ART REVIEW : Pissarro Paints the Town

When Napoleon III employed the engineer Baron Haussmann to redesign and rebuild the city of Paris, in the second half of the 19th Century, he created a new kind of urban environment that would soon be imitated from Budapest to Mexico City.

Inadvertently, he also set the scene for the emergence of a new kind of painting. For, without the transformation of Paris from a medieval walled enclave into a grandly theatrical stage for the prosaic enactment of bourgeois pleasures, Impressionism would be unthinkable.

“The Impressionist and the City: Camille Pissarro’s Serial Paintings” is a smart, rigorously assembled and often lovely exhibition that hones in on precisely this intricate and far-reaching relationship, as epitomized in the often brilliant late paintings of the West Indian-born artist. Organized by Richard Bretell, former director of the Dallas Museum of Art, and Joachim Pissarro, great grandson of the artist, it examines its subject in 70 paintings brought together on the anniversary of the centennial of Pissarro’s commencement of his city-works.

Eleven groups of paintings executed during the last decade of his life are surveyed by the show, which remains at the Dallas Museum through Sunday. It then travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (March 7-June 6) and London’s Royal Academy of Arts (July 2-October 10).

Pissarro was not alone in choosing the city as a prominent subject for his art. Monet, Renoir, Gustave Caillebotte and others made significant works that focused on the urban milieu. Nonetheless, he emerges in this eloquent presentation as a distinct personality whose particular understanding of the profound alterations of modern life are evoked in the form of complex urban landscapes.

It’s true that surgery for a chronic eye-infection had something to do with his sticking close to the city, having forsaken the langourous French countryside that had been so important to the development of Impressionist painting of the past 20 years. Pissarro was nearly 63 when he launched his urban campaign--but, medical infirmities don’t explain the extraordinary level of achievement in so many of his paintings of Parisian streets.

In all, Pissarro painted more than 300 pictures in 11 different series executed in four separate cities. Twice he painted in Rouen, twice in the small city of Dieppe, and once in the seaside port of Le Havre. All these locales are represented in the show, but it was Paris that was the principal focus of his energies between the initial, tentative pictures of 1892 and his death in 1903.

He took a cue from Monet--specifically, from Monet’s contemporaneous pictures of the facade of Rouen Cathedral, as depicted in all sorts of weather and at different times of day. Pissarro had been greatly moved by a show of the cathedrals, and although he had painted pictures of Parisian neighborhoods before 1892, he began to conceive of his new work in a consciously serial manner.

Pissarro executed 14 views of the Boulevard Montmartre, 15 of the Avenue de l’Opera, 28 of the Tuileries Gardens, and more. Oddly, until now only the Opera paintings have ever been shown together.

The most visually exciting is the first that focused on Parisian streets: the Boulevard Montmartre series, which Pissarro painted from the window of his room at the Grand Hotel de Russie. Ten of the 14 paintings in the series have been reunited for the show, and they include the only known nocturne by an Impressionist painter.

For Pissarro, the newness of his project may have contributed to the dazzling excitement with which these pictures are endowed. Whatever the case, they are decidedly systematic in composition, all painted from the same, high vantage-point in the artist’s hotel room. The street recedes on a sharp diagonal to the left, creating a dramatic perspective that opens like a fan across the surface of the painting. Populated with lively pedestrians, carriages and horses, the broad avenue is rhythmically lined with trees, lamp posts and buildings.

In two canvases, wild throngs pack the boulevard in a Shrove Tuesday celebration, as streamers flutter in the air. Always the disorganized tumult of an ordinary day in a bustling metropolis is held in vigorous tension with the precise, compositional orderliness of the painting.

The spectator’s vantage point on this scene is critical. Pissarro didn’t frame the view with glimpses of the hotel window through which he was looking, in order to create an interplay between indoors and outdoors, as artists like Bonnard and Matisse so often did. In no way are you grounded as you look out over the urban scene. Instead, you have the feeling of airy, buoyant lift.

Hanging on the wall, these pictures almost always line up their horizons at the spectator’s eye-level. Yet, the vista is clearly an aerial view. It’s as if the spectator’s eye, like the artist’s, has been loosened from its moorings, and is now free-floating and omnipotent, gathering in all that it can see. Godlike, each viewer is endowed with an expansive sense of his own powerfully individual freedom.

The other great series in the exhibition records the comings and goings at the Place du Theatre Francais, where the Rue Saint-Honore meets the Avenue de l’Opera. Painted a year after the Montmartre series, the half-dozen pictures in the show make literal the designation of this urban intersection as a place of “French theater.”

In many of these paintings, the vanishing point of the street is blocked by a grandiose edifice: Charles Garnier’s extravagant 1861 opera house, which had been planned as the focus of the new Paris. As an arena for the display of wealth and luxury, the ornate, neo-Baroque building stands as pompous backdrop to the mundane activities of the broad avenue, which dominates Pissarro’s paintings. For him, the street, not the ostentatious opera, is the site of the city’s true dramaturgic spectacle.

Interestingly, the most dramatic of this series is a painting that altogether omits the opera house from view. In “Place du Theatre Francais,” Pissarro shifts his vantage point. Again working from the window of a hotel room, he looks down on the complicated intersection and its roundabout, where masses of converging carriages and pedestrians are intertwined in an energetic serpentine. The horizon is gone. The ground plane tilts vertiginously, like an upended table, the people and carriages precariously poised to slip off the edge.

Transportation buffs might note a wicked irony: This vibrant picture of congested urban traffic--perhaps the first of its subject ever painted--is now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Still, the power of the image comes from its counterpoint of chaos and organic order, in a ringing valedictory to the people: Scores of human types covering a broad spectrum of classes can be made out among the multitude.

Pissarro was painting near the end of the transformation of the French capital--as well as at the approaching end of his own life. His art makes profoundly clear where his sympathies lie. A committed anarchist, the painter was deeply troubled by capitalist government’s inevitable intrusions on individual liberty.

The sweeping reconstruction of Paris, which erased whole neighborhoods in the process of centralizing French authority in a modern imperial city, was a powerful symbol of that threat. Pissarro’s urban landscapes represent the predicament.

As the exhibition organizers point out, it’s probably not accidental that the Opera series coincides with the notorious Dreyfus Affair, in which the abusive, authoritarian power of the state was brought to bear on a single soldier, who had been convicted of treason and sentenced to prison based on fabricated evidence. Pissarro’s paintings don’t describe topical events of the scandal, which shook the foundations of French society in 1898. Still, the political allegiance displayed in these paintings is frank, an allegiance made effective through extraordinary pictorial skill.

Perhaps more deeply than any other Impressionist painter, whose business it was to examine the wonders of perceptual flux, Pissarro understood an essential feature of the new city, and how it could be melded with the purposes of painting. For, fundamental to the transformation of Paris was a conception of the city as picturesque. The Eiffel Tower, the broad avenues, the quais and promenades along the Seine were constructed, at least in part, to provide vantage points from which incomparable vistas of the city could be visually taken in by strolling citizens and tourists.

Paris, in other words, had been remade into a city to be seen . That may explain why the Louvre Museum is a constant presence in Pissarro’s final serial works, which depict various aspects of the French capital. At the end of his life, the artist repeatedly chose to paint a former royal palace, which housed an extraordinary compendium of pictorial images that had been liberated for the pleasure of the people.

Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood, Dallas, Tex., (214) 922-1200; through Sunday.