Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was at the hub of the Impressionist movement. He exhibited at all eight of the group exhibitions, and his paintings appear to typify the Impressionist style. However, his work is very complex and diverse. The variety of media in which he worked—pastel, gouache, etching, even painting on ceramic tiles—and his working practices, which involved careful studio preparation as well as plein air work, raise questions that require us to redefine our concept of Impressionism. Pissarro's own concept of his art interlocked with his anarchist ideology. His belief in a harmonious and classless future society, based on rural communities, was expressed in his lyrical idealizations of the French landscape. But, if in such paintings he played down the contemporary crisis in French agriculture, in his images of the Parisian suburbs and the port of Rouen he tried to come to terms with a modern, industrial society. This book, based on a 1990 touring exhibition organized by the British South Bank Centre, surveys his work in all media.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
One of the most independent of the impressionists, Pissarro is a figure rich in paradox. Born in the West Indies to Jewish parents of Danish citizenship, he came from a peripatetic merchant family yet painted timeless, idyllic images of rural France. His family strongly opposed his marriage to his mother's Gentile maid, Julie Vellay. A bohemian, an anarchist, a devotee of homeopathy, he relied on his bourgeois parents for maintenance. He fled Paris amid the bloody putdown of the Paris Commune in 1871, but returned to witness friends tried for anarchist activities and the anti-Semitism unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair. In this attractive, compact catalogue of a British exhibit, art historian Thomson ( Seurat ) interprets Pissarro's images of rural laborers and markets, of Rouen's factory-clogged port, of Paris's industrialized suburbs, of bucolic landscapes as a continual reassessment of the impact of modernization on a transformed world. Some 100 black-and-white reproductions and 26 color plates accompany the text.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This is a companion volume to a 1990 exhibition, touring in Britain, of selected works of the key Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Thomson, an art history scholar, has chosen works that exemplify the complexities and tensions in Pissarro's world as it evolved from an agricultural to an industrial society. His artistry is perceived within the context of its salability, the sociopolitical climate, and his own anarchistic ideology. Twenty-six lovely colors and 110 black-and-white plates complement the well-written text, which analyzes specific motifs, namely, Parisian suburbs, the marketplace, rural idylls, and Rouen. Notes, chronology, and catalog supplement this important study. Highly recommended.
- Joan Levin, Indian Trails P.L., Wheeling, Ill.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Joan Levin, Indian Trails P.L., Wheeling, Ill.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Richard Thomson, Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape and Rural Labour,
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This review is from: Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape and Rural Labour (Hardcover)
This volume is the catalogue that accompanied the first major Pissarro exhibition ever to be held in Great Britain outside of London (Birmingham and Glasgow). It was conceived and selected by Richard Thomson as a kind of back-up to the large 1980-81 retrospective mounted ten years before in London, Paris, and Boston (see my review on this website). It has a sharper focus than its predecessor and was intended to recognize and reflect the diverse developments and changes of perspective in Impressionist studies in general and in Pissarro scholarship in particular that were given impetus by the earlier show. These included the first authoritative biography, a thorough study of Pissarro's drawings, the important contributions of Christopher Lloyd and Richard Brettell, and the first three fully annotated volumes of the artist's correspondence: quite a busy decade. In his introduction to this book, Thomson points out that the notions of "immediacy" and "accuracy" that were once commonly used to describe Impressionism have given way to the recognition that Impressionist images are fictions resulting from the artist's choice, editing, and preparatory work, and that they depend on individual ideology and various economic and market forces. In the present case, Pissarro emerges as "an artist of greater diversity and complexity" than we had thought, "a figure rich in paradox" whose career now appears on the whole as "a dialogue between city and country" (8). Thus the exhibit and catalogue concentrated on Pissarro's images of rural labor and markets and on specific locations such as Pontoise and Rouen, and the author is occupied greatly with the artist's concern "not merely with HOW to represent the landscape but also with WHAT the landscape should represent" (12).Thomson's major theme is that no matter HOW, Pissarro's WHAT is largely a fictionalized image. Thus in the paintings of the Paris suburbs, Thomson shows us how changes in palette, touch, "effet" and other elements give the same stretch of the Seine quite divergent identities. And as far as Pontoise is concerned: despite the fact that it was, during Pissarro's residency there, becoming a virtual satellite of the capital, the artist consistently represented it as essentially still a country town. Thomson refers here to Pissarro's "reluctant awareness of transition" (35) as, toward the end of the 1870's, his representations of L'Hermitage increasingly promoted the "fiction of a rural community" (39) and he was only occasionally willing to admit symbols of modernization into his landscapes. Thomson cites an 1892 interview in which Pissarro refers to manipulating his studio impressions "to create the true poem of the countryside" and Thomson comments correctly that the artist is thus admitting that his art is an "idyllic fiction" (81). Indeed, Thomson calls Pissarro's landscape pictures in the last decade or so of his life "the late rural idylls" (81), in which he is constructing an ideal of a classless community in accord with his anarchist ideology. Thomson is very good in indicating that no matter how much Pissarro has in common with other painters who were also constructing fictional ideals through the manipulation of rural imagery--say, Jules Breton and Leon Lhermitte--it is Pissarro's commitment to anarchist ideals that distinguishes him: whereas Breton and Lhermitte look back in plaintive regret at the loss of traditional values rooted in their national and religious heritage, Pissarro is looking forward to the communitarian ideals of post-revolutionary society (a point recently underlined most forcefully by Richard Brettell in his exhibition and catalogue "Pissarro's People" [cf. my review]). Thomson's book is an excellent survey of Pissarro's rural art, and together with Brettell's almost simultaneously published "Pissarro and Pontoise: The Artist in a Landscape" (cf. my review), it constitutes a fundamental reassessment of Pissarro as a landscapist. His text is clearly organized and concisely written, and it is all the more pity that it has not been better served by the accompanying illustrations. The author has provided some excellent comparative paintings to illustrate his points about Pissarro's, but many of these are printed too dark to reveal much detail. Of the total of 139 illustrations, only about twenty or so are reproduced in color, and the color is not always very true. This is, then, not a book to purchase for its reproductions, but for its text, which is an outstanding contribution to Pissarro studies.
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This review is from: Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape and Rural Labour (Hardcover)
hardback book...............8 1/2 x 10 inches..........127 pages long. There are color and black and white photos of art work.
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