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Pissarro exhibit spans four generations of artists
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BY: MARILYN H. KARFELD Senior Staff Reporter
Lélia Pissarro never knew her great-grandfather, the famous Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, who died 60 years before she was born.
But Lélia, who showed flair for drawing at age 2 or 3, grew up surrounded by her famous family’s heritage.
Four of her landscapes are among the 56 works in “Lasting Impressions: The Pissarro Family Legacy,” now on view at Contessa Gallery at Legacy Village in Lyndhurst. Four of Camille’s five sons are also represented by artwork in the show, along with that of three of his grandchildren.
The works range from small watercolors by Camille’s fourth son, Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro, to the exhibit’s show stopper by Camille himself, a beautifully worked, thickly layered oil of an old wine grower, “Vieux Vigneron - Moret (Intérieur),” painted in 1902, a year before Camille’s death. Seven works by Camille are in the exhibit, including “Cheval Blanc et Tombereau,” a small 1862 oil of a white horse, which Lélia pronounces her favorite, at least on that day.
“It’s very powerful of this period,” she says in her rapid-fire, French-accented English, hands slicing through the air as she points out the painting’s details. “It’s more interesting, more touching; it says how Impressionism developed.”
Camille painted the first known Impressionist work, she notes, and taught Paul Cézanne, among other artists. An exhibit of Cézanne’s and Pissarro’s work, paintings of the same subject displayed side by side, was shown at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2005.
Lélia’s older brother, Joachim, MoMA curator of painting and sculpture, spent 16 years creating and organizing that show, says David Stern, Lélia’s husband and co-curator of the Contessa show.
The daughter of Hugues Claude Pissarro, one of Camille’s five artist sons, Lélia was raised by her grandmother and grandfather Paulémile Pissarro. She represents the fourth generation of Pissarro artists, a group of 17 painters spanning 150 years.
“My grandfather taught me to write when I was 3 or 4 so I could sign my paintings,” says Lélia, 43, who spoke to the CJN last week while she and husband David were in Cleveland for the exhibit’s opening.
Because her parents traveled frequently, Lélia and her two older brothers were frequently left with their grandparents who resided in a small French village. Ultimately, Lélia’s parents decided it was too difficult to bounce a baby girl from house to house, so she was entrusted to her grandparents’ care for about a dozen years.
There she reaped much attention, encouragement and praise because of her early facility with pencil and paper.
“My grandfather was very patient,” Lélia recalls. “He taught me to look, to see, to recognize part of the face where there are shadows.”
While her paintings in the Contessa exhibit are Impressionist landscapes, in more recent work she has pursued an abstract style. She attributes this to her diagnosis with breast cancer three years ago and her subsequent surgery and treatment.
She promised herself if she survived, she would explore a new style.
“I was brought up under the Pissarro heritage and learned to draw and paint in the figurative matter,” she says. “Every exhibit I would sell out everything.”
Concerned that her name alone brought her success, for two years she signed every painting simply Lélia. Her art still sold.
Her cancer treatment caused her to lose the use of her right arm, and she stopped painting for 18 months. When she regained some of her strength, she painted a series of 40 snowy landscapes of a house in her grandparents’ village, two of which are in the show.
While the snow series is more abstract than her earlier work, Lélia felt she still needed to paint “freer, more emotional, more loose.
“Art, I realized, is totally intellectual,” she says. “Figurative art n you use your skill, your eyes. It’s not challenging (to me) anymore.”
Descended from Portuguese Marranos, Jews forced to convert to Catholicism who practiced their faith in secret, Lélia’s great-grandfather Jacob Camille Pissarro was born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.
He had a complex upbringing, which may have instilled his passionately anti-religious stance, explains Stern, an art historian. Camille’s father Frédéric was sent to St. Thomas to deal with his uncle’s estate and ended up having a child with his uncle’s widow, who was seven years his senior. The couple wanted to marry.
But the marriage was prohibited under halachah, Stern says. Since St. Thomas was the possession of Denmark at the time, Frédéric obtained permission to marry from the Danish king, and the couple wed in 1826 in a civil ceremony.
“But Frédéric invited 10 Jewish friends n a minyan n so he managed to slip in a bit of Judaism,” says Stern. “The rabbis were furious and tried to annul the marriage.”
After years of dispute (the aftermath of a big scandal on a small island), the prosperous Pissarros reached a settlement with the Jewish elders.
But the antagonism over the rejection by the Jewish community remained. Camille was born in 1830 and sent to a Christian school attended by children of Creoles and black slaves. Camille married Julia Vellay, a Catholic girl, who gave up her religious beliefs. He found religion “a messy business,” says Stern.
“Camille’s sons (meanwhile) were attracted to Jewish girls,” continues Stern with a chuckle. “Three of them married Jewish wives.”
Because of his upbringing, Camille had strong populist leanings, Stern adds. He struggled financially throughout his lifetime and considered his family name a liability in the art world. Because his paintings weren’t selling, he encouraged his sons to use pseudonyms on their work.
