Their mutual feeling

PAUL CEZANNE was clearly intrigued by his friend Camille Pissarro’s painting “Louveciennes.” He needed more time with it. So one day he borrowed it from Pissarro, took it home and began to study it. Then he copied it.

Exhibited together at the Museum of Modern Art, Pissarro’s “Louveciennes” of 1871 and Cezanne’s of 1872 are the most obvious example of a creative exchange between Cezanne and Pissarro that spanned more than two decades. Often working side by side in France’s Oise River Valley, each interpreting the view before him, the men shared techniques and ideas through their paintings, letters and, later, memories of each other’s work.

In “Pioneering Modern Painting: Cezanne and Pissarro 1865-1885,” on view at MoMA through Sept. 12, more than 90 artworks chronicle the artistic interplay between two seminal 19th century artists at a key time in their lives and in art history itself. Tracing their friendship from their initial meeting in 1861 at Paris’ Academie Suisse to 1885, when they stopped seeing each other, the exhibition spans the Impressionist era as well.

Although art historians had known of Pissarro’s tutelage of Cezanne, far less was known of the duration, extent and dual nature of their exchange. Organized by the artist’s great-grandson Joachim Pissarro, curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, “Cezanne and Pissarro” draws heavily on works from private collections, many shown publicly for the first time. The exhibition travels next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Oct. 20 and to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris in February.

Born in 1830 in the West Indies, Camille Pissarro was the son of a French Jewish father and Creole mother. Educated in France, he returned to St. Thomas, set off for Caracas to become an artist, and was in Paris by 1855. Nine years younger, Cezanne was from Provence, the son of a banker, and after two years studying law, he too was in Paris painting.

Both were outsiders, both strong individualists in disagreement with contemporary art theory and, says curator Pissarro: “Each of them liberated something in the other. Cezanne was disheveled and rebellious, a madman. Pissarro never strikes you as that, but obviously there was something in him that could be rekindled. Similarly, Pissarro anchored and gave a sense of gravity to Cezanne’s own artistic pursuit.

“I often say they were like chefs trying different recipes, throwing different spices together and trying them out to see what it tastes like. It was like yin and yang principles, as if they recognized in each other what the other didn’t have. Theirs was a true dialogue, a true exchange.”

The myth of the artist working alone is greatly exaggerated in every period, observes Ruth Weisberg, dean of Fine Arts at USC. “There were guilds in the pre-Renaissance, workshops in the Renaissance and, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the academies. Artists of the Barbizon School, the generation before theirs, knew each other and went to the same locale to paint.”

Art historians, curators and scholars have long “celebrated singularity over collaboration,” observes Debora Silverman, UCLA professor of history and art history and author of the prize-winning “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art.” “Most of these artist collaborations had been subordinated to way-station status in art history because we privilege so much the account of individual artists discovering and expressing their own singular style.”

Only in recent years have there been exhibitions on the larger issue of artist interactions and reciprocal influences, Silverman adds. “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” was at MoMA in fall 1989, “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001, and the blockbuster “Matisse Picasso” show began at London’s Tate Modern in 2002 before moving on to Paris and New York.

Now comes “Cezanne and Pissarro,” taking on the interchange of Impressionist Pissarro and post-Impressionist Cezanne. Cezanne at one point reportedly referred to Pissarro as “a father to me,” saying, “He was a man you could turn to for advice; he was something like God.” Pissarro, in turn, wrote to his son Lucien of the artistic “kinship” between his and Cezanne’s paintings, saying in part, “What do you expect! We were always together!”

Cezanne also referred to himself as Pissarro’s pupil, and the relationship does seem to have begun that way. Pissarro’s “Louveciennes” was for Cezanne what the curator calls a “template for technical experimentation.” But even in such a quasi-schoolroom exercise, strong differences between the artists are apparent.

The two paintings of the tranquil scene of mother and child walking a French country road by the village of Louveciennes are different in size, color, detail and texture. “Look at this silvery halo around the child, at the humanity and light,” says curator Pissarro, poised in front of his great-grandfather’s painting. Moving to the Cezanne, he talks of the less-defined clouds and human figures, saying, “Cezanne is more interested in structure. He can’t bother with details.”

For the curator, the pair of paintings are nothing less than “an apex in the history of Impressionism,” he writes in the exhibition catalog. “This is one of the most compelling examples of a close artistic interaction between two early modern artists and is unique in the history of Impressionism.”

In 1872, the same year he painted “Louveciennes,” Cezanne went off to join Pissarro in the town of Pontoise. The men scouted the countryside, says curator Pissarro, often walking as much as 15 to 20 miles a day as they tried to find the best spots to paint.

