Customer Reviews

Camille Pissarro

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The number, size, and quality of color reproductions justifies the physical weight of this book. Joachim Pissarro's commentary interests and informs the reader without making the volume unduly heavy intellectually. I found that the basic chronological organzation with some thematic digressions provided a good vantage point for understanding Pissarro's work.

AS ONE REVIEWER, STILL POSTED AT THIS TIME, WARNS: THE PAPERBOUND EDITION OFFERED BY AMAZON AND OTHER BOOKSELLERS AS AN ALTERNATIVE CHOICE TO THE HARDBOUND EDITION, IS 24 PAGES IN LENGTH. Used copies of the monograph are available but at at a price which is usually well above that for which it was obtainable when published.
Joachim Pissarro, grandson of the artist, is a highly regarded art historian and curator who has been associated with some of the most distinguished museum exhibitions of recent years. This study, one of several he has authored or co-authored on this oldest of the major Impressionists is, simply, beautiful. Abrams publishers, still at that time in the original hands, outdid its customary high standards in putting out a book which is, as a physical entity, gratifying to own. Printing, illustrations and editing are first rate. The author's text is notable for its precision of speech and thought, its analytical acuteness and, importantly for the lay reader, extremely accessible in style. There are some technicalities in discussions of individual pictures, but the ideas are not arcane and the language is straightforward and totally lacking in the speech patterns which characterize professional to professional communications. It is a joy to read for those of us who have not had the benefit of graduate degrees from Yale Fine Arts or other training grounds for art historians.
The major intellectual thrust, as opposed to some other excellent, more recent publications, is that Pissarro's art is to be understood as a reflection of a mind striving objectively to create images which are honest reflections of reality as filtered through the sensibilities of the individual artist and laid down on canvas, paper, or other material, with the most sophisticated techniques which the artist can master. It is not intended as a reflection of the artist's anarchism, story-telling abilities, need to satisfy an audience, desire to win status among fellow-artists, make people feel good, sad, pitying, or, in sum, feel anything but in the presence of a master of the painters, etchers or lithographers skill, and a product which is a good picture, an artist's picture.
Joachim Pissarro does give us a selective biography of the Artists life as well his work. He manages, though without the emphasis that others have, to give us some feeling for the reasons why, as a person, he was so respected. Upright, supportive, absolutely dedicated to the craft of art and to achievement of the good life for all, he was, surely, a great teacher, without being an Academic, and a wise counselor, without demanding any dependency from his students, including his children.
If the price of the book is beyond the reader's means, I strongly recommend reading it where you can find it. Should you find a copy within your means, it will be a worthwhile resident on any bookshelf, whatever may be the quality of the other works thereon.

Highyly reccomend it. It is an amazing portrayal of the arist life and provides a complete account of Camille's various artisit treasures. Preceding this book, there was not much info on Camille that could be commonly found in bookstores. Upon reading the book, i found it unlocked a completely new door to camilles work. Litereary gold, it has so much more than pictures in it. Filed under complete keys you oughtto understand about camille. An unforgettalievable treasure.

When a writer writes a book about one of his own ancestors, it automatically comes with the special cachet of familial authority. Although Joachim Pissarro never knew his famous forebear (who died in 1903), the book is in part dedicated to "the memory of Ludovic-Rodo and Paulemile," i.e., the painter's two youngest sons, who were, respectively, the author's great-uncle and grandfather, and we naturally assume that he has benefitted from personal recollection, family tradition, and many other private sources of information. Be that as it may, the authority of this book is based not on genealogical privilege, but on the solid research and impeccable scholarship of its author, who is one of our most accomplished art historians, and whose prior work on Pissarro (with Richard Brettell), "The Impressionist and the City" (see my review on this website), was the catalogue of an exhibition he co-curated at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1992. He has also recently co-authored the three-volume revised edition of the catalogue raisonne of Pissarro's oeuvre and is currently the Bershad Professor of Art History at Hunter College, Director of the Hunter College Art Galleries and Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Camille Pissarro had such a broad range of interests and was such an inveterate experimenter in various styles and media that his art can be approached from many directions. In addition, as Richard Brettell wrote in his introductory essay to the catalogue of the first great Pissarro retrospective (held in 1980 in London), "more than any other great artist of the late nineteenth century [he] was swayed by politics," and one stream of Pissarro scholarship in the past three decades has sought to trace the political effects of Pissarro's anarchist ideology in his painting. This is a tendency explored most extensively by Brettell, and also by Richard Thomson and occasionally by John House and others. On the other side of that debate are art historians who, while fully recognizing Pissarro's deep political commitment, are content to examine the art without attempting to find in it any particular political cast--any crossover from the ideological side. They may see the man and his life in political terms, but they regard his art in purely aesthetic ones. Joachim Pissarro is in this second group, as he makes quite evident: "What appears particularly clear-cut about Pissarro is that he was able to act both as a painter and as a political or social thinker without mixing or confusing the two fields" (13).