Lélia’s father also used a pseudonym to distinguish different styles of his paintings. He used H. Claude Pissarro on his post-Impressionist pastels of ladies with long skirts and parasols, a number of which are in the Contessa show. But on his more modern work, he uses Hugues Pissarro dit Pomié.
During Camille’s lifetime, anti-Semitism was also an issue in France. In his long white beard, Camille looked “very Jewish,” Stern says, and in the heat of the Dreyfus affair, fellow Impressionists like Renoir and Degas shunned him. In a letter to his son Lucien, Camille says Degas, previously a close friend, crossed the street to avoid him.
Despite Camille’s self-professed atheism and anarchism, being Jewish was important n on some level n to his sons, Stern says. Lélia recalls that at age 9, she begged her grandfather to let her be confirmed with her friends in their very Christian village in Normandy.
Her grandfather refused permission, revealing to her that she was Jewish. Lélia had no idea even what Judaism was.
“When you are 21, if you want to convert, you can,” she recalls her father telling her. “For now, it’s important to me that you remain Jewish.”
Still not grasping what being Jewish really meant, Lélia returned to her parents at 11 and attended school in Paris. One day in spring, she was eating “this flat dry bread” n matzah n because it was what was in her home. A group of Jewish girls approached her at school, asking if she was Ashkenazi or Sephardic.
Thus began Lélia’s introduction to Judaism. “I was like a lost soul,” she says. “They were all Sephardic Jews. Their mothers invited me into their homes. I loved every part of it.”
When she was 16, she asked her father if she could attend a Jewish school, to which he happily agreed. The rabbi there was under the impression that her mother was Jewish because she had a Sephardic-sounding maiden name.
When the rabbi discovered that Lélia’s mother was in fact Catholic, he said the young Pissarro could not attend the Jewish school unless she converted. Reluctantly, she agreed.
When she was about 21, Lélia went to Israel, where she met her future husband in his father’s Tel Aviv gallery. Today, David, who owns art galleries in London and Tel Aviv, and Lélia live in London, Israel and France. Their three children, daughters Kalia, 18, and Lyora, 16, and son Dotahn, 11, are Israeli citizens.
“It’s too early to say” if any of the Pissarro-Stern children will carry on the family’s art tradition, Lélia says.
However, Lyora won an important art scholarship at her London school, although her mother tried to deter her from even entering the competition. Lélia was certain the school would want to avoid the appearance of partiality to the famous Pissarro name and would never award it to Lyora.
This spring Lyora withdrew her application to study philosophy at a university because she decided to study history of art instead.
It appears the Pissarro art gene is surfacing in a fifth generation.
mkarfeld@cjn.org
But Lélia, who showed flair for drawing at age 2 or 3, grew up surrounded by her famous family’s heritage.
Four of her landscapes are among the 56 works in “Lasting Impressions: The Pissarro Family Legacy,” now on view at Contessa Gallery at Legacy Village in Lyndhurst. Four of Camille’s five sons are also represented by artwork in the show, along with that of three of his grandchildren.
The works range from small watercolors by Camille’s fourth son, Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro, to the exhibit’s show stopper by Camille himself, a beautifully worked, thickly layered oil of an old wine grower, “Vieux Vigneron - Moret (Intérieur),” painted in 1902, a year before Camille’s death. Seven works by Camille are in the exhibit, including “Cheval Blanc et Tombereau,” a small 1862 oil of a white horse, which Lélia pronounces her favorite, at least on that day.
“It’s very powerful of this period,” she says in her rapid-fire, French-accented English, hands slicing through the air as she points out the painting’s details. “It’s more interesting, more touching; it says how Impressionism developed.”
Camille painted the first known Impressionist work, she notes, and taught Paul Cézanne, among other artists. An exhibit of Cézanne’s and Pissarro’s work, paintings of the same subject displayed side by side, was shown at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2005.
Lélia’s older brother, Joachim, MoMA curator of painting and sculpture, spent 16 years creating and organizing that show, says David Stern, Lélia’s husband and co-curator of the Contessa show.
The daughter of Hugues Claude Pissarro, one of Camille’s five artist sons, Lélia was raised by her grandmother and grandfather Paulémile Pissarro. She represents the fourth generation of Pissarro artists, a group of 17 painters spanning 150 years.
“My grandfather taught me to write when I was 3 or 4 so I could sign my paintings,” says Lélia, 43, who spoke to the CJN last week while she and husband David were in Cleveland for the exhibit’s opening.
Because her parents traveled frequently, Lélia and her two older brothers were frequently left with their grandparents who resided in a small French village. Ultimately, Lélia’s parents decided it was too difficult to bounce a baby girl from house to house, so she was entrusted to her grandparents’ care for about a dozen years.
There she reaped much attention, encouragement and praise because of her early facility with pencil and paper.
“My grandfather was very patient,” Lélia recalls. “He taught me to look, to see, to recognize part of the face where there are shadows.”
While her paintings in the Contessa exhibit are Impressionist landscapes, in more recent work she has pursued an abstract style. She attributes this to her diagnosis with breast cancer three years ago and her subsequent surgery and treatment.