Vistas, common and unique

MoMA’s gallery walls are covered with landscapes the two discovered and painted. The show also includes illuminating portraits of the artists by themselves and each other as well as stunning still-lifes by both men, but it is the landscapes that make up the bulk of the exhibition. According to Joachim Pissarro, it is mainly through their landscapes that you can see their give and take.

Although many of their landscapes of similar subjects were painted at different times, other depictions of villages and country roads, forests and fields were painted at the same times. “Sometimes they were back to back, sometimes looking at the same motif from slightly different vantage points,” Pissarro says. “But their easels were not so close that Pissarro could see what Cezanne was doing. Cezanne hates being watched.”

Pissarro sees Cezanne’s need to work in privacy exemplified in their 1877 dual portraits of a house and garden in Pontoise. In Pissarro’s painting, “Kitchen Garden, Trees in Flower, Spring, Pontoise,” a large tree heavy with white flowers dominates the canvas. But that tree is gone in Cezanne’s image, “The Garden of Maubuisson, Pontoise.” Yes, says curator Pissarro, Cezanne may have edited nature, but that’s only part of the story. “The way I see it, Cezanne couldn’t stand having Pissarro watching him, so Cezanne goes closer, taking a different vantage point. The trees are less flowering, there are several of them, and the house on the hill is seen from a somewhat different angle.”

This is also an exhibition that celebrates memory. In 1881, they are still setting out together, but Cezanne is more interested in the early Pissarro. “Look at the date of each painting and the identity of the artist,” suggests Pissarro, gliding from painting to painting, calling out artist and year: “Cezanne, 1881; Pissarro, 1867; Pissarro, 1867; Cezanne, 1881; Pissarro, 1867; Cezanne, 1881.

“They are side by side from May to October that year, spending more time together than they ever will again, yet find a painting by Pissarro of 1881 that is relevant to what Cezanne is doing. You can’t. He reengages in what Pissarro was doing as a younger man.”

Cezanne’s preference for Pissarro’s earlier work probably contributed to their growing apart, curator Pissarro theorizes in the show’s catalog. Cezanne had also not been able to lure Pissarro to Provence, where he was working in the mid-1870s and, over time, they moved their separate ways.

But the curator seems convinced they had “at the very least, indirect knowledge of each other’s work” through friends and dealers.

He estimates that about 40% of the paintings in the exhibition have not been seen before publicly, emphasizing that none of the juxtapositions have. “You often have a painting by Cezanne or Pissarro that is well known and not the other,” Pissarro says. “Half of the story was missing. That’s what this show is about.”

Loans and logistics

TELLING that story took considerable effort, according to Pissarro and Patrice Marandel, LACMA chief curator of European painting and sculpture. The exhibition has been under discussion since about 1990, they say; only recently were organizers able to get enough loans and correspondence to make it feasible.

Because more of the artworks were in private collections than usual, a greater number had not been reproduced in publications or exhibited before and were, essentially, hidden away. Pissarro analogizes exhibition research to “living through a Sherlock Holmes story” and credits the intervention of MoMA Director Glenn Lowry, trustees and others with help getting him paintings.

Not all of those will wind up in Los Angeles, where the exhibition will be somewhat smaller, and negotiations were continuing earlier this month. “When you borrow works of that magnitude, collectors or museums sometimes only lend to one venue and not to others,” Marandel says. “This will not affect the core [of the show] or its significance.”

When a show moves, Marandel adds, changes also are dictated by the shape of the venue’s galleries. “It’s like a deck of cards,” he says. “You can reshuffle the cards and create all sorts of juxtapositions. The exhibition is not about Cezanne and Pissarro doing the same thing at the same time, but about their thinking about one another’s works throughout the years.”

Many elements remain the same, of course. Marandel will highlight the “Louveciennes” pairing at LACMA, for instance. He also plans to conclude the exhibition with paintings that include LACMA’s monumental Cezanne, “Forest” (“Sous-Bois”), the 1894 masterpiece that concludes the MoMA show.

“This exhibition is really lovely to look at, but it is quite demanding on the eye,” Marandel says. “We know from experience that visitors spend very little time in front of each picture. That’s modern culture -- we see, we absorb, we move on. For me, the hope is that this exhibition will really make people look at works of art.”

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‘Pioneering Modern Painting: Cezanne and Pissarro 1865--1885’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Oct. 20 through Jan. 16; noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays; closed Wednesdays

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000, or www.lacma.org

Also

Where: Exhibition continues at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through Sept. 12; www.moma.org