WINTER SUN

How Camille Pissarro went from mediocrity to magnificence.

- ADAM GOPNIK

It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises— has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his heropainter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.

The absence isn’t that hard to explain. Impressionism, though profound, isn’t philosophical. Symbolism and Surrealism have an agreeably articulate aesthetic, a body of poems, a point of view. Impressionism is mostly silent. Its implicit credo is empirical and material: there is a stubborn physicality to it— bodies and babies and wheat fields and boulevards. It does not make an argument, except in the way art does, by being art. And yet museums provide the one test that matters most, the test of the crowded room, and the most crowded remain the Impressionists’, marking, as Cyril Connolly once suggested, one of the last instances of a valid myth in Western art: the Impressionist myth of bourgeois pleasure.