Search - The Impressionists: Pissarro on DVD

A politicized impressionist

Jeffery Mingo | Homewood, IL USA | 10/14/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This details a somewhat contradictory happening. On the one hand, Pissarro was the only painter to contribute to all 8 or so Impressionist Salons. On the other hand, the work says he abandoned and re-embraced Impressionism at various times.

Like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Oscar Wilde, Pissarro was a political and left-wing artist. The work says he identified as an anarchist, but it also seems to say we'd call those people socialists nowadays. He painted working-class people and thus can be said to be an anti-classist artist.

The work says Pissarro had a Jewish father and later identified as an atheist. However, I heard that Pissarro faced much anti-Semitism in his life. This was especially so during the Dreyfus Affair and even Degas was prejudiced against him. I am not sure why the documentary skipped over this terrible bigotry thrust against him.

The work mentioned that Pissarro took younger artists under his wing. A documentary on Gauguin said much about Pissarro, but this work said little about Gauguin. The work says that Pisarro followed Seurat's pointilism. (I hated the way the narrator would mispronounce Seurat's name as if the "a" in this name sounded like the one in "hat" or "map," rather than having an "ah" sound.) This is one of the rare examples of a famous person following a younger person's lead."