She promised herself if she survived, she would explore a new style.
“I was brought up under the Pissarro heritage and learned to draw and paint in the figurative matter,” she says. “Every exhibit I would sell out everything.”
Concerned that her name alone brought her success, for two years she signed every painting simply Lélia. Her art still sold.
Her cancer treatment caused her to lose the use of her right arm, and she stopped painting for 18 months. When she regained some of her strength, she painted a series of 40 snowy landscapes of a house in her grandparents’ village, two of which are in the show.
While the snow series is more abstract than her earlier work, Lélia felt she still needed to paint “freer, more emotional, more loose.
“Art, I realized, is totally intellectual,” she says. “Figurative art n you use your skill, your eyes. It’s not challenging (to me) anymore.”
Descended from Portuguese Marranos, Jews forced to convert to Catholicism who practiced their faith in secret, Lélia’s great-grandfather Jacob Camille Pissarro was born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.
He had a complex upbringing, which may have instilled his passionately anti-religious stance, explains Stern, an art historian. Camille’s father Frédéric was sent to St. Thomas to deal with his uncle’s estate and ended up having a child with his uncle’s widow, who was seven years his senior. The couple wanted to marry.
But the marriage was prohibited under halachah, Stern says. Since St. Thomas was the possession of Denmark at the time, Frédéric obtained permission to marry from the Danish king, and the couple wed in 1826 in a civil ceremony.
“But Frédéric invited 10 Jewish friends n a minyan n so he managed to slip in a bit of Judaism,” says Stern. “The rabbis were furious and tried to annul the marriage.”
After years of dispute (the aftermath of a big scandal on a small island), the prosperous Pissarros reached a settlement with the Jewish elders.
But the antagonism over the rejection by the Jewish community remained. Camille was born in 1830 and sent to a Christian school attended by children of Creoles and black slaves. Camille married Julia Vellay, a Catholic girl, who gave up her religious beliefs. He found religion “a messy business,” says Stern.
“Camille’s sons (meanwhile) were attracted to Jewish girls,” continues Stern with a chuckle. “Three of them married Jewish wives.”
Because of his upbringing, Camille had strong populist leanings, Stern adds. He struggled financially throughout his lifetime and considered his family name a liability in the art world. Because his paintings weren’t selling, he encouraged his sons to use pseudonyms on their work.
Lélia’s father also used a pseudonym to distinguish different styles of his paintings. He used H. Claude Pissarro on his post-Impressionist pastels of ladies with long skirts and parasols, a number of which are in the Contessa show. But on his more modern work, he uses Hugues Pissarro dit Pomié.
During Camille’s lifetime, anti-Semitism was also an issue in France. In his long white beard, Camille looked “very Jewish,” Stern says, and in the heat of the Dreyfus affair, fellow Impressionists like Renoir and Degas shunned him. In a letter to his son Lucien, Camille says Degas, previously a close friend, crossed the street to avoid him.
Despite Camille’s self-professed atheism and anarchism, being Jewish was important n on some level n to his sons, Stern says. Lélia recalls that at age 9, she begged her grandfather to let her be confirmed with her friends in their very Christian village in Normandy.
Her grandfather refused permission, revealing to her that she was Jewish. Lélia had no idea even what Judaism was.
“When you are 21, if you want to convert, you can,” she recalls her father telling her. “For now, it’s important to me that you remain Jewish.”
Still not grasping what being Jewish really meant, Lélia returned to her parents at 11 and attended school in Paris. One day in spring, she was eating “this flat dry bread” n matzah n because it was what was in her home. A group of Jewish girls approached her at school, asking if she was Ashkenazi or Sephardic.
Thus began Lélia’s introduction to Judaism. “I was like a lost soul,” she says. “They were all Sephardic Jews. Their mothers invited me into their homes. I loved every part of it.”
When she was 16, she asked her father if she could attend a Jewish school, to which he happily agreed. The rabbi there was under the impression that her mother was Jewish because she had a Sephardic-sounding maiden name.
When the rabbi discovered that Lélia’s mother was in fact Catholic, he said the young Pissarro could not attend the Jewish school unless she converted. Reluctantly, she agreed.
When she was about 21, Lélia went to Israel, where she met her future husband in his father’s Tel Aviv gallery. Today, David, who owns art galleries in London and Tel Aviv, and Lélia live in London, Israel and France. Their three children, daughters Kalia, 18, and Lyora, 16, and son Dotahn, 11, are Israeli citizens.
“It’s too early to say” if any of the Pissarro-Stern children will carry on the family’s art tradition, Lélia says.
However, Lyora won an important art scholarship at her London school, although her mother tried to deter her from even entering the competition. Lélia was certain the school would want to avoid the appearance of partiality to the famous Pissarro name and would never award it to Lyora.
This spring Lyora withdrew her application to study philosophy at a university because she decided to study history of art instead.
It appears the Pissarro art gene is surfacing in a fifth generation.
mkarfeld@cjn.org
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