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'PARBLEU' : PISSARRO AND THE POLITICAL COLOUR OF AN ORIGINAL
VISION PAUL SMITH
PISSARRO AND IMPRESSIONIST VISION
To judge from their own accounts, and from their later work, both Monet and Cezanne eventually succeeded in seeing their motifs only as blocks of colour or coloured 'taches', as if they were free from knowledge of what they looked at, like men who had just gained their sight.' As Charles Stuckey points out, it was Ruskin's injunction to see with an 'innocence of the eye . . . as a blind man would see . . . as if suddenly gifted with sight' that guided Monet to see 'flat stains of colour' and 'patches of colour'; and he also suggests that Taine's ideas on the retina1 data of pre-conceptual visual experience might have been equally influential on the Impressionists at large.' From Richard Shiffs work, i t is clear that this characteristically Impressionist vision was motivated by a search for na'ive ' ' impressions', and for personal 'sensations' supposedly corresponding to a 'double origin' where nature and the self met.? By these accounts, therefore, Impressionist vision was meant to result from an intentionality free of interest in a reified world, and instead to be expressive of a more primal and 'original' experience of reality.
Putting aside the vexed question of whether seeing in this way is actually possible for a normal adult, the Impressionists' search for sensations untouched by culture or language remains at least doubly paradoxical. In the first place, their frequent statements on the matter suggest the Impressionists adhered almost religiously to the principle that sensations were the basis of a way of painting free from rules. Moreover, while sensations were meant to be pre-conceptual experiences, it is plain that both Monet and Ctzanne had quite specific concepts about them and the vision corresponding to them, and that these concepts were themselves contingent upon particular nineteenth-century beliefs such as Positivism and ind i~ idua l i sm.~ Moreover, to follow Meyer Schapiro, the list of contingencies determining Impressionist perception would also include their desire to find an alternative to the perception characteristic of a society in the thrall of the 'advance of monopoly capitalism' .'
In effect, then, and despite the rhetoric of their own statements, it is precisely because the Impressionists' vision was contingent upon the rationality of a particular
Art History Vol. 15 No. 2 June 1992 ISSN 0141-6790
PISSARKO AND 7'Hk POI,I'I'IC41, C O L O U R O F AT\; OKIC;INAId VISION
culture, and subject to historically specific causes, that it was meaningful. In other words, it was a function of the way in which it was infiitrated by and expressive of its various social determinations, both consciously and unconsciously, that the way of seeing recorded in an Impressionist painting had specific moral and political meanings.
Like his more illustrious colleagues, Pissarro asserted that he too saw in 'taches', and painted his own 'impressions' and ' s ensa t ions ' .~oweve r , Pissarro was more reasonable and explicit about the factors affecting his perception, and less given to romantic claims about it, than his fellows. Indeed, by the 1880s, this artist - whom Renoir recalled as the 'theoricicn' of Impressionist research' - made many staternents to the effect that hc intended the scientific knowledge and political bcliefs bound up with his vision to be recognizable as such in his paintings.
These connections, and the meaning they gave to Pissarro's vision, are the sub.ject of the majority of what follows. The remainder is concerned with Pissarro's unusual sensitivity to blue, what some called his 'daltonisme', and the emergence of this aspect of his vision into public sense. In particular, I wish to explain how it was that Pissarro's preference for blue was far from devoid of meaning, even though the painter himself failed to explain this preference, or even recognize it. The solution I will suggest to this conundrum is that this aspect of his vision was irreducible to existing concepts and rules of seeing, and that it was this that guarantced its potential to carry an original sense beyond the semantics of the language available to him.
PISSARRO'S PERCEPTION AND SCIENCE
O n a few occasions, Pissarro seemed no less naive than his colleagues about perception. For example, in a letter to Lucien of September 1892, he advised his son to concentrate on rendering 'sensations libres de toute autrc chose que ta propre sensation'.' But it is difficult to believe this statement was intended as literal advice, because the majority of Pissarro's staternents show quite unequivocally that his vision was inf'ormed by scientific concepts, and that he knew this. For cxample, in a letter to Durand-Rue1 of November 1886, he mentioned his familiarity with the work of Chevreul and Ogclen Rood on colour (probably Chevreul's De la loi du contraste simulta~ld des couleurs of 1839 and Rood's The'urie scient@que des couleurs of 1881)." And in a letter of February 1887 to Lucien, he affirmed his debt to science in a letter concerning a difference of opinion with a patron about its importance to the painter. Indignantly, he wrote:
de Bellio . . . me dit qu'il ne croit pas que les recherches physiques sur la couleur et la lumicre puissent servir 2 l'artiste, pas plus que l'anatomie ou les lois de l'optique . . . ; parbleu; si je ne savais pas comment les couleurs se comportent depuis les dkcouvertes de Chevreul et autres savants, nous ne pourrions poursuivre nos etudes sur la lumi?re avcc autant d'assurance. Je ne ferais pas une difference entre la couleur locale et la lumi?re, si la science ne nous wa i t mis en 6veil. Et les compl6mentaires et les contrastes, etc."'
PJSSAKKO ANT) T H E I'OLITICAL (:OLOUK O F .\N CIKIGINAI. VISION
Pissarro's paintings of the late 1870s and early 1880s do show hc recorded perceptions of colour which owe a debt to the work of' Rood and Chevreul, just as he described. In works likc L a C6te des boeufs, Pontoise of 1877 (plate 43) and Jeune Puysanne au chapeau of 1881 (plate 44), Pissarro separately recorded the local colour of objects and the modifications imposed on it by the various components of the light - illumination, shadow and reflections" - and hc also registered perceptions of contrast effects in his insistent use of pairs of complementar ic~ . '~ Ftndon's criticism of 1886 and 1887 describes the presence of precisely these perceived effects in Seurat's paintings,l%ut only because Pissarro supplied him with an analysis of the components of Neo-Impressionist colour (as is recorded in three letters of September 188614 and two letters of April and summer 1887)." The fact that FCnCon's Les Zmpressionnistes en 1886 more-or-less accurately represents Pissarro's ideas (and not Seurat's as is often supposcc l ) '~s further revealed by the letter of November 1886 to Durancl-Ruel," in which Pissarro told his dealer to read Ftn ton ' s pamphlet for a n amplification of his own scientific theories."
Science did not just enable Pissarro's perception of colours in nature, it also affccted his way of rendering what he saw. Put simply, Pissarro's manner of composing a surf'ace was scientific because it was designed to take account of' how effects like simultaneous contrast and optical mixture could affect the way colours looked. Following Chevreul, paintings such as L a Ci te des boeufs (plate 43) do not map the colours Pissarro saw directly onto the canvas, but instead modulate patches of colour on the surface so as to take account of how their hues and tones (and position in depth and apparent size) are affected by adjacent colours, and also by more distant colours.'" Following Rood, other paintings, such as Jeune Paysanne au chapeau (plate 44), use small touches of (spectral) colour which form resultants at a distance due to the effect of optical mixture."' In practice, both effects come into play in deciding the look of a surface, and it is somewhat schematic to separate them out," even if Pissarro tended to adopt an explanation based on the notion of optical mixture in the later 1880s. '~
SCIENCE AND ANARCHISM I N PISSARRO'S VISION
Science plainly gave Pissarro his concepts of what colour was, and his models of how it behaved, but this does not explain zrihy Pissarro read science to help him see, or what he hoped to achieve by using it to hone his colour perception. Even a cursory look at the history of different cultures' colour terms shows that people normally invent or adopt particular colour concepts because they can be usrd - either to help them make useful discriminations between differently coloured things or effects in daily life, or to discriminate colours precisely for purposes of communication." Put crudely: seeing in a particular way, or 'seeing-as', is normally meaningful because it makes sense within a specific social practice.'4 In an activity like painting, seeing can be imaginative, but it gains meaning because it makes sense within the form of life imagined in the painting.
