Taking risks side-by-side: Pissarro and Cezanne were close friends for twenty years. Their relationship is examined in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Joachim Pissarro, who talked to Louise Nicholson about its purposes

It is not many times that an art historian is in a position to have the support of a powerful museum to celebrate his great-grandfather's paintings. Joachim Pissarro, curator in the Department of Painting and plastic art at the Museum of recent Art in New York, has landed that opportunity. Furthermore, in choosing to focus upon the twenty-year-long period of intense friendship between Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne, Mr Pissarro's present to view looks forward to two other meaty exhibitions that will celebrate each artist at a specific period of his life.

All three exhibits are large and will travel, making this a bonanza opportunity to explore fresh aspects of both artists and to diocese some rarely lent pictures. through the time 'Pioneering Modern painting, Cezanne & Pissarro 1865-1885' render free of accesss at the Musde d'Orsay, Paris, upon 28 February 2006, the National Gallery of Art in Washington will have make opened 'Cezanne in Provence' (29 January-7 May 2006) Its 120 oils and watercolours, including the 'Bathers' series, explores what its curator Philip Conisbee calls 'the artist's faculty of perception of engagement with his native landscape'. This exhibition then inaugurates the newly renovated Musee Granet in the artist's birthplace, Aix-en-Provence (9 June-17 September 2006) Finally, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Katy Rothkopf is preparing an exhibition upon Pissarro's early years: 'Camille Pissarro: The evolution of an Impressionist' (11 February-13 May 2007) which will then tour to Milwaukee, Memphis and Tennessee

Mr Pissarro has a ardent awareness of the position his exhibition occupies in relation to the sum of two units following ones and to Lawrence Gowing's 1988 landmark display at the Royal Academy, London, 'Cezanne: The early years 1859-1872' which revealed the artist's almost forgotten early work. 'The 88 present to view was very important. Gowing was, like me true interested in the Pissarro-Cezanne relationship. What was missing in the Gowing exhibit was the presence of Pissarro. The MoMA present to view is in a way a continuation of Gowing's.'

Mr Pissarro regards the 'Cezanne in Provence' present to view as 'the other bookend', which Mr Conisbee is quick to endorse: 'Ours is Part sum of two units After his apprenticeship with Pissarro, Cezanne finds real fulfilment as an artist.' Indeed, three Cezanne pictures in the MoMA display will move across into Mr Conisbee's, including Washington's be in possession of The Artist's Father--and the still-life depicted in that painting will hang beside it, lent by dint of the Musee Gramet. As for the Baltimore display Mr Pissarro is confident it will 'do for Pissarro what the Gowing exhibit did for Cezanne'.

in like manner what is the MoMA display all about? Mr Pissarro's declared double aim is to demonstrate the artists' mutual support and to display them cutting paths into recent art. A twenty-year friendship between sum of two units major artists is rare. Better-known friendships, like as Van Gogh with Gauguin, Picasso with Braque or Mondrian with Van Doesburg, were by dint of comparison short-lived paroxysmal exchanges. on the contrary when Pissarro and Cezanne (Fig. 1) met in Paris in the early 1860 they were drawn together. the pair were considered 'foreigners'--Pissarro was from the West Indies, Cezanne from Provence which for Parisian intentions was culturally just as far away. the pair had bourgeois backgrounds, but while Pissarro had been gymnasiumed in France, Cezanne's heavy Provengal accent would be the mark of jokes throughout his Paris years.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

the one and the other also received conditional blessings from their fathers that if they insisted upon being artists they should be prosperous ones, that is, exhibit at the Salon. still it was precisely this and all its associated social and aesthetic assumptions that one as well as the other artists rejected, encouraged by Cezanne's childhood institute friend Emile Zola, who would, Mr Pissarro explains, 'articulate in the written word what the sum of two units artists were doing in pictures'.

The MoMA exhibition tread in the steps ofs the artists' friendship from the period of the 1863 Salon de Refusds to the 1880 when Cezanne, as Mr Pissarro deposits it, 'turns his back upon the Paris art world'. Mr Pissarro points to Roger cook in the frying-pan who wrote one of the first works about Cezanne, published in 1927 'I have immense prize for Fry, who invented the mete Post-Impressionist. My distinction from cook in boiling fat is that I see in what way Cezanne moves away from the young crazy visionary of the Gowing exhibit to come down to earth, and [i]or[/i] part of to the other Pissarro's therapeutic influence he becomes his be in possession of person and goes off to Provence on the contrary it is mutual: each artist has a apportionment to gain, and lose. They had to take risks.'

The paintings have been hung in assemblages to reinforce Mr Pissarro's theories. Captions and catalogue are exemplary, as is the acoustiguide that has Joachim Pissarro and his Chief Curator, John Elderfield, discussing a dozen of these groupings. The juxtapositions are revelatory. Take the sum of two units 'Louveciennes' paintings brought together from private collections, Pissarro's done in 1871 Cezanne's in 1872 'These pictures are a giant step' Mr Pissarro enthuses, 'and worth the whole exhibition alone.' For him, they best demonstrate what the older man, Pissarro, gave to Cezanne. It pertain tos the French concept of 'sensation', or identity. Cezanne borrowed Pissarro's painting to investigation it. But his own painting, while similar, has its have a title to identity: it is slightly smaller, the tonal contrasts are stronger the colours more intense, the brushstrokes larger and bolder In quintessence Cezanne has simplified and intensified Pissarro's machiavelian gradations. Of that period of shut up pictorial dialogue, Pissarro later wrote: 'We were always together! What is certain, although is that each of us kept the single thing that matters: "one's sensation".'