The close friendship between Cézanne and Pissarro flowered at a crucial time for French Impressionism, writes Lara Marlowe
The self-portraits that greet you at the entry to the exhibition might have been painted by cousins, even brothers. Both are bearded and balding; both look at the viewer with the intense, dark-eyed stare they inherited from creole mothers.
If these two great artists of the late 19th century were spiritual brothers, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was the elder, exercising an influence over Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) which surpassed their age difference. Pissarro was the wise, gentle brother whose oeuvre exudes a poetic love of nature. Cézanne is the brooding brother, with supercilious, arched eyebrows. The father of modern art painted this self-portrait about the time he wrote to his mother: "I know that Pissarro has a high opinion of me, and I have a high opinion of myself. I am beginning to find myself better than all those around me . . ."
Pissarro's generosity was so profound that in later life he rejoiced in the success of his friends Monet and Renoir. He would live to see the beginning of Cézanne's fame. "He felt only joy for their triumph, which he considered his own, and had never doubted," the art historian Thadée Natanson wrote in 1948. "For this good man did not know the meaning of envy."
Despite Cézanne's bourgeois upbringing - his father Louis-Auguste founded the only bank in Aix - he was something of a social misfit. Though he admired Édouard Manet, Cézanne shied from contact with him, once announcing: "I will not shake your hand, Monsieur Manet. It's a week since I washed." In later life, Cézanne broke off a 40-year friendship with the writer Émile Zola, and railed against the "invasion of bipeds" on the Côte d'Azur.
Cézanne and Pissarro met at the Académie Suisse, a school frequented by painters who wanted to break out of the academic tradition, in 1861. For a decade, they crossed paths in galleries and painters' studios, but the acquaintance deepened into friendship after the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war and the Commune which followed.
Pissarro had taken his wife Julie and their children (they would have seven) to London to escape the violence. When they returned, they found the painter's house in Louveciennes ransacked, his artist's studio destroyed. Pissarro's paintings had disappeared, "which represented a considerable amount of work", the art dealer Ambroise Vollard wrote. "But Pissarro did not give in to discouragement and painting followed painting."
Pissarro and his family moved ten times between 1866 and 1881. The painter found it difficult to sell his paintings, and in the countryside northwest of Paris there were always cheaper lodgings to be found. Cézanne visited the Pissarros often in Pontoise, sleeping over when he missed the train back to Paris. The younger painter's model and mistress Hortense Fiquet was pregnant with their son Paul. They decided to leave their cramped apartment in Montparnasse for Auvers-sur-Oise, to be near the Pissarros.
In Auvers in the 1870s, painters gathered for a glass of absinthe at the Auberge Ravoux, spent evenings discussing atheism and anarchism. Cézanne was quiet during these debates; he enjoyed his time alone with Pissarro most of all.
FOR THE BETTER part of a decade, Cézanne and Pissarro tramped around the countryside together, setting up their easels to paint roads, bridges, and village houses. While Monet and Sisley concentrated on the effects of light on water, Cézanne and Pissarro were drawn to the land. "In Pontoise, Cézanne was influenced by me and I by him," Pissarro wrote to his son, Lucien, in 1895. "What is striking is . . . the affinity between certain landscapes he painted in Auvers and Pontoise and mine. By Jove! We were inseparable! But one thing is certain: each of us retained the only thing that matters, his 'sense of feeling'."
Cézanne and Pissarro 1865-1885 chronicles this period of joint artistic endeavour. (The dates have been fudged by several years in either direction in the title; the two men painted together for the last time in 1881.) The Musée d'Orsay, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art pooled resources to organise this fine exhibition, one of two major shows marking the centenary of Cézanne's death. (The other, Cézanne in Provence, is at the National Gallery in Washington until May 7th, and will move to the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence from June 9th until September 17th.)
Comparative exhibitions have become fashionable here over the past decade, but none of the artists paired before shared an artistic bond as close as that between Cézanne and Pissarro. Pissarro temporarily brought the younger painter into the Impressionist movement, by convincing Cézanne to abandon his cumbersome literary and mythological themes, and to lighten his sombre palette.
Pissarro was such a skilled teacher that "he could have taught rocks to draw properly", the American artist Mary Cassatt wrote. Cézanne said he wasted his youth before he worked with Pissarro: "It was only later, when I knew the indefatigable, relentless Pissarro, that I acquired the taste for work." After Cézanne left the Paris region to return to his native Provence, Van Gogh and Gauguin followed him as Pissarro's students.
Cézanne and Pissarro participated in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. But Cézanne was so angered by the critics' response that he boycotted the second, and participated for the last time in the third, organised by Gustave Caillebotte in 1877. Pissarro, sometimes considered the most Impressionist of all Impressionists, did not miss any of the eight exhibitions.
The contrast between Pissarro's and Cézanne's "sense of feeling" was most obvious when they painted the same scene. Cézanne borrowed Pissarro's Louveciennes to copy it. Pissarro's original exudes the beauty of a sunlit autumn day in the country. Cézanne did not usually paint human figures in his landscapes, but in Louveciennes he kept Pissarro's figure of a woman and small girl walking towards the village. Cézanne's version of the painting is stripped of superficial detail, with a hard coldness not present in Pissarro's canvas.
CÉZANNE WAS NEVER at ease with the precepts of Impressionism, which to his mind lacked structure and form. "I want to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums," he said. Their different visions are even more evident in The Maubuisson Garden, Pontoise, painted in the spring of 1877. Pissarro's garden is a delicate, shimmering vista of fruit trees in blossom. White and pale green brush-strokes almost hide the houses on the hill behind the trees. Cézanne merely hints at the fruit trees. He is far more interested in the heavier substance of walls with their parallel lines, of a grey slate trapezoidal roof. The ploughed earth of the foreground is rendered in horizontal strips of colour.
Even during his years with Pissarro, a certain visual dissonance, the seeds of abstraction and cubism, can be seen in Cézanne's painting. A painter "should treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone," he once told a young follower. Though he was faithful to the Impressionists' rule of painting outdoors, one may legitimately ask whether Cézanne was ever truly an Impressionist. "Cézanne was never, even in 1874-1878, the period of his most beautiful landscapes of the Île-de-France, a true Impressionist like Pissarro, Sisley or Monet," the art historian Liliane Brion-Guerry wrote in 1966.
Though their styles eventually diverged beyond compatibility, Pissarro never ceased admiring Cézanne's work, which he called "truly extraordinary in its savagery and character". In a nostalgic mood in the early 1880s, Cézanne reinterpreted several of Pissarro's early landscapes. "If Pissarro had continued painting as he did in 1870, he would have been the best of us all," Cézanne said.
Cézanne disapproved of Pissarro's flirtation with pointillism and post-Impressionism, but he never forgot his debt to the man he called "the humble, colossal Pissarro".
Pissarro died in 1903. Three years later, in the year of his own death, when Cézanne exhibited in Aix, he insisted that his name be followed with the words "student of Pissarro."
Cézanne and Pissarro 1865-1885 is at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris until May 28. See www.musee-orsay.fr for details