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COPYRIGHT 1998 College Art Association
Paul Cezanne once remarked that if Camille Pissarro "had gone on painting as he was doing in 1870, he would have been the strongest of us all."(1) Cezanne did not make clear why he found Pissarro's early work so compelling, but he implied that its strength was not sustained in the artist's subsequent production. This essay explores what it was that made Pissarro's pictures appear so forceful to someone like Cezanne and what it was that Pissarro wanted his pictures to do in the early and middle years of the 1870s, a period in the artist's career that deserves more attention than it has hitherto received.
In 1880, Pissarro turned away from landscape painting and toward figure painting. Martha Ward has argued that this turn was propelled by the artist's desire to produce a work that qualified as a tableau, a fully realized and self-sufficient painting.(2) Both Pissarro and his critics thought that the figure was necessary to the production of such a tableau, or chef d'oeuvre, and their interest in the figure can be seen in terms of a return to criteria that originated in writing about theater and art in the eighteenth century in France.(3) This return might be characterized as a rejection or revision on Pissarro's part of his own artistic past; what motivated the artist in the 1880s, namely, the desire for a tableau (the same desire that led Claude Monet to the series), was not precisely what had motivated him in earlier years.4 During the 1870s, painters and critics were able to set aside the issue of the tableau while, importantly, not forgetting. it entirely.(5) With this bracketing, made possible in part by Edouard Manet, or rather, by the redefinition or transformation of what Manet's aims were perceived to be, Impressionists like Pissarro, Monet, and Alfred Sisley, the landscapists of the group, came to think about picture making in terms of an alternative (but not wholly novel) set of criteria. In the 1870s, Pissarro, especially, transformed his thinking about how paintings were asked to represent and about how they demanded to be viewed, and his critics, both those who liked his painting and those who were disturbed by it, understood what he was trying to do. I say transformed because it is the case that Pissarro did not reject or attempt to forget the past; he involved himself in the history of landscape painting in France and made sure to manufacture an alternative to this history, one not wholly bound to its aims. In so doing, he pursued a practice situated somewhere between that of his precursors and that of his Impressionist colleagues, a practice tied to criteria of the past even as it struggled to reinvent them. As we shall see, Pissarro made use of what was characterized at the time as the partialness of landscape, its insufficiency and its inability to ever achieve the status of tableau, in order to produce pictures that reexamined the relation between painting and beholder. In these pictures, described by Pissarro's critics as compelling and successful works of art, the artist found a way to represent what he imagined to be the relationship of sight to embodiment and insisted not on instantaneous intelligibility but on the difficulty and duration of vision. Pissarro painted in a variety of manners during the period under discussion; despite their diversity, the pictures examined in this essay make similar claims about perceptual experience and must be understood in terms of a sustained exploration on Pissarro's part of vision and the possibility of its representation.
In broad terms, then, this essay addresses the turn to landscape painting in the late 1860s and early 1870s by Pissarro and his Impressionist colleagues, painters who were repeatedly called disciples of Manet, an artist intensely interested in the figure and seemingly uninterested in landscape painting as a viable genre in and of itself.(6) More specifically, it focuses on the early career of Pissarro and examines a select number of his works dating from the 1870s as well as the critical discourse that surrounded their production, and attempts to come to terms with what the artist thought he was doing in these pictures. I shall examine Pissarro's paintings of landscape in the light of writing about Impressionism as a "movement" (reviews of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, for instance) but shall read closely to see what critics thought was special, noteworthy, or strange about Pissarro as an individual painter. To say that each painter classified as an Impressionist in 1874 painted in a unique fashion is to state what is now a truism. But to see Pissarro as a painter not exclusively invested in what has come to be known as an Impressionist aesthetic is to see him as un-Impressionist, or, more productively, to see our understanding of what we call Impressionism as oversimplified and incomplete. In writing about Pissarro and the distinctive nature of his pictorial enterprise, then, I am confronting the need to reconceptualize painting and its projects in the 1870s.