This is probably the most "painterly" of the Pissarro books currently available. By that, I mean that the author pays more attention than others to matters of the physical application of medium (paint, pencil, chalk, etc.) to support (canvas, paper, etc.) and to composition. He is very good at finding illustrative metaphors for the effects of different kinds of brushwork and in pointing out the larger implications of such effects. One example will serve for many: While Pissarro was still exploring the possibility of becoming an artist, a battle for authority was being waged in the Parisian art world between those who supported the supremacy of line over color and the opposite camp, i.e., between the backers of Ingres and the champions of Delacroix, who had come to personify the two directions. But by the time of the great paintings of and at The Hermitage in Pontoise (i.e., 1867 and thereabouts), which Joachim Pissarro identifies as "the kernel of works that bring Pissarro's breakthrough to a culmination" (51), Pissarro's technical and compositional independence had progressed to the degree that he essentially opted for "none of the above": he devised a manner of delineating contours that refuses to adopt a position on either side by withholding both line and color. As the writer says, "the plastic contours of objects require neither paint nor drawn line but can be outlined in negative--by withholding the brush at the seam of two planes of color. [. . .] the contours of houses and trees [in these Hermitage paintings] are suggested through an extremely thin furrow of unpainted canvas that runs along the edges of the represented objects, letting through the nearly untouched web of primed canvas" (53). Thus the traditional academic hierarchic opposition between line and color is obviated in one fell swoop by Pissarro's new technique and more or less relegated to the scrap heap of art history. As the author comments, the ability of color to inform itself may not seem radically innovative today, but it was in 1867. There is as much in this study about composition as about facture, and one remark may serve to illustrate the author's concerns. One might have said, for instance, that Pissarro's Louveciennes paintings are all about roads and the buildings that flank them, but Joachim Pissarro's emphasis is from another perspective: "Two notions summarize in a general way what Pissarro's Louveciennes period was about: shadow and structure" (66)

Joachim Pissarro is very good in following the twists and turns of the painter's constantly evolving aesthetic and in integrating into his discussion the broader implications of a given stylistic "period." Thus the chapter "Pontoise and Auvers 1872-82: Impressionism" presents a very fruitful analysis of the results of Pissarro's and Cezanne's close collaboration during those seminal years (an occupation that led to a further project of the author, his organization and curatorship of the exhibition "Pioneering Modern Painting: Cezanne and Pissarro 1865-1885" at the MoMA in 2005 and his authorship of the accompanying catalogue). The later relationship with Degas is also well illuminated; the author emphasizes the closeness of their collaboration in experimentation and research with numerous examples of mutual influence. Other chapters that stand out as particularly successful are, I believe, the first one, on Pissarro's very early art in St. Thomas and Caracas, and the chapter on his association with Neo-Impressionism.

This is a large and substantial book, a major contribution to the literature on Pissarro, and since Harry Abrams is a near-legendary art publisher, we are assured a volume of very high production values. The print is clearly legible and the pages uncluttered. There are over 350 illustrations in color and black and white, and the color reproductions are excellent, although I did find it frustrating that there was not more attention paid to reproducing in color those paintings the discussion of which rather depends on our being able to see color, and that the layout sometimes has the illustrations at an inconvenient distance from the discussion. But in any case, it is clear that this is a necessary addition to any serious collection of books of and about this "dean of the Impressionists."

It should be noted that Joachim Pissarro has a SECOND BOOK WITH THE SAME TITLE as the one just reviewed. It cannot be reviewed separately because Amazon's computer system reads it as the paperback edition of the above book, i.e., as in the same "product set." It is not; the Abrams 1993 book does not have a paperback edition. This other book is a volume in the "Rizzoli Art Series" (completely different publisher, although generally equally distinguished as a publisher of fine art books). It is intended, I suppose, for people who want a representative few paintings in large-format reproductions (14"x10-1/4") along with a brief essay on the life and work of the artist. The reproductions are very well printed and with excellent color and are no doubt suitable for framing, albeit they are printed back-to-back. There are four black-and-white illustrations and fifteen paintings representing all phases of Pissarro's career and most of the genres he worked in: landscapes, a portrait (Cezanne), a self-portrait (the one from 1873), etc. Although Pissarro actually created more graphic work than oil paintings, the illustrated works are exclusively of oils on canvas. There is a little "Index to Colorplates" that gives each reproduction a two or three-sentence commentary. Joachim Pissarro's brief introduction, which would run about ten pages if printed in normal format, is of some interest. As in the large study reviewed above, he begins with the issue of liberty and independence, noting that the year of the artist's birth (1830) was the year in which the last hereditary king of France was toppled from the throne and sent into exile. Thus Pissarro's entire life was coterminous with the gradual liberation of France from the dual authority of aristocracy and Church, and it is a useful reminder that one should see the artistic emancipation achieved by the Impressionists (from the various ecoles, academies, and Salons) as part of a more general social and political evolution that emboldened and at the same time legitimized individual artistic autonomy. As the artist wrote in one of his letters quoted by Prof. Pissarro, the founding condition of all great art is nothing less than "absolute liberty."

The book, Camille Pissarro, is delightful. The reproductions are excellent and the information very interesting.

Mary Mathews

I have read and collected hardback and softback books on C. Pissarro for quite some time, and regard myself as a novice art historian on French pre-Impressionism. This book is one of the best in-depth books on Camille Pissarro that I have come across, and at such an incredible low price. The pictures are of some of his most beautiful to the eye. And the biographical information is top notch. If you pursue the history of such artists or know of someone who does, this is an incredible addition to your library.

This is a good book on Camille Pissaro. It's a good source for those interested in the lives of artists.
It shows his work both in color and black and white.
For whatever reason, Pissaro was the first Impressionist that I became interested in.
Not wanting to give up my book, my art instructor (a fellow bibliophile ), asked if I'd order a copy for her. That's what this purchase was, she's very pleased with it.

Joachim is a genious ..appears in my film Monet's PalateMonet's Palate - A Gastronomic View from the Gardens of Giverny

You think you're recieving the paper back edition of the hardcover book represented. YOUR NOT!!! save your money and get the hardcover edition