post more
> material like this.
Dan(s) - I agree. Do you remember when this show first opened there was
another review posted, approaching the comparison from a completely
different POV? IIRC it trashed Pissarro for his lack of modernism.
Maybe what's important is that the two artists while completely
different, were able to communicate....
Cheers;
Chris
Bill
they deserve. Their work has been around for years and featured in
dozens of coffee table books ad nauseam. These traveling road shows
serve only the interest of the museums who need to keep people moving
through their doors. Art lovers have seen it all before and the
casual and curious have no real interest in it at all. So what's the
point, except to try to hype the prices at the next auction ?
Have a nice day.
G*rd*n
Apparently for many people the art experience begins with someone
telling them something is art. The more often this happens with
regard to some particular set of objects, the more they seem to
believe in and actually experience it as art. Therefore, we have
to count this _telling_ as part of experiencing art -- regardless
of any intrinsic merits of Cezanne or Pissarro, or their reception
among those who have some sort of artistic experience without
being told to. The attention given to them _makes_ them deserve
the attention. It is yet another mode of being famous for being
famous. And it not only hypes auction prices, it seems to hype
admittance fees as well -- MoMA can now get away with charging
tourists $20 a head, and they line up in droves to pay it.
Mani Deli
"What
a symbol for a period! On the pretext of the academic being
detestable, the worst in the class was made a hero! He opens the door
to the ethics of shit! Newness at whatever cost and art becomes just a
latrine! The logic of this search for newness leads to the
glorification of total shit of which Cezanne is the high priest."
My analytical opinion of Cezanne
http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/behind.htm
As to Pissaro; even if he lived in a different time and took the
"Famous Artists Course, he still would have been a failure.
no skill, no art