- May 23, 2022
- Posted by: AliensFaith
- Category: OBJECTIVE PRESS
The impressionist painter lacks the glitzy kudos of peers such as Monet and Degas but is celebrated in this study, tied to an exhibition of his work
The French impressionists have proved fertile territory for gallery-film specialists Exhibition on Screen, with offerings hat-tipping Monet, Degas, Renoir and their peers. This one extends the range slightly outside the usual suspects by taking as its subject the impressionists’ Danish-French elder statesman Camille Pissarro, whose oeuvre is perhaps short on the world-conquering masterpieces of his fellows, but who nevertheless played a key role in establishing impressionism as a style, and as a movement.
As its cue, the film takes the current Pissarro exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, so it’s possible to watch it, then see the paintings – or vice versa. (It was jointly mounted with Basel’s Kustmuseum, but audiences in Switzerland will have to settle for a virtual tour as the show closed there in January.) The film is the customary solidly informative mixture of biographical detail and curatorial insight, tracing Pissarro from his early years in what was then called the Danish West Indies to Paris, via Venezuela and – while the Franco-Prussian war was raging – Norwood in London.
