January 1 & 8, 2024 Issue

Adam Gopnik’s “Winter Sun,” in this week’s issue, is ostensibly a review of Anka Muhlstein’s Camille Pissarro: The Audacity of Impressionism. But after saying a few kind words about the book (e.g., it “invites us to head to the museums to look at the work again”), he embarks on his own interpretation of Pissarro’s life and work. Mulstein is rarely heard from again. I find this annoying. When I read a review, I want to know if the subject book is worth reading. I want to know what it’s about and, just as importantly, I want to know about the quality of its writing. Is it flat, clichéd, and boring, or is it sharp, vivid, and specific? A sample quotation would be appreciated so that I can judge for myself. Gopnik fails to do any of this. 

He also makes at least one questionable judgment of Pissarro. He says that until Pissarro reached his final decade, he was a mediocrity. My favorite Pissarro, Cabbage Field, Pontoise, was painted in 1873, thirty years before he died. Is it mediocre? Not in the eyes of this beholder. Not in the eyes of T. J. Clark, either. Clark writes,

Can we agree that the light in Cabbage Field, which is immediately breathtaking, is some kind of high-summer gloaming, maybe with moisture in the early evening air? (Of course, the painting is equivocal about clock time. It isn't a Monet sunset. It could be that the peasants are taking advantage of the coolness of the morning. But the overall colour balance seems to look forward to dusk). Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. 

Things emerge from the evening light only gradually: it is the light that is striking, not the ghosts of trees. The edge of visibility is a world of its own. Push towards the unnoticeable in vision, therefore, and if necessary the unpaintable: that seems to be Pissarro’s self-instruction. Look at the dark leafless tree in the picture’s left foreground, drawn dark on dark against the hill and the house. How did Pissarro do it? How did he see it as paintable in the first place? Or look at the light caught in the trees on top of the hill, and the final flourish of touches that establish the sparser tree standing on its own between the houses, its dark greens scrawled liquid on pink. [“Strange Apprentice,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2020; retitled "Pissarro and Cézanne" in Clark’s superb 2022 collection If These Apples Should Fall]

Now that’s more like it. Attentive, descriptive, analytical, exquisite – my idea of great critical writing. Pissarro was in the front rank of artists long before his final decade. Gopnik doesn't do him justice.