Art
An Impure Impressionist
THOSE who like to be as exact as possible in their application of terms generally agree that the word Impressionist can be applied with the greatest accuracy to the painters, Monet, Sisley and Pissarro. This is perfectly reasonable, and if the new theories about colour are taken as the touchstone of Impressionism these three artists certainly come out as the most whole-hearted exponents of the style, and it has never
really been settled to whose credit the original invention and exploitation of divisionism should be put. But the exhibition at present on, view at Wildenstein's calls attention in a remark- able degree to the fact that Pissarro continued long after the development of Impressionism to display many qualities not entirely in agreement with the true Impressionist creed.
Before 1870 the group of progressive painters in France was more or less homogeneous. Roughly speaking, all of them were investigating the new field of realism opened up by Courbet and Manet. They were painting scenes of everyday life and were particularly interested in effects of open air daylight as opposed to the more directed light of the studio. But after the Commune the group began to split up and to desert more or less strict realism for different kinds of ingenuity. Degas tried the method of whimsically chosen views of nature, artfully arranged to look artless. For a period almost all the rest became fascinated by the new ideas about colour and were absorbed in attempts to get something, at any rate, of the brilliance of sunlight into their canvases. With Renoir and Cezanne this was only a phase, and they soon went back to their more solid courses, but in the case of Monet the obsession with light remained, and for the rest of his life he pursued the sun in ordinary landscapes, on Rouen Cathedral, in water-lilies on a pond, till material objects ceased, apparently, to interest him; or became merely means of producing a new kind of reflec- tion which challenged his brush. In a slighter degree Sisley followed the same path, and for a time Pissarro tried it out. But he could never abandon his earlier interest in human beings and in the real three-dimensional world. Even when he painted pure landscape it was always more ordered and less taken by chance than was allowed by the strict doctrines of Impressionism, and the exhibition at Wildenstein's is a strong reminder that 'he always continued the most careful study of the' iitisisan figure.
The earliest works in the exhibition are two oil paintings of the period just before Pissarro took up the new colour tech- niqiie, both' of them portraits of Jeanne Pissarro. These are singtlarly honest, unpretentious, naturalistic studies, one of them, with the sitter in a garden, showing Pissarro interested in Sunlight effects, but not yet knowing how to render them. The brilliant Pontoise is typical of his most mature landscapes, alive with light, but with houses and trees given their full importance as solid objects. Best of all is the portrait, La Mire L'Archec&jue. Here the artist indulges in almost full division of the colours into their primary components and therefore does all he will with light, but he gives at the same time a psychological study incredibly well observed. Paintings such as this make one regret that Monet abandoned the possibilities suggested by his early Family Group in the Louvre and lost himself so completely in the pursuit of light—a chase which still apparently irresistibly lures on an artist like Moholy-Nagy. The rest of the exhibition is mainly composed of sketches in pastels, gouache or chalk, almost all of figure groups, some almost too painstakingly honest like the Washerwoman (5), others more audacious in simplification like Peasant Girl (15).
At the Bloomsbury Gallery two young artists are showing for the first time, a sculptress, Phyllis Parker, and a painter, Roger Hilton. The former, a pupil of Skeaping, seems not yet to have dared take her feet very far off her master's shoulders. The latter has produced at any rate one very good painting, a portrait of the artist's sister. The fact that this is both the biggest and the most realistic of the paintings shown, as well as the best, is relevant, for it seems that Mr. Hilton needs a large canvas and a close attention to nature in order to get over a certain tendency to a dry method of composition and to give full play to an unusual feeling for restrained and delicate colour-harmonies and to a con- siderable ability in a rather swaggering use of paint.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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