A World of His Own Making

In “Pissarro’s People,” the Clark Art Institute has an exemplary summer show, the first exhibition of the artists’ figurative paintings and drawings. Although we do not see the dewy landscapes and authoritative cityscapes upon which his reputation rests, we do see what mattered most to Pissarro: the prospect of a radical, utopian world of collective work and happiness, and — above all — his family and seven children. Camille Pissarro was born on the Danish island of St. Thomas to a Jewish-French father and Creole mother. He moved to France hungry for intellectual stimulation and open to artistic influences. Generous, kind, humanistic, he became a father figure to artists such as Cezanne, Renoir, even van Gogh and Gauguin. And if his pictures never achieved the evanescent, shimmering quality of these greater painters — a sense of life lived before your eyes — they did convey the permanence of a moment. Unconventional in much of his private life, Pissarro married his mother’s maid. The portraits of his children and wife are expressions of tenderness and caring. There is the famous picture of son Felix in a red beret that accentuates his rosy, plump cheeks. A pink scarf is bow-tied around his neck, giving him a debonaire, child-of-the-world look. His brown hair curls down to his shoulders; his eyes are the brightest blue. Pissarro painted Felix again as a pensive young man reading, but the dreamy quality of the earlier work is missing. Felix is no longer adorable, but stolid and resigned. (He would die four years later.) Pissarro’s favorite child was Jeanne-Rachel, nicknamed Minette. He painted her in a series of blue dresses in the garden, in an obviously cold interior, seated with a fan. Most poignantly, his last picture shows the 17-year-old on what would be her deathbed after a long illness. It is a wrenching, tortured picture of loss. There are also lovely pictures of his wife, Julie: comfortable, calm, reassuringly maternal and domestic. Three self-portraits show the artist in assured middle age and as an old man, the last, painted only months before his death, a study in calmness and acceptance. Growing up on St. Thomas, Pissarro experienced discrimination and witnessed slavery. As a part-Creole, he was forced to go to an Afro-Caribbean school, while his father’s merchant business depended upon the labor of slaves. Later he became an implacable foe of prejudice and intolerance — he was a determined supporter of Dreyfus in the great French anti-Semitic scandal — and an avowed anarchist. Pissarro’s anarchism did not envision a new order bought with bombs and violence. Rather, he believed that government and authority would dissolve under the weight of their own venality, oppressiveness and corruption. Citizens would then live in self-sustaining collectives, trading and bartering food and goods. He believed in the dignity of work and its ability to give life stability and happiness. The artist’s beliefs are clear in pictures of maids and servants calmly, even serenely, washing dishes, sweeping, laundering. These are women in blooming good health, not the tired figures in Degas’ pictures of exhausted laundresses — which were among highlights of last summer’s blockbuster show, “Picasso Looks at Degas,” at the Clark — or even of Manet’s listless working girls. It’s as if Pissarro simply ignored social tensions and instead painted the utopian world he believed would come. Certainly, two beautiful works — “Peasant Women Weeding” and “Peasants Resting” — are the antithesis of Millet’s images of weary workers. The women at work in the fields are bent but unburdened, calm rather than exhausted. And the women resting are placed in a bucolic, sun-dappled setting of surpassing beauty in a series of market paintings — mostly gouaches and watercolors to make them more affordable to bourgeoise buyers. Pissarro crowds his picture planes with crowds of women happily trading produce and wares. Also on view is the artist’s stunning pointillist picture, Pissarro was nothing if not adaptable to new influences in his long career, “Apple-Picking,” a large picture that rises almost to greatness. The most graphic depictions of Pissarro’s views on the evils of capitalism and its corrosive influencecome in a suite of drawings titled “Les Turpitudes Sociales,” 28 urban scenes intended as political education for his nieces. Here are depictions of suicide, starvation, violence, drunkenness rendered in graphic political caricatures. Drawing was one of the artist’s greatest strengths, and these works are sensational. Amazingly they have never before been shown in a significant Pissarro exhibition. “Pissarro’s People” runs through Oct. 2 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA; For information, go to www.clarkart.edu for information.