Such a picture of perception makes it imperative to discover just what Pissarro thought science allowed him to imagine (or ultimately, achieve) in enabling him to see as he did." O n its own though, this is a misleading question, because i t
PIXSAKKO A N D THE POI.ITICAL C O L O U R O F AN OKIGINAI . \ ISION
is incomplete. Even were we to provide an answer to it, this would still not explain why Pissarro painted what science helped him see.2h However, one explanation of why Pissarro both saw as he did and painted what he saw, is that, for him, to do so was to refute the way of seeing encoded in dominant conventions of painting at the time. And Pissarro does suggest several times, in his letters of the early 1880s, that he sought freedom from the lnonolithic tonalism of Salon art, and the freedom to see and paint his own sensations of colour in all their variety. In letters of 1883, Pissarro went so far as to oppose his own tastes for colour and variety against 'bourgeois' taste. For example, in February he described his own art as 'l'oiseau rare au plumage resplendissant de toutes les belles couleurs de l'arc en ciel', and in November identified the 'boueuse' technique of Adolphe von Menzel's Das Ballsouper (plate 45) of 1878 as 'bourgeois' .27
What these letters suggest is that Pissarro regarded science as a means of libcrating his sensations from the dull, tonal and 'bourgeois' way of seeing promoted by Salon and Academic art (and not as an end in i t~elf) .~ ' They also il~lply strongly that there was a political dimension to Pissarro's scientifically-informed chromatic vision: that its very freedom from Salon conventions and its diversity of sensation exemplified the anarchism he had come to cherish in the late 1870s and early 1880s."' In this vein, Pissarro even told Lucien in a letter of April 1891: 'Je crois fermement que nos idtes imprtgntes de philosophie anarchique se dtteignent sur nos oeuvres . . . .'"" And it is difficult to believe he chose his words without ~ e g a r d fbr the image they conjured.
Pissarro's way of seeing was intended to be anarchist for other reasons as well. For instance, his insistence on recording light and colour as such seems to have been intended as a refusal of the traditional use of light in Salon art only to reveal the texture and physicality of objects, or other objects of desire like the female body. At least, in the letter concerning Menzel, Pissarro identified the 'bourgeoisisme' of the German painter's work with its 'lourdeur',"' suggesting its heavy handling gave objects (and women) a tactile appeal which satisfied a spectator's possessive fantasies. In contrast, the quite different emphasis in Pissarro's own paintings on immaterial effects of light and colour seems designed to allow the spectator an imaginative experience of freedom from such acquisitive and 'bourgeois' attitudes.
The logic which united the meanings of Pissarro's use of colour was therefore something like this: 'bourgeois' attitudes to things dictate the use of a dull vehicle which can bring out their materiality, and which promotcs an aspect-blindness to colour and light. A disinterested vision emphasizes colour and light at the expense of things, and signifies freedom from 'bourgeois' forms of (real or fantasy) life.
All in all, therefore, science allowed Pissarro a certain imaginative freedom from 'bourgeois' forms of life, something akin to the freedom which was the goal o f the anarchism formulated by Proudhon. Pissarro avidly read Proudhon in the late 1870s and early 1880s," and firmly espoused his theory of self- determination." It is hardly a surprise, therefore, to find him explicitly illustrating the putative benefits of Proudhon's theory in a number of paintings of the late 1870s and early to mid 1880s in which peasants are represented emblematically: emancipated from the drudgery or alienation of labour, and free to enjoy leisure and contemplation at will." Among these are Jeune P a y s a n e au chapeau (plate 44), L e Fond de I'Hermitage, Pontoise of 1879 (plate 46), L a BergZre of
I'ISSARKO A N D T H E I'OLlrl'lC:AL C O L O U R O F AN 0KIC;LNAL VISION
1881 (plate 47), Etude defigure en plein air, fffet de soleil of 1881 (plate 48), Le Repos, paysanne couche'e dun5 l'herbe, Pontoise of 1882 (plate 49) and Paysnnne assise of 1885 (plate 50). Crucially, though, these paintings about the freedom which anarchism and sciencr could allow are themselves cast in the very technique which Pissarro considered anarchist because it was the vehicle of a perception liberated by science. Moreover, the spectator sees the painting in the way that the figures represented
\ in the painting see their world. In other words, the spectator is prompted to take on in imagination the disinterested, contemplative vision of the anarchist form of life Pissarro conjures in his paintings.
PISSARRO'S COMMUNITY O F BELIEF
For all the consistency and coherence of Pissarro's ideas, it is nonetheless hard to see how his paintings could have been meaningful in the way he intended, unless they exemplified his own beliefs for somebody apart from himself. Indeed, unless his works had effects upon the social practices of real individuals, it is difficult to see how Pissarro's paintings could have meant, or done, anything at all.
Happily, the evidence shows that the synecdoche between Pissarro's anarchist faith and his scientific, colourist aesthetic was anything but private to him. Even the reclusive and conservative Ctzanne knew there was a connection between Pissarro's learning from science and his political beliefs. At least, this seems to be what Cezanne meant by a peculiar sentence in a letter which he wrote to Emile Bernard in 1905, which reads: 'l 'ttude modifie notre vision 21 un tel point que l'humble et colossal Pissarro se trouve justifit pour ses theories anarchistes.'""
Of course, it does not mean Ctzanne shared Pissarro's beliefs just because he understood them. For the conservatives among the Impressionists, painting their own sensations of colour meant affirming a different kind of political stance, as the individualism i t exemplified was just as much a tenet of bourgeois ideology as of anarchism. Probably because he knew this, Pissarro made fun of how his colleagues saw like him and used the same techniques as he did, and even parodied his own association between colour and anarchism. For example, in the letter of April 1891 mentioned above, he wrote to his son in jest, declaring the reactionary Degas to be 'si anarchiste! En art bien entendu, et sans le savoir!'"'
Given these conflicting views, i t is no surprise that the community in which Pissarro's work actually did find favour in the 1880s was not that of his fellow Impressionists. Instead, it did so with a small group within the literary and artistic salon of the critic and former communard, Robert Caze.'" This ce'nacle was in its heyday only for a short time between the winter of 1885 and the spring of 1 8 8 6 , ~ ~ but was no less important because of it; for (besides Pissarro himself) it included the novelist and critic Huysmans, Pissarro's longstanding friend Paul Alexis, pseudonymously the art critic 'Trublot' of the radical newspaper L e Cri du peuple,"" the incipient Neo-Impressionist painter Signac, and a young Symbolist writer, Paul Adam ."
Many of the aesthetic beliefs of this community emerge in the novel Soi, which Adam published in May 1886 (with a dedication to Alexis). This work is especially interesting because it featured a character called 'Vibrac' - a radical Impressionist
PISSAKRO A N 0 THE I'0l217'ICAI, C O I D U R OF AN 0RIC;INAI. VISION
with a taste for vibrant colour, and a long grey beard - who was only a thinly veiled composite of Signac and Pissarro himself. And so, Vibrac's views on art not only represent Pissarro's in all likelihood; but, arguably, they also reveal the extent to which Pissarro's beliefs were shared by his colleagues (or at least the extent to which they did not conflict with Adam's more solipsistic aesthetic)." At all events, Vibrac expresses substantially the same arguments about the connections between colour vision and anarchism that Pissarro himself makes in his letters.
Vibrac's beliefs are most clearly elaborated in a long dialogue early in Soi with the character Marthe Grellou - a rich woman whose conservative tastes and reactionary values cause Vibrac to spell out the meanings of what he sees and paints. The conversation in question begins with Marthe's response to a snow scene Vibrac is painting. This is probably modelled on one of Pissarro's paintings of the 1870s such as L a Sente des pouilleux, effet de n ~ i g e of 1874 (plate 51). Vibrac's painting is significant because it marks his conversion to Impressionism, and we are told:
2 cette Epoque, il parut changer sa manikre. Son pinceau s'appuyait en multiples et kpaisses maculatures, et portait des ombres mauves ou bleues. 11 brossait des arbres lie de vin, crGment.
Ainsi composa-t-il un cffet de neige oh se montraient 2 peine deux lignes blanches perdues dans des encroGtements roses, mauves, violets et gris.4'
Horrified by Vibrac's frank colour, Marthe blurts out: 'Mais ce n'est plus vous . . . Qu'avez-vous fait l&?' But Vibrac, the typical Impressionist, merely replies: 'Mettez-vous plus loin . . . . ' Not to be put off, Marthe turns to Vibrac with the accusation: 'Oh! vous exagerez joliment. Et puis, d'abord, la neige est blanche.' But again Vibrac counters her, this time with the response:
Jamais de la vie. Je la vois rose, je la vois mauve dans les ombres, et il y a de l'ombre partout. Oui , c'est un peu blanc, 12-haut; eh bien, je I'ai fait. 4"
Behind the rhetoric of this dialogue, Adam suggests, like Pissarro, that bourgeois art promotes a dull, tonal and hence repressed kind of vision. Because Marthe is used to seeing pictures such as Goeneutte's L e Boulevard de Clichy par un ternps de n e k r of the Salon of 1876 (plate 52) in which snow is white, she cannot see it in its full diversity of colour. In other words, Marthe's sensations of colour suffer privation because of what Salon art tells her about the way reality looks.
