Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) was a ceaseless innovator and organizer whose ideological concerns were as profound as his aesthetic interests. Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country examines how Pissarro's artistic theories and social convictions influenced his Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist work.
Pissarro espoused an anti-bourgeois, anarchist ideology and was interested in the plight of the working classes. This book’s authors examine recurring motifs in Pissarro’s work as intellectual metaphors as well as his background as a Sephardic Jew who was involved in many of the political and class issues of the period. The text also looks at Pissarro as a painter who identified with laborers and agriculture, exploring connections between his subject matter and the “dirty” nature of his painterly technique.
Featuring a wide selection of superb paintings from private collections, many rarely seen, this beautifully illustrated book reveals the genius of an artist keenly focused on his natural surroundings and the lives of common folk.
Karen Levitov is associate curator at The Jewish Museum and a contributor to Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (Yale). Richard Shiff holds the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at The University of Texas at Austin. His publications include Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (Yale).
This review is from: Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country (Paperback)
This is a beautifully designed and printed little book (86 pp.) published as the catalogue to accompany the 2007-08 exhibition of the same name at The Jewish Museum in New York. According to Karen Levitov, the editor, who is associate curator at the Museum, the New York area is particularly rich in private collections of Pissarro, and most of the forty-nine well done illustrations are from such collections, many of them seldom seen . Two short essays introduce the plates. Levitov's "Paths to Pissarro" organizes a brief overview of Pissarro's life and works around the artist's "characteristic motif" of the path (10): she uses the metaphor to follow the twists and turns of Pissarro's career on his own path to artistic individualism. The distinguished art historian Richard Shiff writes "Pissarro's Dirty Painting," an equally meandering essay differentiating Pissarro from Millet and Monet, apparently coming finally to deal with the way the artist's technique is both "pure" and "dirty," i.e., how he allows patches of pure painting to show on the surface like dirt on a camera lens. Neither of these essays is particularly valuable, but the book is nevertheless worthwhile because of its illustrations and unusual reproductions.
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This review is from: Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country (Paperback)
This book is beautiful. It's divided into two sections, the first half is two essays by the authors, respectively. The second half is a series of rarely seen prints, etchings and sketchings. They are worth buying the book for, as they are not available anywhere else.
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