Exhibition on Screen: PISSARRO: FATHER OF IMPRESSIONISM

Director: David Bickerstaff

2022, UK, 94min

 

Bravo to Exhibition on Screen for giving art lovers access to museums and artworks in select cinemas around the world! The brainchild of filmmaker Phil Grabsky, EOS now brings inspiring masterpieces to 1500 cinemas in 55 countries. This May, the spotlight is on “The Father of Impressionism,” Camille Pissarro. In the first major retrospective in four decades, the Ashmolean Museum Oxford opens its archives to reveal their wonderfully extensive and rich collection of this forward-thinking artist’s work. The film follows Pissarro to Paris, from life as the leader of a scorned artistic movement to the revered “old man” who championed Claude Manet and Paul Cézanne. His paintings gain an added dimension with interviews with curators and a narration consisting of the many letters the often-misunderstood radical wrote to his most loyal audience: his family.

“So why did Pierre-Auguste Renoir refer to Pissarro’s work as ‘revolutionary’? It is in his artistic portrayals of the common man we find our answer.” – Jonathan Jones, The Guardian.