The same dialogue continues so as to allow Vibrac to express another of Pissarro's opinions. In response to Vibrac's observation of colour for itself, Marthe insists that good painting should create 'relief' - or the feeling of three dimensionality - by using glazing. Predictably, Vibrac turns on Marthe with the rejoinder: 'Tenez, vous parlez comme les bonzes des Beaux-Arts.lt4 Vibrac then goes on to attack another Academic device: the use of 'fonds' - or backcloths - to give a figure in a portrait salience. H e directs his invective against Carolus- Duran's use of the technique in particular, which suggests Adam modelled the passage on Huysmans's parody of Carolus-Duran's contrived use of 'fonds' in his L 'Art modern? of 1883.4' Unsurprisingly, Marthe disputes Vibrac's opinion and defends the 'effet' which the technique creates. But this only causes Vibrac to turn
52 Norhrrr Goent-utte. LP Rouleonrd de C1ich.y par u n /nnps dr nrt'pr, Salon of 1876. Tare Gallery, 1,ondon
232
PISSAKKO A N D -1 Hli POLI TIC:AI, ( . O I , O U K 0 1 A N 0RIC;INAI. \ 'ISION
on her with the rejoinder:
Ah! I'effet, l'effet! L'effet c'est bon pour les bourgeois, pour la vente, pour l'enseigne. C a tire 170eil, n'est-ce pas, c'est la carotte Ccarlate B la porte du marchand de tabac!+"
The point of these latter exchanges is clear enough. Through Vibrac, Adam is arguing that Marthe's 'bourgeois' vision results from Academic painting, where what counts is the artist's ability to see and render the way light reveals the physicality of things or wornen. And he also makes it plain that such art i r 'bourgeois' because it appeals to the spectator's avarice and cupidity. For Adam, this appeal is anathema, both aesthetically and politically, as the violence of Vibrac's language makes plain. Implicitly, and like Pissarro, his delight in colour and light is founded in another kind of pleasure: the disinterested contemplation of intangibles. And like Pissarro, Adam seems to think that seeing such effects is to see in a way antipathetic to a bourgeois way of seeing, and the morality it carries.
Elsewhere in Soi the various characters articulate different standards of taste based on their individual moralities and political beliefs. Predictably, Marthe admires Cabanel. Early in the novel, shc even imagines herself and her cousin, Henriette, as figures in an exotic painting entitled Inthieur. And she muses about it, perhaps with Cabanel's PhPdre of the Salon of 1880 (plate 53) in (Adam's) mind:
Seul le pinceau de Cabanel [serait] assez dtlicat pour rendre les nuances ambrtes du cachemire tendu sur les meubles bas et les broderies hindoues qui traversaient les sicgcs par larges bandes. En fond s'ttalerait le vieil or de la tapisserie oh, de place en place, une simple fleur noire se piquait. Au premier plan, leur groupe, deux teintes tranchkes: dans l'une toute la gamme gradute des bruns, dans l'autre une synchromie de blanc et de vert tendre."
However, not long afterwards, Adam has Marthe overhear her radical husband, Luc Polskoff, cast a Huysmansesque insult at one of her favourite paintings, Cabanel's Venus of the Salon of 1 8 6 3 . ~ ~ T o Marthe's dismay, he blurts out: 'Cabanel, de la cr2me d6layi.e dans du sirop de groseilles, le tout sur un fond d ' a n g t l i q ~ e . ' ~ " Luc's unintentionally cruel parody of his wife's chocolate-box tastes exposes how Marthe's sense of self is tied up with what she has learnt from Salon and Academic art. In condemning Cabanel, therefore, Adam implicitly -
condemns Marthe's misrecognition of her femininity in paintings which suggest personal fulfilment is to be found in wealth or sexual attractiveness. Like Pissarro, Adam seems to suggest through Luc that a good painting does not lead the spectator into such fantasies, but insists instead upon the spectator finding pleasure in exercising more aesthetic skills. In other words, for Adam, as for Pissarro, a good painting was one which affirmed the values of a form of life free from materialistic or acquisitive concerns.""
Adam's mentor, Paul Alexis, expressed similar tastes and beliefs about the virtues of Impressionism in the column, 'A minuit', which he wrote almost daily in the 1880s. The clearest case of his views coinciding with Pissarro's and Adam's comes in an article entitled 'Mon Vernissage', which he published in L e Cri du peuple on 2 May 1886. Here, Alexis, like his friends, was at pains to stress how
PISSARRO AND 'I'HE POLITICAL COLOUR O F AN ORIGINAL VISION
5 Alcsi~nclr(. Cahancl, I'htdrr.. Salon of 1880. Musk= Fabre, M(~nrpellier
the quality of a work was bound up with the artist's disinterested delight in effects of light and colour. Accordingly, he mentioned how he had a landscape by Signac in his home, but instead of dwelling on the details of what it represented, he simply described it as 'une page toute vibrante d ' soleil, avec une Seine toute bleue, toute chaude: de Paul Signac, le jeune et d6jB magistral impressionniste.'" More light- heartedly, he also suggested that his collection might soon contain: 'un Pissarro qu ' j'ai jamais d7mandC . . . mais qui, un d ' ces quatres matins, j' 1' parierais, m'arrivera tout d ' m2me.'52
Alexis succeeded in giving a political edge to these remarks because they appeared in a review of his own collection, which he had written, he told the reader, because he had not been sent a ticket for the Salon vernissage. But to make sure his reader would realize the political nature of his opinions, Alexis insisted that he had missed nothing in missing the occasion; rather, he declared he had spent an enjoyable afternoon looking at his own pictures: 'et sans m' mouiller, et sans me buter B c' Tout-Paris brillamment imbecile des premieres . . . .'53
DALTONISM AND ANARCHISM
Plainly, Pissarro, Alexis and Adam all saw Impressionist colour vision as anarchist. However, as is implied by Alexis's pointed emphasis on Signac's 'Seine toute bleue', and by Adam's references to Vibrac's use of 'bleu' and 'violet', it was the blueness
PISSAKKCI A N D THb: I'OI,I I'ICAI. C:OI.OUK O F A N O R I G I N A I , V I S I O N
of Impressionist vision that pre-eminently signified its political meaning among the Caze group.
'The origin of this peculiar synecdoche probably lay in I-Iuysmans's L 'Art moderne of 1883, which was undoubtedly well known to Pissarro and his colleague^."^ In this work, in an essay on the Impressionists' exhibition of 1880, Huysmans had ritjbed the Impressionists for their excessive sensitivity to blue, and even suggested that they suffered from 'daltonisme' - a rare retina1 disorder."" Huysmans also accused Caillebottc of having contracted 'indigomanie', and Pissarro of having fallen prey to 'la manie de bleu'.""he reason why the Caze group might have picked on the Impressionists' preference fbr blue as a sign for their (putative) political radicalism is contained in the logical structure of Huysmans's text. Brutally summarized, L'Ar t moderne elaborated a consistent opposition between 'faux', 'bourgeois' Salon art and Impressionism, which, it argued, exhibited 'v6ritC' of vision and technique." Given, therefbre, that Impressionism was seen as antipathetic to Salon art and bourgeois values, and that a veridical vision prone to seeing blue was its distinguishing feature, 'daltonisme' could stand metonymically for its value as a vehicle of opposition to bourgeois
At least one other critic madc the same connection. In his book, Pour le beau of 1893, the reactionary Alphonse German wrote: 'l'ambiance ne souf'f'rc du daltonisme sensitif par cause originelle, mais parce qu'elle subit l'influence malcment saturnienne du dCmocratisme.'"!'
A blue picture undoubtedly signified populist and even socialist beliefs for the additional reason that blue was the workers' colour, insofar as it was the predominant colour of the female peasant's costume and the colour of the male peasant's and the city labourer's blouse. Many of Pissarro's paintings make a feature of such costumes, for example, L a C6te des boeufs, Jeune Paysanne a11 chapeau, L a Bergire, Etude dehyure en plein air, Le Repos and Paysanne a.rsise (plates 43, 44, 47, 48, 49 and 50). A worker in a blue blouse also features at the extreme left of Signac's L a Necge, boulevard de Clichy by 1886 (plate 54). Moreover, by the 1880s, when some urban workers had begun to adopt a variant of bourgeois black and white - as can be seen in the foreground of Seurat's Une Bazynade a Asniires of 1883-4 - wearing such coloured costume had assumed a pointed and even aggressively working-class significance ."'
