Pissarro Lecture Packs Museum's Ballroom

Portland Art Museum members scorned the Super Bowl in favor of a lecture about a painter who has been dead for 100 years. After 1,500 museum members showed up last Sunday to hear Joachim Pissarro and Richard Brettell lecture on Camille Pissarro, the museum admitted that they were stunned and thrilled.

“I’ve been to events at the museum before and I’ve never seen anything like this,” a member was overheard saying, as people flooded into the North Wing’s Grand Ballroom.

The lecture took place before the opening of the Paris to Portland exhibit at the Portland Art Museum. The lecturers have known one another for years and were excited to talk about Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.

Brettell worked as a curator for the Paris to Portland exhibit. Joachim Pissarro is Camille Pissarro’s great-grandson and has written popular books on Impressionist artists. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro are both art history professors, curators and renowned Impressionist scholars.

“Most of what we know about Impressionism has come from Pissarro,” said Brettell. Camille Pissarro, an Impressionist painter, documented everything he knew about the movement. This culminated in the printing of a five-volume set of his letters.

All of the paintings in the Paris to Portland exhibit are owned by Portland residents or the Portland Art Museum. The show highlights Impressionist and Post-Impressionist French painters. And many of these paintings show the tremendous influence of Camille Pissarro.

He worked with Corot, whom he greatly admired, when he first came to Paris. He mentored younger painters such as Cezanne, Gauguin and Seurat, and discussed painting with Matisse. He and Cezanne painted together for 10 years. One of Cezanne’s well-known paintings has been found to be a copy of a Pissarro.

Joachim Pissarro summed up Camille Pissarro by saying, “He was an anti-establishment kind of guy.” He asked the audience to reconsider Pissarro as a more complex man than we may have previously realized.

Pissarro was raised in the Danish Virgin Islands by French parents. In his twenties he left for Caracas, Venezuela. There, he decided to become an artist, infuriating his family. From Caracas he moved to Paris, where politics were being hotly debated in the nineteenth century.

The art establishment did not reflect the huge changes going on in French society. Pissarro and his friends set out to change this with their wild, thick brushstrokes and unusual compositions.

If the 1,500 people who attended the lecture didn’t know the influence Pissarro had on French painting, they now have much to ponder as they view the art. And as PAM celebrates its 110th anniversary, Sunday’s turn-out makes it clear that the museum won’t be celebrating alone.

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