Hitting the canvas ... Cézanne and Pissarro
There's been a rash of historical exhibitions in recent years premised on oppositions and correspondences between artists. At the Tate, we had Turner, Whistler, Monet in 2004, and the following year, Dégas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. Cézanne and Pissarro, now on at the Musée D'Orsay in Paris is the latest.
One characteristic of this sort of show is that it does encourage a sort of competition between artists. I remember thinking about the Turner, Whistler, Monet before I saw it that I expected to love Turner's work more than that of the other two artists, and being surprised when it came to it that, as I put it to myself, all the artists were "winners" - Whistler's amazing Nocturnes, Monet's jaw-dropping views of the Seine at dawn; Turner's on-the-spot watercolours of the conflagrating Palace of Westminster.
I also remember someone debating whether Monet "came out better" when the show was done in Paris than in London. But is this school sports-day way of comparing artists rather reductive?
Cézanne and Pissarro is even more extreme in the way it asks the viewer to compare and contrast. The correspondences are all too present, because the two artists spent time painting easel-by-easel in the early 1870s; they looked at the same rural streets, sometimes even working on precisely the same views.
Poor old Pissarro. Whereas Cézanne's works suck you into his deep, dark, dense, miraculously three-dimensional world, Pissarro's energy seems to leak out of the edges of his canvases. Whereas Cézanne's are exciting experiments in form, Pissarro's - peopled, unlike his friend's, with rustics - seem more like pastoral fancies. They use the same material, but Cézanne uses it better.
He clearly needed Pissarro, who was loyal, supportive and kind, and whose way of working and seeing the world was an inspiration to Cézanne. But what did they think as they sat side by side in Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise? Was there a hint of competition to their work, or is this just an imposition from our own contest-obsessed age? Is setting artists against each other in this way an illuminating venture, or does it just reduce the viewer to playing spot the difference?