In any case, Adam spells out both connections between the blueness of Impressionist painting and its political meanings in an episode at the end of Soi which takes place at an imaginary Impressionist exhibition. (The show includes works by Pissarro and a painting by Signac of 'une rner bleue'.)'" At this event, Vibrac confronts Marthe's nephew Karl, a decadent, morphinornaniac snob. who objects to the large number of working-class people in Montmartre because they spoil an otherwise beautiful view. Vibrac argues violently against Karl, and admonishes him:
Le peuple, c'est la couleur. C'est la seule classe de la soci6tC oh il y avait tant de bleu et de blanc. Les blouses des travailleurs trks pauvres c'est un bleu mort, use, pass6 avec d'extraordinaires omhres verditres. O n voudrait ces teintes-18, en peluche, pour faire des portikres.G'
1 0 make sure his reader realizes there is something significant about
I'ISSARRO AND THE POLI7TICAId CO1,OUR O F AN ORIGINAT, VISION
Impressionist blueness, Adam continues to plug it throughout the remainder of the episode. Indeed, Adam singles out for lengthy description a predominantly blue view of the Seine by Vibrac, which is actually a real painting by Dubois- Pillet (himself a member of the Caze salon): La Seine d Bercy, of 1885 (plate 55). In this work, Adam tells us 'La saisissante vie d 'un paysage parisien, s 'enfon~ait dans la toile A travers une atmosph?re bleue et grise de m a t i r ~ . ' ~ ' He also tells us that the parts of the painting 's'unifiaient dans une grande sensation bleue, un glacis bleustre d ' a i ~ - ' . ~ ~ And just for good measure, Adam adds, in an uncomfortably neologistic style: 'le la de cette synchromie sonnait dans la rCclame gros bleue du Petit Journal, couvrant toute la coupe d'une maison isolCe sur la berge. '"
Vibrac's pointed and political preference for seeing blue undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that Pissarro had done several 'daltonist' pictures in the late 1870s and early 1880s which not only show (resting) peasants in blue costurne, but are also paintings of scenes largely or entirely in (blue) shadow. Examples of such works are Jeune Paysanne au chapeau, Le Fond de /'Hermitage, La Bergbre and Etude de jgure en plezn air (plates 41, 46, 47 and 48). And so, these overall blue pictures expressed anarchist sentiments, or contempt for bourgeois materialism, in their iconography; but they also did so in a more purely visual - or psychological - manner, as a blue cast to a painting defies a spectator's ability to read texture or salience in it, and particularly the skills of a spectator versed in Academic conventions."" In addition, the overall blueness of Pissarro's paintings reinforced the compositionally unhierarchical effect which their colourist patchiness already gave them. And so, by denying what Baudelaire had called 'hitrachie et subordination', Pissarro's blueness can be seen to have instituted what the critic saw as a kind of pictorial ' a n a r ~ h i e ' . ~ '
Significantly, however, while Pissarro did rationalize about the connection between his preference for colour in general and his anarchism, he never rationalized about the connection between his specific sensitivity to blue shadows and his political beliefs. Instead, to judge from two letters of May 1883 to his son, Pissarro was annoyed and even stung by Huysmans's accusation that he suffered from 'da l t~n i sme ' . "~ And so, it appears that Pissarro had a vague sense of why he saw blue (inasmuch as he preferred it), but that it was not until Adarn and Alexis had given his daltonism precise meanings, afier the fact, that it acquired any precise or public significance. Indeed, the peculiarity of the quirky, argotic and ironic prose in which its meanings were elaborated itself testifies to the struggle Adarn and Alexis had in making out, and making plain, the potential sense of Pissarro's idiosyncratic vision.
ANARCHIST IMPRESSIONISM AND ANARCHIST LIFE
It might be said that Pissarro and his friends achieved little in writing about Impressionist vision the way they did, beyond indulging themselves and their audience in useless aestheticizing. But this is not the case: their public appreciation and enjoyment of Impressionism - and its blueness in particular - actually came to have important consequences within their anarchist way of life.
I'ISSAKRO A N D T H F I'OI,ITT(;A12 (:OI.OUR (>F A N OKIGINAI . VISION
The events which show this to be the case were unfolded in Alexis's 'A Minuit' column. They begin on 10 February 1886, when Alexis opened a subscription fund for the families of the miners on strike in the small southern town of Decazeville."" Indeed, in setting up a mechanism for political action in an 'Art' column, Alexis seemed to want to make the point that art and life were not separate domains. He had almost said as much in an earlier article of 31 January 1886, entitled "'Germinal" 2 Decazeville', in which he taunted the Minister of Fine Arts, who had recently suppressed a theatrical adaptation of Zola's Germinal, with news of the outbreak of the Decazeville strike. Triumphantly, he sniped:
E' viennent de jouer Germinal! Oui, dans la realit6 - B Decazeville. Est-ce que vous n ' seriez plus ministre, monsieur Goblet?'"
Undoubtedly in collusion with Alexis, Signac sent money to the Decazeville fund just in time for his contribution to be featured in the first issue of 'A minuit' to host the subscription (on 10 February). True to form, Alexis prefaced Signac's covering letter with the acid remark: 'Voici un artisse peintre . . . Rien de Cabanel!771 And Signac himself wrote in terms which emphasized the connection between his political motives in making a contribution and his preference, as an Impressionist painter - an anti-Cabanel - for bluc. In an otherwise nonsensical double-entendre, he conlided:
Mon cher Tublot Ci: 5 francs pour la sousscrission . . . Une thume c'est bien pcu; rnais lc blcu dc cobalt cst si cller!
Paul Si, m a c peintre irnpressionniste
130, boulevard de ClichyU
Signac certainly did use cobalt blue, even luridly. In contrast to Goeneutte's tonal painting of the same motif, Signac's L a Nelye, boulevard de C l i c l ~ of 1886 (plate 54) makes extensive use of the colour, not just for the worker's blouse (on the left), but also for the shutters on the houses and its many shadows.
Pissarro's sympathy for his colleagues' effbrts is revealed by an anonymous contribution of two francs which Alexis featured in his 'sousscrission' column for 14 February. According to Alexis, the money was Yent in by 'un copair1 B Signac, de Gisors (Eure), qu'avale mal qu' Trublot jaspine mal du L o ~ v r e . ' ~ ' That this correspondent was Pissarro is revealed by the fact that Pissarro used the fbrm 'Eragny-sur-Epte par Gisors, Eure' for his address in letters of the same week.'' His identity is further confirmed by the ironic attack in the letter upon Alexis for having recently rnade hostile remarks in his column about the Louvre,75 as it was about this time that Pissarro probably first made his own inflammatory remarks about the same i n s t i t u t i ~ n . ~ ~ (Pissarro had good reason to remain anonymous, as his post had previously been tampered with, and he suspected the police of having him under surveillance as a political subver~ive.) '~
*Jokes like Pissarro's in this letter may appear trivial in themselves, but they expressed preferences which, within six months, had helped consolidate support for Alexis's fund considerably - and well beyond the rarified confines of the Caze
I'ISSARKO A N D I 'HE I'OLITICAL C<)I,OUR O F A N ORIGINAI, VISION
salon. By 30 April 1886, Alexis's Decazeville fund had amassed the considerable sum of 5,000 francs, which means it must have had wide support among the Parisian workers. And, indeed, evidence exists which suggests that the Parisian workers might have sent money to the fund because they identified with Alexis's politicized taste for Impressionism. O r at least this appears to be the case to judge from a letter which Adam published in the journal Lulice for 31 January 1886. In this, he regaled the reader with the following anecdote, very possibly about Signac's L a Neige, boulevard de Clichy:
Dernikrement un pcintre de mes amis travaillait en plein air, dans une rue de Montmartre. Des badauds massts derrikre lui tmettaient des stupiditts tnormes. Survint un garGon boucher qui regarda la toile de f a ~ o n intelligente et dit: 'Tiens! c'est tr2s chic, Ga: c'est dc l'impressionnismc.' Mon peintrc de se retourner, ahuri: 'Comment savez-vous?' 'Le Cri, parbleu! dans les articles de Trublot!"'
It has to be admitted that the workers' enthusiasm for Impressionisnl was only one factor in the success of Alexis's column; nonetheless, it does appear that the feelings Impressionism could arouse did at least facilitate real opposition to the bourgeois culture which Pissarro and his friends detested. Alexis's was the first subscription fund to be instituted for the Decazeville miners, but it led to others, which in total amassed between 200,000-300,000 fi-ancs, allowing the Decazrville rniners to stay on strike for 108 days."' And even though their resistance was finally crushed, and the Decazeville minc was eventually run down,80 it can be said fairly that art played some part in crystallizing an effbrt to transform life.
PISSARRO'S ORIGINALITY
These events are significant, and not just because they suggest art can have a salutory effect on life, even when politically nai've." They also demonstrate the conditions in which originality might be said to be possible, and in the process cast some light on the concept of originality itself.