When critics began writing about Pissarro and his Impressionist colleagues in the first half of the 1870s, they described their work in terms that had little to do with those employed in criticism about painting in the previous decade.(7) Significantly, those critics, whether or not they liked the new painting or felt it had a future, agreed when describing its nature and aims.s In response to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, Philippe Burty wrote that the group "pursues . . . a common artistic goal: in the process, the rendition of the broad light of open air, in the feeling, the purity of the first sensation."(9) Jules Castagnary praised what he saw as the instantaneous quality of the pictures on view:
These young artists have a way of comprehending nature that is neither tedious nor banal. It is vivacious, it is nimble, it is light; it is ravishing. Such rapid intelligence of the object and such pleasing facture! It is summary, true, but how accurate the indications are! ... [These artists] are "impressionists" in the sense that they render not the landscape but the sensation produced by the landscape.(10)
Emile Zola, writing in 1876 about the Salon and the second Impressionist exhibition, agreed:
These artists of whom I speak have been called "impressionists" became for the most part they want to make visible and communicate above all the truthful impression given by things and beings; they want to seize and reproduce it directly, without losing themselves in the insignificant details which spoil the freshness of the personal and lively observations.(11)
In a review of an exhibition of a group of young artists including Pissaro, Monet, and Sisley held at the gallery Durand-Ruel in 1872, Armand Silvestre drew attention to the simplicity and harmony of Impressionist paintings:
What immediately strikes one when looking at this painting is the immediate caress that the eye receives - it is above all harmonious. What finally distinguishes it is the simplicity of means in achieving this harmony. One quickly discovers, in effect, that the secret is based completely on a very fine and very exact observation of the relation of one tone to another.(12)
For both Burty and Silvestre, the new painting seemed to operate in a strictly aesthetic mode. Such works, suggested the former, "pursue a purely artistic end. They depend upon elements of interest strictly aesthetic, and not social or human - lightness of colouring, boldness of masses, blunt naturalness of impression" - and leave scarcely any room for other motives in their "decorative freedom."(13) The canvases, the latter wrote, "open, in the surfaces they decorate, windows onto the joyous countryside."(14)
According to contemporary critics, Impressionist paintings address themselves first and foremost to the faculty of vision. Pissarro, Monet, and Sisley are described as attempting to recreate, give form to, their visual experience; the viewer is struck by the "immediate caress which the eye receives" when looking at one of their paintings. Alfred de Lostalot remarks that an Impressionist work can offer only "everything for the eye and nothing for the thought."(15) Both Marc de Montifaud, who muses, "[I]f this small group were to constitute a school, one would have to call them 'the school of the eyes' [l'ecole des yeux]," and Ernest d'Hervilly, who notes that at each corner of the 1874 exhibition "a work, always striking, never banal, offers itself to the eye of the visitor," conceive of the new painting as a decidedly ocular art.(16)
Harmony, instantaneity, reality, simplicity, discovery, decorative unity, and, above all, the eye: as early as 1872, when Silvestre wrote his review of the Durand-Ruel exhibition, these concepts, used in conjunction with one another in descriptions of Impressionism both positive and negative, came to stand for the new painting. For the critics, Pissarro's art both exemplified and helped produce the new vocabulary. In an important sense, then, the artist's work is embedded in the conceptual categories manufactured at this time. Silvestre wrote:
First of all, one has difficulty distinguishing that which differentiates the painting of Monet from that of Sisley and the manner of the latter from that of Pissarro. After a little study, one finds that M. Monet is the most skillful and the most daring, M. Sisley the most harmonious and the most timid, M. Pissarro the most direct and naive.(17)
Zola echoes Silvestre: Pissarro is "a revolutionary fiercer than Monet," and his brush, he writes, "is the simplest and the most naive."(18) Burty drew attention to the tonal quality of Gelee blanche, ancienne route d'Ennery, Pontoise, a painting on view in 1874 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]: "One effect . . . reminds us of Millet's best themes. One believes that he intentionally suppresses shadows, even though he merely selects those sunless but gen fly luminous days that soften planes and leave to tones all their color values."(19) Georges Riviere, in 1877, concurred:
What is not sufficiently noted in the works of the Impressionist painters, and above all in Pissarro, is the variety of tones. Has the public ever noticed how the foliage of each tree is different and how the relationship among all is exact? It is, however, a thing worthy of notice, since it is this difference and these relationships that constitute the powerful harmony of the works of Pissarro. And these skies, so light, so marvelous in the background of the landscapes, one doesn't admire them as one should, became one has, upon entering the exhibition, a lasting bias.(20)
Pissarro himself attached positive value to the notions of harmony, purity, and truth. In a letter of 1873 to his friend Theodore Duret, written in order to convince the latter of the merit of Monet's paintings, he stated:
Do not think that I would mislead you about the talent of Monet, which is in my view very serious, very pure . . . it is an art very studied, based on observation, and of a sentiment wholly new, it is poetry by harmony of color, Monet is an adorer of true nature.(21)
Clearly, Pissarro's output in the 1870s operated under the sign of what had come to be understood as an Impressionist aesthetic. Critical audiences saw his art as simple, tonal, naive, harmonious, and, above all, attuned to the faculty of vision; he himself praised these qualifies in the work of his friend Monet.
