08.14.07
Pissarro at the Milwaukee Art Museum
I couldn’t leave Milwaukee last month without a trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM). It’s one of my favorite museums because it houses a broad range of art for its size, with examples of virtually every major artistic period in its collection. The museum also exhibits some important examples of folk art, American design, Haitian art, and photography. The most obvious work of art here is the building itself: the new addition, designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2001, resembles a bird with wings that open and close.
Until September 9th, MAM is holding an exhibition entitled “Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape,” which focuses on the artist’s landscape painting from the 1860s and 1870s. This period was a formative one for Pissarro, who evolved from the realist tradition of the Barbizon school to a new impressionistic aesthetic, the theory of which he helped found.
The exhibition shows fifty of Pissarro’s paintings, arranged in chronological order. This arrangement highlights the contrast between his earlier, more academic paintings, and the artist’s experiments with color and brush-strokes into the 1870s. A wall-sized map of Paris and its environs indicates the locations Pissarro worked on landscapes and countryside scenes such as his 1864 Strollers on a Country Road, La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire (at right).
My favorite Pissarro painting, Hoarfrost at Ennery (below), is one of the last on display. After showing it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1874, Pissarro was fiercely criticized for painting shadows of trees that lie outside the boundaries of the canvas, a technique which gives the painting depth and interest. What is most striking is the geometric composition of the scene, with criss-crossing diagonal lines dividing the plane into large fields of contrasting warm and cool colors. It should come as no surprise, then, that Paul Cézanne – whose paintings are so geometrically composed many consider him a proto-cubist – was a pupil of Pissarro’s.
Pissarro, Hoarfrost at Ennery, 1873
We took advantage of the afternoon and stayed at the museum until closing. As soon as we walked out of the building, MAM’s “wings” began to close, so I snapped some quick shots of the action.
Grace said,
August 14, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Where did the time go? That was almost a month ago!
rachel said,
August 15, 2007 at 12:14 pm
It goes by way too fast! I keep telling everyone I’ve only been back in Paris for a week. For some reason, it feels that way, but yes, it’s been three!
Molly said,
September 19, 2007 at 4:45 am
I read your blog from time to time, and don’t remember at all how I stumbled upon it - but I’m in Milwaukee so it is fun to see a blogger I read post about my city. The MAM is one of my favorite places!