These problems are best explained by reference to Wittgenstein's (later) thinking about what makes a sign meaningful. In this scheme, the meanings of signs of any sort are normally circumscribed by what they can achieve within particular 'form(s) of life'." A word, for example, has a meaning within a specific 'language-game'"' where it 'attains a goal's' appropriate to particular circum- stances themselves defined by the'customs and institutions'" of a culture. One of thc fundamental jobs which words do is exemplify shared thoughts, feelings and beliefs for the different individuals of a culture so that they can share a rationality and communicate with one another. It follows that a word cannot have 'private' meanings; rather, it must carry a meaning which is at least potentially capable of being made public, and used in social life, if it is to signify at
A sign such as painting is rather like a 'paradigm' - or an example of something
I'ISSAKKO A N D T H E I'OLITICAL COJ.OUK O F AN ORIGINAL VISJON
corresponding to a name-word - in that it has meaning when it instantiates a set of particular and also shared beliefs (as a thing with a name does). In other words, a painting signifies publicly when it expresses an agreed sense.R7 This is not to say that paintings cannot function in ways different from language, or that they cannot exert psychological effects on an adequately sensitive and informed spectator irrespective of rules and conventions. (In the case of Pissarro's paintings. the spectator gets posited as a particular kind of disinterested perceiving subject, and slhe experiences a particular emotion as a c o n ~ e ~ u e n c e . ) ' ~ It is to say, however, that in brcoming public, the psychological effects of paintings are ipso Jacto subsumed to linguistic descriptions of what those effects are. The meanings of paintir~gs are also measured against the meanings of comparable paradigms (or conventions) whose sense is already established (if contested by different communities of belief). Both ways, paintings become paradigmatic of the intentionality and beliefs of the form of lifc they are thou<yht or said to represent or express.
Pissarro's (generally) colourist paintings of his own sensa/iotls can be seen to have come to signify because they recognizably negated and refused the meanings of existing paradigms - Salon pictures - whose sense was already public (if disputed). For example, in his writings, ThCophile ThorC had argued that Salon art represented the vision of a 'bourgeois' class, whose preoccupation with the 'utile' and its obsession for 'argent' made it lose any 'sentiment de la nature', and rendered it 'aveugle devant les tableaux colorts par la l ~ r n i i r c . " ~ All in all then, i t can be said that Pissarro's colourist paintings had a weak originality in that they signified a kind of sense already largely defined by language and by the paradigms whose tneanings they negated.
However, the kind of theory I am using nonetheless holds to the view that the rneaning of a painting is to some extent sui generis,'"' or that it is not reducible to the language used to make its sense public. As paintings of his .sensations, therefore, Pissarro's colourist pair~tings had a certain nebulous deterrninacy, a 'pcculiar' or 'particular' psychological effect," which existed prior to thcir inscription within language as paradigms, and which informed their meaning subsequently. This much also applies to Pissarro's predominantly bluc paintings - for the sake of argument, i t can be said that they produced a particular effect of immateriality. And it is this that f'acilitated their entry into public sense, even though they were less reducible to language than were Pissarro's generally colourist paintings. Empirically, the precise sense of the blue pictures could not be cxpressed so vasily or so completely in tcrms of their enacting a simple negation of' Salon conventions. And their entry into public sense as paradigms of the particular feelings they exemplified was complicated (and made risky for Pissarro) by the fact that nobody (including the artist) had words with which to describe this effect. They were not empty of meaning because ofthis , hut laden with (as yet) pre-linguistic meaning (which is prot~ably why Pissarro failcd to register his prefcrcnce fbr bluc in tlicsc paintings for what it was).
Further light can be cast on the strange situation f;icing Pissarro's bluc pictures betbrc they came to have public sense by comparing this with the situation fiicing those neologisms which arc not composed out of the elements of an already existing language. It is fairly plain that such a worci can only makc sense when there is
PISSAKRO A N D T H F POLITICAI , C:OLOUR OF AN ORIGINAL. VISION
a language-game and a form of life in which i t can be used. And so, unless it is to rernain 'without meaning' (like some of the words in Lewis Carroll's or make sense only in the realm of an imaginary form of life (like 'Excalibur'),"" it can signify only if generated in response to sorne change(s) in social life. In this case it signifies sorne newly discovered thing, event or experience. This kind of case seems to stipulate that Pissarro's blue pictures could only corne to enter language and gain publicity as paradigms once there was a form of life which could guarantee their sense, andlor the sense of the language used to define that.
However, the evidence strongly suggests that Pissar-ro's blue pictures did not signify publicly merely because they followed upon social changes that had already happerlcd. O n the contrary, i t seems inescapable that their pre-linguistic, psycho- logical effects actually encouraged Alexis and his comrades to act on the feelings they prompted and evolve new forms of life, or at least evolve new means of resistance to bourgeois economic power. And so, i t seems that Pissarro's blue pictures came to gain sense as paradigms of an anarchist set of values precisely because they had been effective in consolidating those values within a new form of life.
This being the case, Pissarro's blue pictures were original in the strong sense that they had the force to signify publicly before they had the chance to do so. And they had this potential to be original because they were grounded in Pissarro's vision, and not in words. Accordingly, i t was the irreducibility of Pissarro's 'daltonisme' to rules of meaningful seeing that gave i t the potential to carry an original sense."' Or , which is (almost) the same: it was the anarchic quality of'the way Pissarro saw that grounded his paintings' ability to signify anarchism without them having to spell out how this was to be achicvcd."'
Paul Smith BI i ~ t o l lrt~iuersity
NOTES
l A<.u~rtlrng to 1,illa Cahot Pcr-S!. Monrr told her r r r 188C) 'Whrn you #o out to pailit, rr\. ro I O I qc.1 hat ob,jccrs )(]U have I I ~ . ~ I I I t. you Alcrcly think, her(. is ;t lictlr quart ill blue. 1it.1.1. ; I I I ohlong ol' pink, here a srrrak O S yrllow. I I it U i s i t l o o k o c . . . ' Shr ;dso rccallb that Milnrt 'w~yhrd hr had been II~II-n blind ;Incl thcn h,rd .;uddenly piinrrl h ~ s sight so rlrat hr. ~ r ~ u l r l Iir,q~rl to parnr i r ~ rhis w a y nirhorrt k n o w i n ~ whnt thr <~l)jr(. ts w(,rc. rti;~r he . ;nu h(.li)r~. hi111 ' SC.I. I . . Nc~chlin (rrl ). 111rp11\ \ioni\rrr t ' o \ / - l ~ r r p ~ ~ ~ ~ \11111i$rn 187g-l004 SII~TII,> an// l ) o ( u m e n / \ , linglcwoorl (:Irtt?;. Nrw Jcrsc), 196t1, p. 35. In a similar Lcln. (;C/,rnnc rrputrrll) told ,Jo~ichirrr Gasqur t : 'Jr. vois. IJ;lr t,i(h(.s'. ;~nt l tic is sup[)oscd t c~ ha\^ s,ricl ro ,]ulrs I<o~-i.l> : ' \ ' r ) i r - cornrrrr crlui qui .r irnr dr. n;li~rt.l'
Sec M . I ) O I ~ I I (( ,cl ), (, 'orii ,cr\a/ton~ ai,~,c Cbmnrr~,. I';~rrs. 11178. 1). 113 and 22
2 Sec C:.F. Stuckcy. 'Monrr ' s Art and thr of Visriln' in ,I . Krw,~ld ancl F. CVritz1ic1t'li.r- (cdh ), A t p x / \ of , t-lon~/: A Syrr1po\7urrr on //Ic. .ll-/ii/ ' 5 L!/> rind 7imt.t. Ncw York. 1984, pp. 108-9. Ku.;kir~'\ ~bc~rds arc ri~kcn Icom , l . Kuxkrn, 771e 1</1'1rrt~71/\ I>/ 1)razoiny. 1!102 [ IH56] , p p 5 nncl 7 ( l i ~ o t n i ~ ~ r ) I'issi~rri] was Irss rnrhusiastir a1,out Kuskin than Monrt In a 1rtrc.r 01' March I882 ri) his nirrc, Es thc~ . he jtarcd: ',]I. n'ai rierl I11
tlc (.c critiquc anxl.ri\ ,I(. rrc cnnnais q u r (111clc1urs ~tlir . ; Crn~sr.\ 11;11- tic\ ,~rtisrcs clui son1 plus OII moins arl ,ollr .~nt Oc sch thttlrics . .
