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April 2, 2007
Pissarro and industry in the French landscape
A lovely, subtle Pissarro show at the Baltimore Museum of Art chronicles Pissarro's mild transformation from a Barbizon-style landscape painter to an impressionist. Most interesting to me was the evidence of what academic Pissarro has in common with avant-garde Pissarro: A compositional interest in strong and dramatic verticals, and the presence of industry in the French countryside. Of the 45 or so paintings in curator Katy Rothkopf's show, six of them include the smokestack of a major industrial plant along the Oise, at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone. Two of them are from what Rothkopf delineates as Pissarro's Barbizon period, four are from after.
Throughout this transitional decade Pissarro frequently painted along the Oise: See how the smokestack blends into some masts in this painting, or how it balances a single mast in this painting in Indianapolis. My favorite part of Baltimore's show was watching Pissarro find ways to integrate this smokestack into his gentle landscapes.
The painting above is 1867's Banks of the Oise at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone, from the Denver Art Museum's collection. Typical of the six landscapes here, Pissarro shows a smokestack (or two or three) as a small but key part of his compositions, certainly happily co-existing with rural life. (In the sixth and latest painting, a factory dominates the composition, but it's in concert with it too: Trees on the right-hand side of the painting seem to 'graduate' into smokestacks.)
Certainly Pissarro was in the impressionist vanguard when it came to showing how French country life and industry were peaceful co-existers. (Rothkopf describes Pissarro as "ambivalent" about industrial development, but compositionally he basked in it.) In Banks of the Oise we see a few churches, a rich, blue river, a comfortable riverside home, some thickly verdant trees, farm land, bucolicness itself. In the detail at right, you can see how Pissarro tried to emphasize the happy merger of progress and tradition by placing all of that (except the churches) in one tiny area, directly in the middle of the painting.
(Compositionally, the Denver painting is the best of the bunch. Those two strong vertical, the happy tree on the right and the happy smokestack in the middle, are especially strong. Pissarro was Barnett Newman's favorite artist, and he and his wife Annalee owned this painting. Easy to see why, eh?)
Later today: Pushing this idea 140 years forward, an artist spotlights industry in today's exurbia.
Posted April 2, 2007 8:22 AM
