TWO VIEWS.

In terms of a viewer's chief experience, "Pioneering Modern Painting: Cezanne & Pissarro, 1865-1885," at the Museum of Modern Art, is a show about Paul Cezanne: what he did, how it works, and why it's classical. Camille Pissarro, a likable man and a delightful artist, important in any number of contingent ways, is not in the same league as that driven revolutionary. Not since the similarly titled "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," in 1989-90, has moma, or any other museum that I can think of, produced such a pitiless comparison of stylistically related painters, one great and one just very good, with results that are instructive--providing vigorous exercise for the thinking eye--while sort of painful. The mismatch isn't as drastic as it might have been, because the Cezanne in this show, which stops when he was forty-six years old--eight years younger than Pissarro--had yet to attain the full flower of his talents. (To see that, take the escalator to the first gallery of the permanent collection, where five Cezannes, dating from 1885 to 1906, reign in clenched, strenuous majesty.) But, from the start, there's no contest. The show's drama is ambient, in the fact that it has been allowed to happen. It was organized by Pissarro's great-grandson, Joachim, a curator in the museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture. This lends an air of fond nepotism, which proves peculiarly subversive. As if slipped past a nodding doorkeeper, Pissarro's earnestly ingratiating pictures jangle the museum's policy of fiercely screened modernness--a Draconian mania that is ever more played out.

The idea of their being pitted against each other would have surprised Pissarro, a French-Creole Jew from the West Indies, and Cezanne, a coarse Provencal. Their quarter-century friendship, during which they sometimes painted side by side, was forged in shared senses of social alienation and a generational crusade. (It ended after Cezanne holed up for good in Provence, in the mid- eighteen-eighties.) In Pissarro, Cezanne found an older colleague who didn't laugh at his gaucheries. They met in the period of the 1863 Salon des Refuses, when the insurrection against the academic art world had rallied around the incendiary figures of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet. Cezanne and Pissarro, in their earliest paintings here, are thoroughly, earthily Courbet-like, immune to Manet-esque, sparkling urbanity. Abetted by their critical champion Emile Zola, they aimed their competitive rage outward, at the establishment. Pissarro, a declared anarchist, recommended burning down the Louvre. Cezanne characterized art schools this way: "Teachers are all castrated bastards and assholes. They have no guts!" We are on the familiar ground of modern art's creation saga, with knights of the new beset by howling and jeering philistines. Are we ready to be over that coercive romance? If so, team membership in the avant-garde no longer elides the differences between the amiable Pissarro and the unbending Cezanne.

Take one of several telling juxtapositions on offer: Pissarro's "The Conversation, chemin du chou, Pontoise" (1874) and Cezanne's "The House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise" (1873). Each is about two feet high and a bit wider; both show roads in rural towns, with steep-roofed houses. The Pissarro, set in a wooded valley, with two small figures, is quietly sumptuous. Layered, highly varied patches and strokes--les taches and les touches, the standard ingredients of School of Paris painterly cuisine--in greens, grays, and gray-greens conjure masses of absolute summer under a blue-blushing sky. The tonality and chroma of the scene's over-all, milky light are monotonous, in a manner typical of the artist; they are tasteful. Pissarro was prone to superfluous nuance and conventional pictorial unity. Now Cezanne. Looking down into a cluster of buildings on a hillside, he sorts out an astonishing congeries of overlapping planes and textures--anticipating the nested bumps and hollows of tactile space that would one day preoccupy Cubism. Though the picture has been called his Impressionist masterpiece, its glowing colors suggest not scintillant atmosphere but molecular oneness with walls, trees, and dirt that are drenched in sun and shade. Light and what it illuminates register as one thing.