On the other hand, and in an important sense, Pissarro's paintings did not appear to their critics as interested only in effects of light and color and they did not seem to address themselves exclusively to the sense of sight, or if they did, they did so strangely, by stalling vision, even blocking it. "M. Pissarro," wrote Ernest Fillonneau in 1877, "is becoming completely unintelligible. He puts together in his pictures all the colors of the rainbow; he is violent, hard, brutal. From an effect which might well have been acceptable, he makes something unbelievable, against seeing and even against reason."(22) Here, Pissarro's paintings are held to oppose vision in their brutal solidity. As early as 1866, critics who praised Pissarro's facture and his constructive ability drew attention to what they called his profundity, his solemnity, his force of will, and his weight. In his Salon review of that year, Zola wrote:
Pissarro is an unknown, of whom, no doubt, no one will speak. Before departing, I want to make a point of vigorously shaking his hand. Merci, monsieur, your landscape allows me to rest at length as I voyage through this great desert of the Salon. I know that you have been admitted with a great struggle, and I offer you my sincere compliments. You must know that you please no one, and that your picture is thought too bare and too black. And why the devil do you have the remarkable clumsiness of painting solidly and studying nature frankly? Now see, you choose a time of winter, you have there a simple piece of the avenue, then a cottage at the end and a field that extends to the horizon [The Banks of the Marne in Winter [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]]. Not the least delight for the eyes. A painting austere and serious; an extreme concern with truth and accuracy, a will fierce and strong. You are a great blunderer, monsieur, you are an artist that I like.(23)
Here, an opposition to or near absence of visual address ("not the least delight for the eyes") is conjoined with solid painting, austerity and seriousness, and a fierce and strong will. Pissarro's picture, in Zola's eyes, succeeds despite its defects, it conveys truth despite its flaws. It ventures beyond mere directness and naivete: it is clumsy and blundering, yet still frank. Vision is at issue here (there is not delight, but something else, for the eyes) as it was in Fillonneau's review, but it is neither clear nor immediate and its awkwardness is willed.(24)
The relation between Zola and Pissarro has been remarked in several major studies of the artist but has yet to be explored in depth.(25) Zola dedicates large portions of his earliest reviews of the Salon to the artist, and what he has to say about him is nothing short of revelatory. Pissarro met Zola in 1863 through Cezanne and attended the writer's Thursday evening gatherings beginning in 1866. During those years, Pissarro, along with his soon-to-be Impressionist colleagues Monet and Sisley, made regular visits to Manet's studio in the Batignolles as well as to that shared by Frederic Bazille and Auguste Renoir, where he often encountered the critic. Zola's writing on Pissarro is insightful, even inspired; as early as 1866, he understood what Pissarro wanted to do with his painting.
In an essay on the Salon of 1868 entitled "Les naturalistes," Zola again drew attention to Pissarro's strong and convinced canvases, his grave and profound talent, his sturdy technique, and his solidity and breadth of touch.(26) He compared Pissarro's solid metier, his sound technique, which had yet to attract and hold the attention of an audience, to the treacherous and showy metier of other painters in the Salon:
If Camille Pissarro does not hold the crowd, or if he makes the jury, which haphazardly selects or rejects him, hesitate, it is because he does not have any of the minute skillfulness of his colleagues. He is in the realm of excellence, the relentless pursuit of the true, heedless of the tricks of metier. His canvases, which lack all fireworks and spice, discover a nature too living and too pungent in its reality. This is paint with an accuracy and a memorable energy that is of an aspect almost sad. . . . In the midst of these dressed up canvases, those of Pissarro appear bare and desolate. For the unintelligent eyes of the crowd, habituated to the flashiness of the neighboring paintings, these are dull, gray, dirty, coarse and rough. The artist concerns himself with truth only, with consciousness; he places himself before a wall of nature, he devotes himself to the work of interpreting the horizons in their severe breadth, without seeking to put there the least delight of his invention. He is neither poet nor philosopher, but simply a naturalist, maker of skies and land.(27)
Zola's insight consists not only in his realization that Pissarro's is not an art addressed solely to the eye, that his paintings are walls that work to block vision, but also in his realization that Pissarro's paintings, in their solidity, awkwardness, austerity, and severity, are willed into being by a worker and are truthful because they represent the experience of this worker in front of nature. They are "convinced" because a man has, energetically and forcefully, even painfully, made them such by placing himself before a wall of nature and rebuilding it, piece by piece, stroke by stroke. "There does not exist a painter more conscientious or more exact," wrote the critic, "[his pictures] are supremely personal and...
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