Sunday, June 4, 2017

Rural Working Women in Pissarro

Camille Pissarro
Two Young Peasant Women 
1891-92
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Camille Pissarro's Two Young Peasant Women was first shown to the public in late January 1892.  It was part of a wide-ranging exhibition of Pissarro's past and recent work  the kind we would now call a retrospective  put on at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, in a fashionable shopping street just off the boulevard des Italiens.  The catalogue for the show invited the visitor to look at Pissarro's paintings chronologically, or with a sense of how paintings done in the previous few months matched up to those from ten or twenty years earlier.  There were fifty oil paintings and a score of gouaches: eleven oils from the 1870s, and a hard core of twenty or so landscapes and peasant figures from the great years 1881 and 1883.  The year of each cluster of pictures was set off in the catalogue in bold capitals."

"All of this had something of a new-fangled flavor in 1892.  One or two critics of the exhibition managed the word "retrospective," but never as a noun.  Pissarro himself, writing to Monet a fortnight before the opening, opted for the slightly bemused, or maybe even apologetic, formula, "a more or less general exhibition of my works."  Thinking of pictures as primarily episodes in an individual's career  as opposed to, say, contributions to a public dialogue in the Salon, or responses to moments like Vendémiaire Year 2  was to become natural to modernism in the years that followed.  The retrospective is one of modernism's main language-games.  It teaches artists to view their work, proleptically, as part of a singular, continuous past; and therefore to produce work to fill the bill.  I am not saying that these habits of mind were non-existent in 1892  if only the history of bourgeois individualism were divisible into such neat "befores" and "afters"!  but it does matter, to modernism and to Pissarro, that they were still a bit foreign and fragile." 

Camille Pissarro
Conversation
ca. 1881
oil on canvas
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

Camille Pissarro
Peasant Women Minding Cows
1882
canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

"So peasant life was a screen, then, on which modernism projected its technical and expressive wishes?  Well, yes.  But this does not mean the screen was empty, or the projections made out of nothing.  There was a form of life still actually existing in the nineteenth century (I know the word "peasant" sums it up too neatly) that stood in the way of modernity, and resisted the disenchantment of the world.  Modernist values partly depended on an image of that life and its characteristic qualities.  No doubt in the imagining process the qualities were idealized, or prettified, or sentimentalized.  But those words are not final pejoratives.  They may only describe the agony  the inevitable ruthlessness  involved in keeping a dream of humanity alive." 

Camille Pissarro
Apple Picking, or, The Apple Eaters
1886
oil on canvas
Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan

Camille Pissarro
Washerwoman (Study)
1880
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Camille Pissarro
Poultry Market at Gisors
1885
tempera and pastel on paper, mounted on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Camille Pissarro
The Harvest
1882
oil on canvas
Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo

Camille Pissarro
La Récolte des Foins, Éragny
1887
canvas
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

"Maybe the problem is not prettiness in itself.  Prettiness has to be admitted.  Not to do so is not to admit the grounds  or one of the grounds  of one's interest in the subject of peasant women.  (In the letter where Pissarro says his peasant women in general are too pretty, the whole thought is that they regularly start off that way, and only become beautiful  that is, part of the picture's beauty  through repeated work.)  The downtrodden field-women of Millet, or the Joan-of-Arcs-in-the-making of Jules Breton, are far deadlier fictions of labor and the female body than the one Two Young Peasant Women tries to resuscitate. Anti-pastoral was by Pissarro's time (and long, long before) as much of a cliché as pastoral, and more smug in its Realist certainties."

Camille Pissarro
Two Peasant Women in a Meadow
1893
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Camille Pissarro
Le Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise - La Mère Bellette 
1882
canvas
private collection

Camille Pissarro
Washerwoman at Éragny
1893
canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Camille Pissarro
Hay Harvest at Éragny
1901
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Camille Pissarro
Haymakers Resting
1891
oil on canvas
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Camille Pissarro
Woman with Green Scarf
1893
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

"Two Young Peasant Women, in the event, was held back by Pissarro from the market.  His retrospective was a success, and attracted buyers; but he had his latest pictures returned to Éragny, worked on some of them again, and gave Two Young Peasant Women to his wife, Julie  something he had done throughout his career with pictures he especially prized.  Julie herself (to be crudely biographical for a moment) came from peasant stock.  Her family owned two small vineyards east of Dijon.  She had been a kitchen maid in the Pissarro household, twenty-one years old, fresh from the country, when Pissarro had fallen in love with her, and got her pregnant, thirty years before."

 quoted passages are from the Pissarro chapter in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism by T.J. Clark (Yale University Press, 1999)