Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science, and Anarchism in Fin-de-siecle France - Review

JOHN G HUTTON

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Pres 1994 276 pp; 67 b/w ills.

This is a tale of sum of two units superb dissertations - one upon Camille Pissarro in the 1880 and the other upon Neo-Impressionist science and politics - and their eventual publication. Martha Ward complet a lucid and closely argued dissertation entitled "Camille Pissarro in the 1880s" for Michael Fried at the John Hopkins University in 1983 She had already become known as a

scrupulously careful and brilliant researcher and had been asked to contribute the virtually definitive bibliography to the catalogue of the 1980-81 Pissarro retrospective for the Hayward Gallery in London, Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903 when she was still a graduate learner Since that time, she has published sum of two units important articles that have tantalized everyone closely involved with 19th-century studies as they awaited the published version of her dissertation.(1) It has - after more than a decade of work and rework - appeared in a abundant expanded version as a handsome monograph with a rather grander rifle, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde. With a gathering of six color-plates, extensive footnotes, and well-positioned black-and-white comparative plates, it is the greatest in quantity important scholarly book dealing with Camille Pissarro to be published since my hold dissertation-cum-book in 1990 and single of remarkably few critically sophisticated volumes about a major Impressionist artist to appear within this generation. As of that kind it deserves careful analysis.

John Hutton's dissertation of 1987 written beneath the direction of Hollis Clayson for Northwestern University, had a very strange rifle, "A Blow of the Pick: Science, Anarchism, and the Neo-Impressionist Movement" Evidently, Hutton was easier upon himself than Ward (or his readers were easier upon him), for his dissertation appeared in volume form with a new title on the other hand in substantially similar form somewhat more than seven years after it was accepted by dint of Northwestern University. Perhaps for that reason, his volume is relatively unified and easy to read, in spite of the fact that it is packed with respects and detailed bibliographical information. Its of recent origin title makes it clear that Hutton's volume falls comfortably within what might be called the "traditional" social history of art.

Each of the sum of two units books deals with the larger history of the Neo-Impressionist move in fundamentally new, but remarkably different ways, and, for that reason, I will consider them separately. Ward takes upon the movement through the len of its oldest and, in a certain quantity of senses, least studied participant, Camille Pissarro.(2) Interestingly, Ward's dissertation of 1983 is alone the third on Pissarro to have been written at an American university, after Richard Fargo Brown's Harvard dissertation of 1952 "The Colour Technique of Camille Pissarro," and my be in possession of for Yale of 1977, "Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape." Ward's inquiry attempted to make sense of the "bridge" decade in Pissarro's career, the 1880 During those years, Pissarro transformed himself from an active and experimental member of the loosely defined coalition of Impressionists to a doctrinaire member of the smaller - and plenteous better organized - movement that Felix Feneon called Neo-Impressionism. At the extreme point of the 1880s, Pissarro began a gradual retreat from Neo-Impressionist practice and looked to many (but not to the artist himself) to have reenter the Impressionist enclosure Whereas Brown had covered a great deal of of that territory in his dissertation of 1952 his affects were almost completely formal, and he had little access to the immense material part of Pissarro letters and other critical material that have draw near to light since that time. Ward, who is certainly the most bibliographically conscious of all Pissarro scholars, has made ample use of this material. For a searcher after masss of information mined in research, Ward's work is rich indeed.

Ward's volume begins as a careful assessment of the oeuvre of Pissarro in the 1880 within the adjoining matter of the criticism and documents of the period. As similar it is a thoroughly traditional work of "re"search in which the fresh scholar gathers and critically assesses a tremendous amount of written material directly and indirectly related to the works of art. Her research for the dissertation lay opened many previously unknown passages of Parisian criticism, each of which she carefully considered within the adjoining matter of the scanty Pissarro literature as well as the larger literature devot to the Neo-Impressionist move Many of these were listed for the first time in her critical bibliography for the 1980-81 exhibition catalogue Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903 Her reading of these critical essays and of the works of art they purport to explain be the effected in a clearly written and remarkably jargon-free dissertation that treats its control with gimlet-eyed detachment and honesty

The published form of Ward's body reflects more than a decade of continuous reading and thinking, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of it in connection with her teaching at the University of Chicago. This proces has included a far down felt inquiry into the general status of "the history of art," "the work of art," "the monograph," and perhaps plane "the museum" - all as they swell out of Ward's own relentles proces of self-questioning. The resulting body is dense, compact, sometimes overdone and occasionally difficult to read. For the vast majority of the body one feels in the vicinity of an author who, as a highly critical self-editor, will not allow a single phrase or judgment to remain without an act of improvement, clarification, or, greatest in quantity often, qualification. Unfortunately, the reader is completely aware of this condition, and, for that reason, the act of reading this mixed and, in some ways, important true copy is often rewarding but seldom pleasurable. Each judgment must be parsed and considered as "elemental" or essential to the argument, and the proceed is a sort of unromantic that sometimes verges on authorial self-flagellation.