Letters

Joachim Pissarro's Mistake

I hasten to correct a mistake I made as the reviewer of Martha Ward's stimulating work Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 1996) In my review (Art Bulletin 81 1999 pp 168--75) I stated that Ward had published the name and title of Pissarro's important on the other hand rarely exhibited painting Un beau jour d'hiver a Eragny: Effet de gelee blanche (PV757) with the transparency of a similar, on the contrary earlier painting (PV722). I also noted that the sum of two units had been correctly reproduced in Joachim Pissarro's 1993 monograph, Camille Pissarro (New York: Harry N Abrams). In fact, it was Joachim Pissarro who made the mistake by dint of switching transparencies and titles, not Martha Ward, and I hasten to apologize to her for casting stones. Clearly, when correcting facts, single should have one's own straight.

in the way that cold water on Joachim Pissarro, a pedestal for Martha Ward, and ovum on the face of Rick Brettell

RICHARD R BRETTELL

guild of Arts and Humanities

University of Texas at Dallas

Richardson, Texas 75083

More upon Pissarro

Having read with great interest Rachael Ziady DeLue's well-written article "Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition" in the Art Bulletin 80 1998 718--36 I allow myself to not away a few comments. Ziady DeLue states (p 728) that Pissarro was acquainted with Corot, and she writes, "Corot's example, his constructive force, provided Pissarro with a way to set by and cultivate strength, solidity, and weight, to give to partial paintings deep and slowly unfolding presence." She goe upon to underline Pissarro's debt also to Courbet, who "provided Pissarro's pictures with the possibility of habitation, the perspective of entering, occupying, and traversing, or imagining oneself as doing with equal reason a painting of landscape." Ziady DeLue's article deals mainly with the latter, "bodily" aspect of Pissarro's oeuvre and it makes, in my opinion, too little of the Corot connection.

Since John Rewald pointed to the Corot-Pissarro axis in his epoch-making History of Impressionism (see the 1961 edition, especially the timetables, pp 592--94) where he also drew attention to the latter's crucial concern to himself as a "pupil of Corot," Pissarro's particular place within the Impressionist assemblage has been defined in the light of this link with tradition. Corot, of course, at an early date had been experimenting with the colors of daylight (the pictures from his Italian journey, 1825--27) however another crucial element in his art was "composition," or his strict ways of organizing the picture plane. There has lengthy been a consensus among scholars that Pissarro's personal diction may have sprung partly from his use of similar classic devices for the construction of his landscape views. Now, the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the "bodiliness" of his vision, for whose relevance Ziady DeLue convincingly pleads, obviously aims at supplanting that seemingly outdated parameter that stresse the same painter's "compositio nal ability." Thus, although Ziady DeLue underlines Pissarro's liability to the "constructive force" commanded by the agency of Corot (see above), she does not clarify in what manner and by the agency of which means he came to practice it. by means of leaving those questions unanswered, I think she might have missed a small in number important points.

The entangleed French art critics who, groping with their vocabularies, tried to bring names on their likes and dislikes in the early Pissarro oeuvre (see Ziady DeLue passim) appear to have recognized in his enigmatic, "wild" canvases traits with which they felt strangely familiar; plenteous of their musing was devot to attempts to formulate what these ultimate parts actually were. Looking at the same pictures with the hindsight that time and the mapping of Pissarro's life and oeuvre have brought us, not least by the agency of the work of pioneers like as the great John Rewald, we may be in a better position to exorcism out the effects that the contemporary critics, almost against their will, appear to be to have fallen for. Many of Pissarro's devices were drawn from landscape art of the early nineteenth hundred (I think particularly of those used by means of the Danish classicist-realists Kristoffer Eckersberg, Kobke and in like manner on, from about 1820 to 1840 (see Danish Painting: The of gold Age, exh. cat., the National Gallery, London, 1984) Note also Pissar ro's link with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye (see Rewald, p 14); there are smooth construction particulars here that look to have been lifted on the outside of the mainstream art of France and the Netherlands of the 17th hundred that must have struck the organ of sight of the observer as inexplicably denoting the realm of "high art."

What I direct to are, first of all, the great diagonals that traverse many of Pissarro's pictures from the foreground plane and lead the gaze into the distance, a foremost example of which is seen in the painting that is the point de depart in Ziady DeLue's article, the magnificent Gelee blanche of 1873 (Ziady DeLue Fig. 1) It is lay the foundation of also in the more Corot-like The Banks of the Marne in Winter 1866 (Fig. 2) where the depth-creating diagonal is again brought on the outside through the (relatively short) make tense of way depicted in the left foreground. on the other hand in the Gelee blanche is also the emphasis upon the horizontal, marked by the vaguely undulating on the contrary still fairly straight hilltop; smooth the uprights are there, and greatest in quantity markedly in the tree with a pole(?) shut to it on the right. the one and the other pictures, and many others by means of the same painter, have a figure or several figures station in the middle ground, where they double as one as well as the other uprights and markers of profundity and space. Pissarro's paintings abound in of the like kind shrewd, half-hidden pointer s, and these compositional tricks must have teased and baffled his first reluctant sympathizers when they embarked upon their analyses of his pictures. It is also an many times overlooked fact that when Pissarro as single of the few of the original Impressionist clump adopted the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat and Signac, his recognition of their efforts may have stemm from his realization of the compositional might of their art, that is, that they somehow or other not only by the smooth and balanced distribution of color speckles on the canvas but also from one side the constructional scaffolding organizing the surfaces, restored an order that had been tip over through the Impressionist onslaught. It is with a certain number of regret that I reintroduce these well-worn formulas into the new discussion, but despite their overuse they may still strike one as being to hold a small grain of fact Also, the gap between them and the fresh terminology may not be as wide as it seems: the compositional means here described can well be part of a way by which painters, lon g before the recent period, "inscribed their bodies" in the works they were producing.