'
Scr ,l I ' , i~ i l l~-Hc~ 71)1.1g, ( , ' ~ I T T C J ~ U ~ ~ ~ I I I I I ~ I J i(','(~rr~tl/~ 1'1\~011i1, vols.. l'c~ris. 1986-!1 (hcrc,;tlic,r RH), Irttrr number 103
PISSARRO A N D T H E PO1,ITICAL C;OI,OUR OF AN ORIGINA12 VISION
3 See R. Shiff, Cdzanne and the End o j Impn.~sinrti.rm: a Study qf the 7'hiary. 7'echnique and Critllal Evaluatiur~ ~d Modern A T / , Chicago and London, 1984, pp 67, 68, 77, 88. 108, 125. 130, 166 and 192.
4 For an account of'tlie I-elation betwrrn the Ilnpressionists' concepts of their vision and I'ositi\.ist theol-ics of perception and the self, see Shilf, op. cit . , pp. 3-52.
5 S r r hr. Schapiro, 'The Nature of Abstract Art ' , Modern AT/: the Nindren~h and 7bpt11irth On/urie\ . Nrw York, 1978, p. 192.
6 In an interview of 1903, Pissarro stated: 'Je ne vois clue clrs taches.' See J . House. 'Carnille Pissarro's Idea of Unity' in C. Lloyd (rd . ) , Sudier un Camillr Pli~arro, I.ondon, 198ti. 11. 26. For Pissarro's ideas on thc 'impression', src Shim. o p . cit., 1). 242, n . 20. J . House discusses I'issarro's ideas on svnsatiun in relatiorl to ShiWs a~-xunlcnt in op. t i t . , pp. 15-34.
7 See ,Jean Rcnoir. Hrnotr, Paris, 1962. p. 11 1. 8 'Sensations h-ee from rverything hut your own
censations.' RH 815. 9 RH 358. Pissilrro also mrntionrd Chrvl-eul in a
lcttrr 01' October 1886 (RH 356). Pissarrv h]-idly abandoned Chevreul's snbtractlvr systern of colour analysis In the mid-1880s in favour of the additive systcrn proposed by Ogdcn Rood. For n suc<:inct analysis of thr main diffrrcncrs hetwccn the two systrnis and their r-clation tu art, src J .C . \Yrhstcr, ' T h r 'I'echnr(luc 01' tht: Irnprcssionists: A Rrappri~isal ' , ?%c Cn1L:yr AT!
,/c,urnal, no. 4, Novrmbrr 1944, pp. 3-22. 10 'dc Rellio tells rnr that he does not think that
physicists' research nhout colour and light can b r of use to the al-tist. any more than anaroniy or optics . . ; hut sur-rly, we [ thr Irnprrssionists] could not have pu~->uvcl our stlr(lirs ol'light with so rnuch assurance, if we had not had as a ~ u i d c thr discovcrirs of Chcvrrul and othrr scientists. 1 would not havr disting~~ishecl betwren local colour- and illumin;rtion, if scirnce had not given us thc hint: thr sarrlc holds true ol'cornplerrlrrltar-y i.olours, contrasts, ancl ~ h c like.' RH 397.
I I Rood dcscr.ihrs the variations in the i.olour of sunlixht, the different intensities ol' !,lucncss in the skvlighc and thc mannrr- in which ot?jccts pick up reflections of the colour of other ohjccts in op. cit., pp. 4fi-7, 45 and 5. Since these cll'rcts appcar earlier in Impressionist painting thry may have Iearllcd of them I'rom 1,conartio's 7'rattalu (assuming that thcv ~ h o y l z c about what thry did), since this wor-k mentionet1 how the (.olours ol'objects in the oprn air arc altectcd hy thr colour of thr illurr~irration, blur shadows and rrflections. See A 7iea1i.r~ on Pairltin,y by Leonardu da li'nc-i. failhfully trnn~la/od,from the or(<rinal Itolian and r/~er/erl under proprr head), t ~ v J . F . K i p ~ r ~ d , I,ondon, 1835, pp. 150-1. 13.5 and 147-!l. 139 and 147. ' I ' . DUI-et olfrred a similar- taxonomy of the luministic cl'l'rcts trcatrd hy thr
Irnprrssionists in 'Les Printres ilnpressionnistes', 1878; reprinted in Criliyrre d'auant-farde, Paris. 1885, pp. 68-9.
12 Rood discusses the physiological rffect of successi\e contrast and the psychological effrct of simultaneous contrast in op. (:it., pp. 203-8 and 209-17. Chevreul's book is rnostly concerned with simultaneous contrast, although he does discuss successive contrast. See Chevreul, op. cit . , $ $ 79-81 and IJ:1-41. 1.ronardo rrrentions an effect which is that of sir~rultaneous contl-ast in op. cit., p. 269.
13 FknCon analysed Srurat 's colour into 'touleur Ioralt.', 'orang? solairr', 'ornhrr ' . 'reflets' and 'compli.rnentaires' in 'VIII' l'xposition irrrpressioniste', I,a V I I , ~ I I P , 13-20 Junr 1886; '1,'Irnprcssionnismc'. I. 'Emanclpalion ~oriale, l 7 April 1887; and 'Le NCO-Irnpressionnis~~~c', I. 'AT/ modern? rle H r u x r l k ~ , 1 May 1887. Ser J . U Halperin, 1;dli.r Finion; Oel~urr~ p l u ~ que compl2le.r, Paris and Geneva, 1970, pp. 35-6, 66 and 73.
14 HH 350, 3.52 and 354. l i RH 41 5 and a letter publishrd in H . Uorr-a and
J . Rcwalcl. .6urat, I'aris. 1959, p. X I X . 16 '(:l.. A . ].cc, 'Seurat ancl Scicncc', .4r/ H i r l o ~ y ,
vol. 10, no. 2 , June 1987, pp. 203-26, which takes E'6nCon's views as accurate testimony of Srurat ' s intentions. I have argued against his virw (even rhoc~gh Scurat seems to have endorsed F6nton.s ideas in his letter- of 28 August 1890 to h4;luricc Beaubourg) in my article, 'Seurat: 'I'hc Natural Scirnrist'. Apollu, I> r ( - rml~r r 1990. pp. 381-5. For an earlier, but sornrnl~at strategic endorsement of Feneon's test, sec Seur-at's letter of 1888 to Signac in J . Rewald, .S?ural, Paris, 1948, pp. 114-15. F6nton first cried to rlicit information f'roln Seurat in May 1886. In n Irtter to F,douard 1)ujartlin and 'l'todor (lc \Vyzrwa, he confided that hc had h r rn in touch with thr 'impressionr~istes, Seur-at rt Signac' and that ' i l 1Fin60nl c s p h que lrs irrrprrssionnistes ont obtrn~perC 2 sa dclnande.' Unpublished manuscript, Rihliothi-clue litteraire Jacqurs Doucrt. M N R M S 28." Rut as late as Septrmher 1886, in RH 3 2 . Pissarro told 1.utirrr: 'j 'aurais birn ~ o u l u qu'il [I:?nCon] s'aclrrssit 2 Scurat, rr~ais c'rst impossihlc. '
1 7 HH 358. L o Impre~~~ionnh/o.r cn l AHh was a rocue~l of three ol' Fenion 's articles: 'V1 11' Exposition irnprrssionnistc' (ser n. IO), 'V' Expusition intrrnationalt: tic peinturr et de sculptui~r'. 1.a Ibyue, 20 Junr-5 July 1880 and '1,'Imprcssionnisme aux 'l'uillrr-ies'. L :,lr/ modernc (It, Bruxellc~., 19 Septcn~bcr 1886. Sre Halpcrin. op. cit., pp. 29-38, 46-50, 39-42. '0-1, 4:j-5 and 552-8. It was puhlishrd at thr. cnd of October 1886.
18 I'issarro was cri-tainly not satisfirtl with FCnGon's descriptions of the Nro-lrnpl-rssionist tcchniquc. Srt: nly articlrs, 'Srurat: l ' h c Naturi~l Scientist'. Ioc. t i t . , 1). 383 and 'I'icturrs and Histoi-y: O n e Man's Truth ' .
I'ISSAKKO 4 N D I ' H E POLI'I 'ICAL C:OI.OUK OF AN ORIGINA12 VISION
Oxfort1 .47/,/orr77iu/, vol. 10. no. 2, Dccelnber 1987, p. 100.
l!) I'issarro's 'blrvr ' , CPzannr, rrratly forrnularrd ~ h c conrqnences 01' the rlf'rcr k)r paintinq in a I-c.niark 111. madr to Lbo Larguirr in t h r i ~ corrvcrsations ol' I!)Ol-2: 'Peindrc, cc n'est pas copier I'ohjectif: c'est saisir unc ha r~non ic cntrc clrs rappor tsnombrrux, c'est les transposrl- dans une g;rrnmr B soi cn les dbvrloppant sui\ant une logiquc ncuvc ct o r i~ ina l c . ' Scc Doran. op. cit., 11. l i . For a dcscription of how colours i11'li.ct orlc anclthcr's apparrnt size (the Von Rezold o r 'sl)rracltng' rffrct), s r r E . H . Goml~r i ch , ,411 and liiu\ion. ..l S/udy zin t h ~ P!yrho/ofy of /'l(-loriai H(,/~r~~rnlution, Oxlord, 1987 (1,oneIrrn. 1060), p. 2b0 and n. 61.
