Radical Creativity

week 7/52

Last week I went to the Denver Art Museum to see The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism. It was a huge retrospective show, and my husband made sure that we went to see it before it closed. It felt a bit like going on a mini vacation, sneaking away from the craziness and business of the world to the quiet, spacious, well-lit museum space full of amazing art.  

It turns out it centered around many of the themes that we’re struggling with today. Except you wouldn’t know that just by looking at the paintings. They were lovely, filled with the expansive, light-filled, idyllic beauty that impressionism usually brings to mind. But with the exhibit’s guide through Pissarro’s life and career, it felt like a master class in art as resistance. The radical act of creating the world as you wish to see it.

Bridging Cultures

Camille Pissarro was born in 1830 on the island of St. Thomas, which was then part of the Danish West Indes, to French Jewish parents. As a teen he was sent to boarding school in France, where his education included art. After returning to St. Thomas he was more interested in studying art than working as a port clerk for the family business. The early paintings in this exhibit were of the island of St. Thomas. These were followed by work he did in Venezuela, before returning to France and settling in Paris in 1855.

Over time his work evolved into impressionism. His devotion to his art seemed to be matched only by his love for his family — his wife, Julie, and their eight children. Pissarro wrote many letters, and the exhibit used these to provide insight and context for his work.

A New Way of Seeing the World

Pissarro was “the father of impressionism.” He was seen as the father of the movement at the time, not just in retrospect. What he decided to paint — and how he decided to paint it — was rooted to his commitment to seeing the world as he thought it should be.

Part of that was his belief that normal people and daily life were worthy subjects of art. His early work showed Black laborers on St. Thomas, and later he painted French peasants working in the fields and village markets. It was more popular to paint the world of the wealthy elites. At one point Pissarro’s art dealer asked him to stick to landscapes for a while, to make his work easer to sell. Pissarro refused.

Of course, he was affected by the politics of the day. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) he fled with his family to London. When he returned to his home in France three-quarters of his art had been destroyed, along with most of his other belongings. His art doesn’t show the war, and from his letters it sounds like he spent little time despairing over the loss. He was excited to start painting again.

“I Must Work at My Window”

Pissarro spent much of his life living and working in the countryside. Towards the end of his life he returned to Paris, where he painted the city from an apartment window.

The exhibit had this information next to a painting he did in 1897, titled "Boulevard Montmartre, Twilight”: Pissarro’s time in Paris coincided with a surge of antisemitism in France, after Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was falsely convicted of high treason and imprisoned in 1895. Dreyfus never stopped protesting his innocence, and for 12 years French society was divided over the case. The year after he made this paining, Pissarro wrote Lucien (his oldest son) about hurrying past a mob shouting antisemitic chants in the streets. "Despite the grave turn of affairs, despite all of these anxieties,” he wrote, “I must work at my window.”

This is the line I can’t stop thinking about, after leaving the quiet of the museum and the rooms full of paintings — where light and shadow dance together to show the French countryside, peasants working, the streets of Paris, and industrial development along the ports of northern France. Regardless of the subject matter, Pissarro’s paintings convey beauty, softness, and humanity. They don’t show the hate or the violence happening around him. He knew it was there. But that was not the world he wanted to create.

Pissarro left an extraordinary collection of work, sharing his vision for the world. May we all continue to work from wherever we are, whichever windows are ours, to create the world we want to see.

"Boulevard Montmartre, Twilight" by Camille Pissarro, 1897. Photograph courtesy of Michael Rieger.