"Humble & Colossal"

In commenting upon the exhibition on display last week at Paris' Durand-Ruel Gallery, Critic Pierre Cabanne of the weekly Arts neatly summed up the fate of Impressionist Camille Pissarro. He is largely ignored, said Cabanne, "for not having the ardour of Cezanne, the sensuality of Renoir, the brilliance of Sisley, the visual sharpness of Degas, the fullness of Monet's conception." At first glance, Pissarro's work does seem to lack the dazzle of his colleagues', but after longer study, the full truth emerges. Far from lacking the virtues of the others, he had them all under firm and quiet control. Indeed, he was a source of many of them.

Praise for a Primitive. In the 59 years since his death, Pissarro has been given few good shows, and when Pissarro is not seen at his best he is best not seen at all. But the current show, put on by the same gallery that championed the impressionists during their years of public scorn, was chosen from private collections with both taste and sensitivity. Even so, it has not been much of a success; critical comment has been scanty, public attendance indifferent. As Cezanne once noted, Pissarro's was a humble art--and people tend to leave the verdict at that. They do not complete Cezanne's famous phrase: ''The humble and colossal Pissarro.''

He was at one time the dean of the impressionists, and he was always the most beloved--a patient, gentle man with a long flowing beard and a heart as large as a landscape. He was a teacher with so great a gift that Mary Cassatt once said, "He could have taught stones to draw correctly." Though he did not convert the young Paul Cezanne to impressionism, he was responsible for the perception with which Cezanne observed nature, and for his devotion to inner construction. When a pompous friend, expecting him to laugh, took him to an exhibition of Henri Rousseau, Pissarro astonished the gallery by praising the primitive warmly. It was Pissarro who aided Gauguin after he gave up the Bourse for a fulltime career in art, and it was Pissarro who taught the young Van Gogh to open his canvases to the sun.

Error of Imitation. The Durand-Ruel exhibition shows him once again embodying all the currents of the great stream of impressionism. In his early paintings of peasants, there are the same firm, sharply outlined bodies that, in greatly developed form, became the hallmark of Renoir. In the solid structure of the landscape, there are the origins of Cezanne, and some paintings have Monet's ability to dissolve substance into light.

His peaceful landscapes and bustling city streets never scream for attention or proclaim their mastery. But the mastery is there all the same. In his last year, when he could not easily get about, Pissarro painted what he could see from his apartment windows--the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Carrousel. In one of these, he captured perfectly the golden summer light of Paris. But he did it, as usual, in a humble and muted manner forcing the viewer to take a long and tender look.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.