Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists

Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country Details

About the Author Karen Levitov is associate curator at The Jewish Museum and a contributor to Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (Yale). Richard Shiff holds the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at The University of Texas at Austin. His publications include Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (Yale). Read more

Reviews

This is a beautifully designed and printed little book (86 pp.) published as the catalogue to accompany the 2007-08 exhibition of the same name at The Jewish Museum in New York. According to Karen Levitov, the editor, who is associate curator at the Museum, the New York area is particularly rich in private collections of Pissarro, and most of the forty-nine well done illustrations are from such collections, many of them seldom seen. Two short essays introduce the plates. Levitov's "Paths to Pissarro" organizes a brief overview of Pissarro's life and works around the artist's "characteristic motif" of the path (10): she uses the metaphor to follow the twists and turns of Pissarro's career on his own path to artistic individualism. The distinguished art historian Richard Shiff writes "Pissarro's Dirty Painting," an equally meandering essay differentiating Pissarro from Millet and Monet, apparently coming finally to deal with the way the artist's technique is both "pure" and "dirty," i.e., how he allows patches of pure painting to show on the surface like dirt on a camera lens. Neither of these essays is particularly valuable, but the book is nevertheless worthwhile because of its illustrations and unusual reproductions.

Share this post