20 S r r Kood, op rir . , pp 117-18. Sornc tinrc I~rl'orr 1889, Pissal-1-0 tol(i (; .W. Shclclorr that the optirnurn virwing distancr fijr his paintings LV;IS thr r r tinlrs thr cl~agnnal. Sec , ] . House, .2-lone/: Nulure into Art, Ncw Haven anrl London, 1!)8ti. Signilieantly, rhis is grra t r r than the . .
vlrwlng distancr oI' ;In ,Acarlr~oic painting - thrr r timrs its rnaxirnuln dimension, according ro Charles Blanc in the Gran~mair~ a r / ~ (In (l(,\\irr (I'aris, 1867, 537).
21 One ol' the t)csl descriptions of thcsc el'l'ecrs in corrlbin<~tion ~ ~ c c u r s in the Goncourts' clr.\cr-iption 111'C:hartlin's work. S r r h;. and J . d r (;oncourt. L 'Art nu (fix-l~uiliirn~ siirlr,, vol. 1 , 1'. ~ i r ~ s , . l120f5, pp 144 :1r1c1 157-8. Koljrrt
Katclil'l'c Lirr~lly drew I I I \ . attention to rhcsc 1 "IS""Rr\
'L2 I'issarro lirsr ~n rn t ions his use ol 'rr~Clar~gc optiqut.' in letters OS Ju ly iAu~us r 1886 and rlors so again in the letter of Novrmbrl- 1881i to Uurand-Kurl (RH 349 and 358). Hrl-r h r also mrntions an idra of' Rood's: that I l ~ r n ~ n ( n ~ t y ol' .In ol~ti(.;ll rrrixtul-c 01' ~ ~ i y r n r n t s is yrr ;ltcr than rh.u oI'i1 physical rnixrurc ol' the sirrrlc I,lqrrlcnts (sec Kood. op. cit.. pp 124-5). 'l'his notion l?;rtu~-ccl prominently in Fenban's descriptions oI' thc NCO-Impressionist technique (sre H a l p e r ~ n , 01'. (.it., PI). 36, 54-5, 67 ;rntl 73). hut again only bccausc of Piasarro, nnd nr~t bccausc 01' Scurar. H c probaljly Icnrncd about '1116langc opriqur' I'rorn Blanc's Gr(rwnrnn~rc //(,S ~ r t s ~ I I
( IPJ J I~ , pp. 604-6. \vhlcli he I-ead '311 col l i .~e ' , 01-
froln Illanc's articlr 'Eug?nr Drlacl-<\is'. C;ar~//e d r ~ h~aux-ark, vol. 16, 1864, pp. 1 12 .~ntl 115-16. Sec Seurat 's letter to FGnton of 20
, June 1890 In Halpcl-~n, op c i t . , 1). 507
2 3 Scr J C;;~gc, 'Colour in History: Rrlativc o r .4ljsolu~e?', Art Hido~p, vol. 1, no. I , March 1!l78, p,). 104-30: ancl U . Eco. 'How Cul turr (:<jr~clirior~s tt~c. (;olours b ' t ~ See' in bl. I<lonsky (ctl. ). O n S<(,ni. .-L Scn~iotir\ Headfr, Oxl'ortl, 1985, p,, 157-7.5 (I ; r r l l srarclul to Kon Kaxtcr lor . . 11115 ~rvlr~-rn(,c).
2 I.. \ Y i ~ t ~ c n s ~ r i n discuscrs the concrpt oS 'srrinx- ; I \ ' in his F'hilo\o/~hirai Inr'estz~/~/ion\, Oxforcl, 1!),78. 1). 197". Wittgrnstcin rnakrs the point
about the conrcxt-dcpcndenrc of 'srring-'1s' with rrsprct 10 colour in his Hm~oths 0 7 1 (,'oiorlr (1.0s Angeles, l!)78), whcrc he arxucs in Ijook I, Ej 73 that C;octhe's rrmarks on tht. rhar;~cters OS colours arc of little usr hccausr 'Sorne~)nc who speaks ol' thc charactcl- of a colour is always thinking ol'just one particular way it is usrd . '
Z i 'l'his is all the more prrssinq a question because \\hilt the Irrrprcssionist.; San, was often strongly I c~untc~.-irrtuitivc. Motlcrn prrcry)ru;rl science 1~11s us rh;rt nc)l~nally we do not s r r colour patches I)ur I-rilircl things, and that WC do not cli~~rctly rrglstrl- tlir rnoditications which thr illumination, sky l i~h t , rcllcctions and contrasts irnposr on ol,lcctr, but instcad that c)ur- ~)r rcrpt ion ol colour is rcl;lrivcly consrant. Si r~~i l ; r~- ly , rcrent rcsr;lrch (and espccinlly [hat of' k:d\virr ],and) shows that thr additivr s)strrrl 01' colour which Pissarro espoused in thr mid-1880s is col-I-i~iblr. Sre J . D . Mollon, 'C:olour \'ision ;lnd Colour. Blindness', in H .R . Rarlow ancl 1. l ) Mollon (crls.), 777~ Sr,nrr,.\, (:ambridgc, 111ij2, \I[) 16.5-01
2(, ' I 11t. (.as(. (11' l . r ~ ~ n ; ~ r d ~ ) sho\vs ~ j h y this is an Irnlx)rt;LnI 1 ~ 1 1 i r . as he knew that ;I variety of' l i ~ h ~ cl'li.cts ;~n( l sul,jc(.ti\,r effrcts could modify
Irmk of ol~jcct.; in the open ail- (ser n . 9 and n . IO), 1)ut n rv r r p;rintrd what h r saw. W ~ t h i n 1111. con\tmtlons of thr 1ir111. ~t s ~ m l ~ l y \%ouIci l ~ o t I1.1vt. I I I ; I ~ I . sense.
27 ..l'lrc. I.. . l r c . , 1 111.d \ v h ~ s c 111~1lrilpc is r e s [ ) I c ~ ~ ~ l c ~ ~ t with ;l11 ~ h c colours 0 1 ' t he ~-;rinbo\\ '. 'Roueuse' means 'muddy ' . RH 11 7 and 188. In ir sinirlar vr in , I'issarro described the [own of' C;ompi6snc in a lcttcr of' Frljruary 1884, as 'pay? plat er I)o~lrgrois, solrnncl; un pctit \~crsnillcs trhs m;luss;~rlc . . . ' (RH 2 16).
28 'l'his v1.1.y t)elicl' clncrgcs rr1or.c clearly in a lcttcr I'~\s;rr-r-o \vrotc to S ~ g n ; ~ c i r ~ 1888. in lvhlch tic cxl)rc\scd hi\ tlc~rror at rliscc)vcrin~ the Idealist tountlation\ ( 1 1 Srllr;~t 's ;u-I (RH 503). In this, hc atlvisrcl S ~ q n ; ~ e I O .~vnicl Scurat'c inllucncc and ' A p p l ~ q u ~ ~ ~ . . In S( icncc qui appal-ticnt B I O I I I Ic rnonrlt.'. 1,ut hr. ;11so told hirn: 'g;~rtlrz IIOIII. v o u s l ~ ~ ~ l o n r111c. vous , r \ , e ~ d r scntir (,n nrtrrtc d/' r u ~ ( lihti,'. For ;I 1u I l~ r d i s c ~ ~ s s i ~ r i 01' this letter-, src thr t.on~.lusion to rny articlr. 'l';~ul Adarn, Soi ct Ics pcintrcs irnprcssionnistcs', Recuc (/P /'art, no. 82, December 1988, pp l!)-T,O, Sirlrilarly, in the letter (11' No\ ,embr~ Ii(1iO to 1)urancl-Kucl (HH 358). 1'iss;lrro stiltrcl tll,\t 'la s c ~ ~ l or ig~nal~tC' cons~stccl ol' 'lc car,rrttr-r (111 (l~.ssin r t I;I v~sion p;~rticullPrc i chaqur i l r ~ ~ s t c '
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PISSARRO A N D T H E POI>ITICAL C:OIdOUR O F AN O R I G I N A L VISION
.54 I'~s\;lrro ~ncnt ioned Huy\rn;~ns 's book in two It.ttrrs 111 May 1883 (HH 145 and 146). Signac rc<<lrds that Seurilt (also ;I mrmber (11' Caz r ' s \ulon ) knrw and admired L 'All N I U ~ . T I ~ P in De D~~larroix au nio-impre~~zonntsme, P a r ~ s , 1978 (1899). p. 110.
