Text/Jonathan Jones, Compiler/Lu Linhan
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was one of the most famous Artists of 19th-century France and a central figure of Impressionism. Pissarro is arguably the most committed master of Impressionism, expressing purity, simplicity, thickness, softness, freedom, spontaneity and freshness. He had a huge influence on many artists, including Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and others.
On February 18, the exhibition "Pissarro: Father of Impressionism" was exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, showing Pissarro's artistic career. In the eyes of art critic Jonathan Jones, Pissarro is the real guy, and while he may not be as famous as Monet, Renoir or Degas, his talent is always to make you think about art, not just feel it.
Camille Pissarro doesn't worry about looking worse with a big white beard. He didn't care if he looked weak or not. At the beginning of the exhibition, a self-portrait of him is shown, in which his elderly, perhaps myopic eyes are above the glasses, and he seems to be staring at you. He was actually staring in the mirror, looking at himself honestly, and through the window behind him, he could see the gray streets of Paris.
Pissarro self-portrait, 1903
In this Pissarot exhibition, Pissarro fully embodies art as a belief. In the exhibition, there is a portrait of his wife Julie. Julie fell in love with him when she was a cook assistant at his parents' house. The exhibition also includes some portraits of their eight children, notably Lucian, pissarro's jewel in the palm of his hand, who grew up to be an artist. In addition, there are pictures of family dinners in the exhibition, which were depicted by Pissarro's youngest son, George. In the picture, Julie is cooking by the campfire, and the white-bearded father (Pissarro) is talking to his friends, including Gauguin, but another friend, Cézanne, does not join them, but paints the scenery on the side.
Pissarro, The tuileries gardens rainy weather, 1899
毕沙罗《The boieldieu bridge at rouen sunset》，1896年
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford refers to the exhibition as the "Father of Impressionism," reflecting Pissarro's place in his circle of artists. They called him "Father Pissarro" because Pissarro was in his 40s when the first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris in 1874. Perhaps, Pissarro should be called the father of modernism. Because Pissarro has been pushing art forward. He had no single religion, he was Jewish, but his wife was not, and it was clear that politics was more important to him than religion. A painting created in 1889 depicts an agent in a black suit on the Paris Bourse in France. The work was designed for an unfinished book, in the words of anarchist friend, a satire of the bourgeoisie.
Pissarro, Apple Harvest, 1887-1888
Pissarro, The pea stakers, 1890
Pissarro, View from My Window, 1886-1888
Pissarro does not conform to anyone's clichés about Impressionism. That's probably why he's not as famous as Monet, Renoir or Degas. Do you think those sensual pleasures of the Impressionists were meant to celebrate the pleasures of the middle class? Pissarro himself is more interested in the people who work. He highlights scenes of women at work: they trudge through fields with firewood, they stick stakes into the ground and grow peas, and they light bonfires on breezy mornings. His 1886-1888 oil painting View from My Window is an epic landscape painting in which every detail is precisely captured and expressed in the form of pointillism. This inspiration came from his young friend Paul Signac and the anarchist critic Félix Fénéon. But in this bright pixelated color, your gaze will rest on the woman who is doing farm work, and the hen is clucking on the side.
Pissarro's work always makes you think, not feel. He was obsessed with the nature of vision, but did not believe in those essences. In his self-portrait, those wet old eyes are acutely aware of what is holding us back. In his painting The Côte des Boeufs at L'Hermitage, created in 1877, he shows us country houses through the trees in the winter woodland. In the picture, trees block the road, but is this really the theme that we want to show us?
毕沙罗《The Côte des Boeufs at L’Hermitage》，1877年
In these subtle meditations, Pissarro showed the way for the next generation of modern painters. These meditations are what we choose to see from our ever-changing visual perceptions. Spring: Plum Trees in Bloom lets you choose between two visual focal points: a group of houses on a hillside or plum blossoms in a snowstorm. In The Pork Butcher, the crowds in the market appear to be deliberately portrayed as cluttered and blurry. Who should we look at and what is the story here? Of course, we need to look at everyone. There is no single, simple story.
Pissarro, Spring: Plum Trees in Bloom, 1877
Pissarro, The Pork Butcher, 1883
Pissarro not only showed the way for radical art nouveau. He enthusiastically supports young friends who are innovative and confused. Gauguin and Cézanne worked side by side with the kind Pissarro on the outskirts of Paris. Cézanne's country paintings in Pontoise hang by Pissarro's house in the woods. Cézanne used the same technique, showing the houses in the valley through the dense trees. You can see how Pissarro helped Cézanne look at things that we overlook.
So what did Pissarro get back from it? In 1894, Dreyfus, a Jewish captain officer in the French Army Staff, was framed for treason, dismissed from his post and sentenced to lifelong exile, and the French right-wing forces took the opportunity to set off a wave of anti-Semitism. This had an impact not only in French society, but also in the Impressionist art movement. Pissarro and Monet supported Dreyfus, while Cézanne was on the other side. To make matters worse, Pissarro's old friend Degas avoided Pissarro. In the exhibition hall, the artist's early prints are juxtaposed with Pissarro's work.
Monet, Boulevard Pontoise, 1875
Gauguin, The Apple Tree in a Hermitage, 1879
Given the extent to which Pissarro was betrayed, in this exhibition I would rather see less of the work of other artists and more enthusiastically support Pissarro's own artistic genius. Cézanne and Gauguin's paintings transcend their bad personalities and seem to be trying to steal the limelight in the exhibition hall. There is even a wonderful Cézanne still life borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It seems that good people will be ranked low in art history.
The exhibition will be on view until June 12.
(This article is compiled from The Guardian by Jonathan Jones, an art critic.) ）
Editor-in-Charge: Lu Linhan
Proofreader: Liu Wei