The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute To Show "Pissarro's People"

Written by Nils Korerikkeigen Thursday, 21 April 2011 00:12

Williamstown, MA.- A new exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, "Pissarro’s People" offers a fresh look at the Impressionist painter by examining his portraits, harvest scenes, and market views through the lens of his personal relationships, profound social and economic concerns, and anarchist beliefs. Based on new scholarship by curator and leading Pissarro scholar Richard R. Brettell, this visually stunning exhibition brings together some of the artist’s most iconic figural works with lesser-known pictures from private and public collections from around the world. The exhibition will challenge our understanding of the father of Impressionism by focusing on Camille Pissarro's engagement with the human figure in a highly personal and poignant exploration of his humanism.

"Pissarro's People" will be on view at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, from June 12 to October 2, 2011. “Pissarro’s People" continues the Clark’s series of scholarly exhibitions that rely on rigorous new research to expand our current appreciation of well-known artists,” stated Michael Conforti, director of the Clark. “With this exhibition, we welcome one of the outstanding scholars of our time, Richard Brettell, who so dramatically advanced our understanding of nineteenth-century painting with his 2001 exhibition Impression: 'Painting Quickly in France, 1860–1890'.”

While Pissarro is best known for his quietly modulated landscapes and cityscapes, Pissarro’s People will be the first exhibition to concentrate on the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the human figure. Based on extensive new scholarship, the exhibition presents approximately 50 oil paintings and three dozen works on paper. These works explore the three dimensions of Pissarro’s life that are essential to an understanding of his pictorial humanism: his family ties, his friendships, and his intense intellectual involvement with the social and political theories of his time.

According to curator Richard R. Brettell, “Scholars have tended to treat Pissarro’s ‘politics’ and his ‘art’ in two separate categories, often refusing to see the most basic connections between them. This is largely because Camille Pissarro was less a political activist than a social and economic philosopher. The title of the exhibition, Pissarro’s People, is not merely an allusion to his politics, but points to a larger attempt to explore all aspects of his humanism. The exhibition embodies his pictorial humanism and creates a series of contexts, linking his web of family and friends to his profound social and economic concerns.”

Camille Pissarro’s People is the first exhibition to bring together portraits of every member of Pissarro’s immediate family, reflecting his abiding allegiance to his wife and children. The exhibition will also include paintings that reveal Pissarro’s numerous friendships with artists, business colleagues, neighbors, agriculturalists, rural workers, and his extended network of acquaintances. Pissarro’s People will also connect the artist’s biography with his intimate views of domestic labor, through paintings such as Jeanne Pissarro, Called Minette, Holding a Fan (c. 1874, Ashmolean Museum), The Maidservant (1875, Chrysler Museum of Art), Young Peasant Woman Drinking Her Café au Lait (1881, Art Institute of Chicago), and The Little Country Maid (1882, Tate Collection). In this exhibition, the theme of domestic labor will be linked, in turn, to Pissarro’s views on agricultural labor and the market economy in works such as The Harvest (1882, National Museum of Western Art Tokyo), The Gisors Market (1887, Columbus Museum of Art), and his remarkable, biting series of 28 anarchist drawings titled Turpitudes Sociales (1889-90, private collection).

Presiding over the powerful themes of this exhibition will be the artist’s view of himself as a political and ethnic outsider in his adopted country, France, which he brought to bear in his great Self-Portrait (1873) from the Musée d’Orsay.

The Clark is one of the few major art museums that also serves as a leading international center for research and scholarship. The Clark presents public and education programs and organizes groundbreaking exhibitions that advance new scholarship, and its research and academic programs include an international fellowship program and conferences. Its 140-acre campus in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts includes Stone Hill Center, designed by Tadao Ando and opened in 2008, which houses galleries, meeting and classroom facilities, and the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. The Clark, together with Williams College, sponsors one of the nation’s leading master’s programs in art history. The Clark is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Visit the museum's website at ... www.clarkart.edu

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