Camille Pissarro. Opera passage in Paris. Camille Pissarro Opera Passage To Pissarro Opera Passage in Paris 1898

The famous French painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was born in Saint-Thomas (Antilles) and died in Paris. In 1855 he came to Paris, where he entered the Académie Suisse (Gleyre's workshop). There he met Monet, Cézanne and Renoir. IN early period Pissarro was strongly influenced by Corot. Beginning in 1859, he showed his works in the Salons; since 1863, he exhibited at the Salon of the Rejected, and then at separate exhibitions of the Impressionist group. Along with Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro is one of the five leading impressionist artists.

« Opera passage in Paris" belongs to a whole series of works that the artist painted in the fall of 1897 - winter of 1898. He chose for this the view from the window of the Hotel de Louvre onto the street leading to the Grand Opera. The street is depicted crowded with carriages and filled with pedestrians. The snow is white on the roofs, and depressing frost hangs in the air. Black spots of figures and silhouettes of bare trees bring a dull mood to the city landscape. The Grand Opera building is drowning in fog. With extraordinary pictorial observation, the artist captured the state of a twilight day in a rainy Parisian winter.
The genre of urban landscape was not an invention of the Impressionists; it was also known Dutch painters XVII century, but it was the Impressionists who revived it, filling it with new content. Pissarro painted this picture when he was already quite ill, forced to forever abandon the idea of ​​working in the open air. The artist's fate is dramatic: he died in poverty and almost complete oblivion. But the significance of his work and activities as a teacher is extremely great: he was a friend, and in some cases, a teacher of artists of the next generation, the so-called post-impressionists. The painting entered the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in 1948 from State Museum new Western art in Moscow.

OPERA RIDE IN PARIS

Camille Pissarro

In the summer of 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, which scattered the Impressionist friends in different directions. The French army suffered one defeat after another. Camille Pissarro, who lived in Louveciennes, near Paris, was forced to leave all his paintings and hastily leave. In his house, the winners set up a butcher shop and used paintings by C. Pissarro as bedding, wiping their feet on them. Of the five hundred canvases, only about forty survived; the fruits of 17 years of intense labor were lost.

Camille Pissarro has been called the “patriarch of impressionism,” although his name is among those names with which the concept “ french impressionism", is rarely called the first. Like most of these artists, he experienced misunderstanding and insulting ridicule, and knew poverty and even destitution during the years of adversity and deprivation. Sometimes he spent whole weeks running from one dealer to another, trying to sell at least some of his work in order to feed his family.

It was amazing person, rare, and even such blows of fate as the loss of paintings in Louveciennes did not break him. Among his comrades, Camille Pissarro remained the most persistent and convinced; he alone did not lose heart when others despaired, and he found the courage not to seek or achieve official recognition and success. Even when he himself experienced despair, even then he remained an example and support for his friends.

Camille Pissarro may not have become a celebrity, but he was, as M. Herman writes, “a model for truly gifted and insightful artists.” It was to him that he owed his artistic education Paul Gauguin, who was beginning his career in art. The impressionists themselves saw in C. Pissarro not just great artist, but also an absolutely honest and fair person to the point of self-denial.

Camille Pissarro worked tirelessly, and, probably, none of the impressionists was so consistent in his views and learned so much pure poetry from ordinary and humble things like him. He not only improved the already found subjects, but always turned to new motives and new means of their artistic expression. So gradually the artist approached main topic his late creativity- To Paris.

True, this was no longer the Paris of C. Pissarro’s youth - the city of gas lamps, the first laid wide streets, a city of dandies and medinettes, glorified by the French graphic artist Paul Gavarni. At the end of the 1890s, gray smoke rose above the rumbling train stations of Paris, department store palaces shone with lights among the old quarters, the Eiffel Tower was already glaring into the sky and the first cars were exciting the minds of Parisians... The city became bustling, the street rhythms became sharper, everything said that that the 19th century was ending.

But K. Pissarro did not strive to capture the face of this Paris in his canvases; rather, he summarized in them the impressions of past years. An eye disease prevented him from working outside. In 1897, he painted the now well-known landscape “Boulevard Montmartre in Paris”, opening from the windows of the Grand Hotel. A year later, in search of new points of view, the artist moved to the Rue de Rivoli to the Louvre Hotel and painted there the painting “Opera Passage in Paris.”

Rain, umbrellas, a line of carriages, wet pavement - that’s all that is depicted on this canvas. But how everything is written! Truly some kind of witchcraft of colors, and it seems that the air itself glows and shimmers with myriads of raindrops. In this silvery fog the depth of the street melts, and behind it is the invisible, huge Paris. The artist was very fond of such motifs - streets and roads that go away from the viewer. In "Opera Passage in Paris" the wet gray stone pavement of Paris glows with many different undertones - yellow, pink, greenish.

C. Pissarro, together with O. Renoir and C. Monet, became one of the first artist-poets of the modern city. They showed that beauty should be sought not only among ancient ruins, but also in the vibrancy of today's life. The city, from which classic artists fled as if from a monster, became for them part of their beloved France. Almost all of the Parisian landscapes of C. Pissarro (like C. Monet) were painted from the “highest point”. They climbed as high as possible with their canvases.

“Opera Passage in Paris” with its ideal compositional balance is reminiscent of the works of C. Pissarro of his youth. The heavy bulk of houses on the left is balanced by the bowl of the fountain slightly shifted downwards in right side paintings. The immediate impression of the flow of people and crews does not interfere with the feeling of calm stability, as is always the case with the artist. He deliberately enhances the rotation of space into depth in order to achieve a kind of perspective tension, although in reality the distance to the Opera building is much less than in the picture.

Paris in the paintings of Camille Pissarro, as M. Herman writes, “has many faces.” “Opera Passage in Paris” depicts a damp, hazy winter day, the distance is hidden by fog, a yellowish half-light trembles on the wet pavement, reflecting the muddy shadows of human figures and cabs. In this work, C. Pissarro, perhaps more than ever before, felt such a characteristic combination of Paris large-scale buildings and wide streets with intimacy and subtle significance of individual details. It unobtrusively and artistically emphasizes the shape of tall chimneys, the rhythm of window awnings, the silhouettes of lanterns and fountain bowls. Judging by the keen sense of the modern “face of the city”, the restraint of color and the swiftness of the spatial effect, many researchers believe that “Opera Passage in Paris” by Camille Pissarro anticipates the future Parisian landscapes of A. Marquet.

RUSSIAN LANDSCAPE PAINTER IN PARIS For the first time - “Kiev Thought”, 1913, March 16, No. 75. Published according to the text of the book: Lunacharsky A.V. Ob. fine arts, vol. 1, p. 395-401. There are two more known articles by Lunacharsky about A. Manevich (“Day”, 1913, No. 64; “Prozhektor”, 1928, No. 34). Closed the other day