j.5 L ',4rt morlcrnr, p . 104. (:l ibid . 1). 136. Kood tliscusses Daltonis~li in op. c ~ t . . pp 79-82. 1)altonism n a s wldrly publicized in I:. VCron, L ' E ~ t h k i q u r . Paris, 1883 (1878). p. 277. O n thc Imprcssionista and I)altonism, see 0. Rei~rers\vli~-cl, 'The Violrttomania of the Iniprrssionists', LJournal I J ~ Ae~fhelzrs nnd Arl Crrl i( l~ni , \,ol. I X , no 2, 1950, pp. 106-10 O n I)altonisrn, ser W.( ; . Wright, 'The C l r~ ro l~ r ( l I'roblrrn of Ualtonisrn' in 7hr Rays nrr No1 Coluur~d, Idondon, 1967, pp. 67-87.
.?h L L4rf muderne, pp. l07 and 106. - 11 Sctting thr book's ton?. Huys~nans opened
1- '.4r/ ~no~lrrrrc with rhc prefitory remark. '(:ontl.;~il-rmrnt B I'opinion r c ~ u c , ,j 'rstime qu r rollre v6rit.G rst honnr i dire . ' For cxi~rnplcs of Huy.\rr~ans's logic, sre L'Ar t mudcrnr. pp. 10-12, 14-15. 17, 42-3. 86, 101-3 and 138-R. In a s~mi la r \.tin, Caze describrti thr wnl-k of Jean Reraud as 'peu vrai' and cvcn 'SZILIX' i r ~ his Srilun of l885 (Inc. cit.).
58 'l'his is not to d rny that orher kinds 111' pictorial h lucncs~ could mean o t l~e r things to tlittrrent cv~rlrrrunit~es oS lanquagr-use. Richard Shil'l' kindly pointrd out to me that Ctzannc 's l~lurnrss m ~ g h t stand as a s i p of Meditrrraneanism for writers like Mauri re I)rrlis, and hence acquire a kind of rractiorlnry \,llur. Rlue in a paintinR convcntionally t ~ x l x c s c d 'modrs t i r ' o r ' C ~ I I I ~ C I I I - ' nr some such ernotion. S r r D Sutter. 'Lra PtlCrlomZ-nes d r la \.iaion', I , 'Arl , vol. 20, 1880, p. 219.
59 'The artistic climate does not suffer kern Daltonis~n bccause of any causr in the nature of things, but br~.ause it sul'fers the rvil and s i~turnint ~nlluence of dcrrlocracy.' A Germain, Polir /P htciu, Paris, 1893, p . 123.
60 On this h~~b jec t , and borrowing frorr~ Raudelaire's 'Salon de 1846', J ran R~chep in wrotr: ' I x peuple cst \,rainlent plus a]-tiste quc la bourgeoisie. 11 n'ohCit pas, comme elle, au mot tl'ordre tyrilnniquc dc la mode, qui n ~ u a habille tous B I'unil'nl-me. D'instinrt . . . il reasit contrc ccttr maladlc moderne dc I'i-galit;~rismr en matikrc de costumr. . . . Ainsi. tantlis que nous allons dans la \.ir . . . tristernent vetus d r nail- . . . portant tterncllemenr le deuil dc nos gaietCs perdues . . . et tous unitbrmPment \ .~llains r t sinistres, comrnr u n r bande d r (orbeaux. ils travaillent cn chantant d;lns unc fitc dc costurnrs et d r c.c,ulrurs . . ' (1. Rirhepin, Le Paui, Paris, 1883, pp. 204 and 207-8).
61 Sol, p. 422. In thr Pdil Bo/!in des lcltrej el des urls (Paris, 1886). Adam had written in the entry concernina S i y n a ~ : 'Au pinceau: des Ial-gcurs
t)lcucs dc t l r u ~ r t,nsolrillt. . . . ' (p . 125). 0 2 "l he people, rhty ;Irr i.olou~- 11's thc only c l a s
111' soclety whrrc thcrc is so 111uc h Idue anti white. 'I'hc blourc 01' the vrl-y poor workers is a dr.1~1 blue. a worn-out, hacl-its-clay blue with cxtrdol-dinarv. grernlsh shado\+b. O n e could w ; ~ r ~ t the)\' col~)urs, in plush, t o make blinds with. ' S O I , p. 416.
(13 "l'hc s t r~k ing bpectacle of the life 01' a Parisian i.itvscnpc t r r t c h e d back into the paintiny ar.l-oss ;I blue ancl yrey mornirig i~rmosphcrc. ' .SOI, p. +l!].
64 'Uni t rd in a grrat blue sensation, a t~luriah sl;lzr of air. ' Sol, p . 420.
65 ' T h e krynote of this synrhromy ranS out in the tlrrp blue Pe/~/ ,Journal poster which covered the whc~lc gable OS iln isolated housc on the rivct.bank.' Sol. 1>p. 419-20.
r)o I'll-hapa this is why Kcvr~olds pros~.ribcd rhc use 111' I~lue as the 'prrdc~minnnr colour in a picturr ' , nt Ic,~at according to an apor.rvpha1 story. Thc silmr story has i t that G a i n b o r o u s h painted his Blue Boy precisely to defy Reynnlds: howrver, Lawrenrr cornrnented that Gainshorough's painting amounted to 'a dil'liculty holclly comb;lttccl, not conquerrd' See W T . Whitley, 7'hornu~ (;orn,hornu~7h. Idondon, 1015, pp. 375-7. 1 am gra~r l i l l to Micharl l ivers idgr for this refrrencc.
(i7 Ser C:. Haudel;~ire, 'l,e Peintrc dc la vir moclrrnc'. 1863; reprinted in Oruorr~ rompl?/c~. \.oI. 2, Paris, 1'176, p. 699. Richard ShiSf kindly 11r0111ptcd ~ n r RI recall this quotation. T. Uurct recalls how CCzannv's work was (onsidrrecl 'pcinture d'anal-chistr' (undoubtedly because of its subversion of t rad~t ional pictorial hierarchies) in his Hirtuire d e ~ peinlrer impresszonnisl~s, Paris, 1922 (1906), p . 145.
68 Sec RH 14.5 and RH I4t). 6CJ 'l'hc L)e<~~zeville strikc broke out on 26 January.
For a ~ictailed analysis of the events in question. sec D Reid, The M i n e n oJ L)rcazr~,i//r. A (;enr.a/o~p uf L)eindustrzallJatiun, Cambr ids r , Mass. and I.ondon, 1985, pp. 91-106.
70 'They 've just performed "Gern~inal"! Yes, but in reality - at Uccazeville. AI-cn't you minister any rnorr, monsirul- Gc~blet?'
71 'Hrl-e 's an artlst of a painter . . . None of your C:abanrl"
72 'Ura r T r i~b lo t , hrre'a 5 francs for the subscription . . . Five francs is not much, but cobalt blur is so dear! ' This lettrr is unpublishetl elsewherr. Alcxis also records a '~nagnif iqur volume valant ;l11 moins 100 fr. offert par M . Paul Signilc, print]-e impressionniste' in 'A minuit ' of 9 April 1886.
73 'A mate of S i ~ n a c ' s , from Gisors (Eure), who finds it hard to swallo\v that Trublot gossips nlal~ciously about the Louvre. ' Not in RH.
74 S r r BH 311 and BH 313. 75 Alrxis's remarks we]-c made in 'A rninuit' of 29
,January 1886 and they were promptrd by a
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PISSAKKO A N D 'I'HE I'OLI'I'ICAL, (:OI,OUK O F AN OKIGINAI . VISION
!l2 Sr r I.. Wittgcnatcin, op. cit., 1958, 13. liavc rriraning even when their participants 93 Srr. ibid., $ $ 39 and 45. 'make up thc rules as [thcyj go along', or when 94 IVittgrnsrein discuaxs thr rule-governed nature 'therr. is some vagucncss in lhe r u k ~ ' . S r r I,.
(11' seeing-as in op. cit . , 1958, $ 74. W~ttsr.natein, op. cit., 1958, S$ 83 ancl 100. 95 Cf. Wittgrnstein, who argues that garrres can
