The art of Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) expresses no hint that its creator was Jewish.
As one can see in the exhibition of his works, titled “Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape,” which opened last week at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he created primarily landscapes and scenes in villages and cities that could have been made by an artist of any or no religion.
Indeed, his preference seems to have been “no religion.” Stephanie Rachum, former curator at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, wrote an article on “Camille Pissarro’s Jewish Identity” for an exhibit of his works there in the mid-1990s. “Pissarro was a self-declared atheist and anarchist,” she wrote.
Nevertheless, during much of his life, “he was in the middle of some kind of Jewish scandal,” said Jody Hirsh, director of Judaic education at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
Moreover, in numerous ways, Pissarro’s career typified that of many Jewish artists in Europe in the 19th century and early 20th century, Hirsch said.
Hirsh has given two lectures on Pissarro and his Jewishness in connection with the MAM exhibit, one at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun for the JCC’s Off Center program, and the second at the museum itself on June 10.
Family scandals
In a telephone conversation, Hirsh said that Pissarro’s “Jewish scandals” started with his parents. His father Frederic was the son of a well-connected Spanish-Portuguese Jewish family that had settled in Bordeaux, France.
Frederic went to the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, then ruled by Denmark, to help his maternal uncle’s widow, Rachel Petit, deal with the uncle’s post-mortem business matters. They became lovers and got permission to marry from the Danish authorities.
However, the St. Thomas Jewish community at first refused to recognize the marriage apparently because it violated a Torah prohibition on nephew-aunt sexual relations. (Leviticus 18:14; however, the verse seems to limit the prohibition to sexual relations between a nephew and his paternal aunt.)
Not until the couple had been married seven years, when Camille was 3, did the St. Thomas Jewish community legitimize the marriage. Rachum suggests in her article that the artist’s alienation from Judaism began with this local scandal.
Camille himself married a woman who was both not Jewish and from the lower classes; in fact, his wife had worked for his mother as a cook’s helper after the family moved to Paris in the 1850s. Camille’s mother refused to acknowledge and accept that marriage to her dying day.
Later, when Camille’s oldest son, Lucien, fell in love with a young woman from a British Orthodox family, his intended’s father demanded that Lucien convert. With his fiancee’s support, Lucien refused; and with his father’s support, the two were married in a civil ceremony.
Professional trials
Whatever his relations to Judaism in his personal and family life, Pissarro was caught in the bind that confronted many if not most contemporary European Jewish artists — musicians and writers as much as painters, according to Hirsh.
“They don’t fit into the Jewish community anymore, but they don’t fit into the non-Jewish world either,” said Hirsh. One sees such characters in much European Jewish literature of that era — Jewish artists or intellectuals so tormented by their social-cultural homelessness that they become insane or commit suicide, he said.
Pissarro had “a zest for life” and became neither crazy nor suicidal, said Hirsh. But he did do something that many other Jewish artists in the same situation did, according to Hirsh.
“I really think that for a Jewish artist, who does not fit into the Jewish community or the art establishment, one appealing alternative is to be an iconoclast, to associate oneself with an emerging art form that is not supported by the establishment in any case,” said Hirsh.
Pissarro became one of the founders of the Impressionist school and one of the organizers of its independent exhibits. He became friend and sometimes mentor to Claude Monet, Edward Manet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gaugin, Mary Cassatt and Auguste Renoir. Gradually, he and they won acceptance as artists.
Nevertheless, “thoughout his life, in varying degrees, the ‘Jewish problem’ would manifest itself in different ways,” wrote Rachum.
The Dreyfus Affair — in which a French Jewish army officer, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely convicted for stealing military secrets — split all of French society, including the Impressionist circle, and inspired an outburst of anti-Semitism.
“It must have been horrendous” when Pissarro, who believed that Dreyfus was innocent, thereby lost the friendship of anti-Dreyfusards Cezanne, Renoir and the anti-Semitic Degas, said Hirsh.
Moreover, Pissarro’s struggle for success was long and often heartbreaking for himself and his family. In an 1889 letter, he wondered if his being Jewish helped cause that.
“Until now, no Jew has made art here, or rather no Jew has searched to make a disinterested and truly felt art. I believe that this could be one of the causes of my bad luck,” he wrote.
But acceptance finally came in his last years and his place in the history of art seems secure. “He’s such a fascinating figure,” said Hirsh.
The MAM’s Pissarro exhibit runs through Sept. 9. For more information, contact the museum, 414-224-3200.
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