Innovation for the Sake of Tradition

Torah is such a playful companion. It puns and teases. Tells stories and often changes a few details, just to see if we were paying attention. This playfulness is not a matter of frivolity. It is a basic provision for our survival. The psalmist cries out, "If your Torah had not been my plaything, I would have perished in my impoverishment!" Torah's favorite game is called "paradox." Here are just a few samples from this game: Learning the art of instability is the only way to experience stability. An invisible God provides the most intense experience of the presence of God. The closest God is the God who is everywhere.

Questions are how Torah often brings us into play. The very first question God asks humanity is "Where are you?" This question may look like it's being asked of Adam and Eve, but it's really being asked of us: How are you going to sustain this magnificent creation of beauty and harmony? The first three major stories in Genesis are cautionary tales about how not to do it: indolence (Adam and Eve); lack of concern about one's neighbors (Noah); living behind walls of isolation from others (Tower of Babel). The model figure for sustaining what has been created is the one who breaks with the prevailing paradigm, the one who is even willing to question the Source of everything. This is Abraham, who separated from the way of everyone around him. Just to make sure we get the point, the earliest rabbis declare that the written Torah is not the only Torah. There's also an oral Torah, transmitted from teacher to disciple over generations. And God has no voice, the rabbis proclaim, in establishing the terms of that oral Torah. It is our voice. We're told that God laughed when hearing that. Subversion, it seems, is the way to sustain what has been created.

The Beauty of a Destabilizing World

For hundreds of years art in Europe was dedicated to illuminating a reality understood to be absolute and stable. This reality was more conceptual than perceptual. It was an ideal not an experienced reality. Government-sponsored academies and art exhibitions ensured that only art that adhered to this approach prospered. In the middle of the 19th century a group of artists rebelled, against both the reigning aesthetic and the social controls governing the development, exhibition and marketing of art. These were the Impressionists. They explored reality not as stable and absolute but as transient and subjective. Where the goal of the classical artist was to hide the individuality of his hand, the Impressionists boldly asserted that the expression of the artist's subjective attitude was a primary element of the art itself. This radical assertion of the artist's unique experience, perception and personality marked the beginning of modern art. At the organizational hub of this subversive movement was Camille Pissarro.

Pissarro's Origins

Pissarro was born in 1830 on the Danish West Indies island of St. Thomas. His father Frederic was a Sephardic Jew, whose ancestors had lived as hidden Jews in Portugal until the mid-18th century. Frederic journeyed to St. Thomas from France to manage the business of his recently deceased uncle. Within a year Frederick and his uncle's widow, Rachel, fell in love. The synagogue on St. Thomas refused to recognize their marriage, declaring it a violation of Jewish law. A beautifully, painterly written novel by Alice Hoffman, A Marriage of Opposites, opens up a narrative to these conflict-filled origins of Pissarro and to his yearnings to escape its confines.

Pissarro began his artistic career sketching on the docks of St. Thomas while working there for his father's trading company. When he was 21 he fled to Venezuela with a visiting Danish artist, spending two years sketching landscapes and village scenes. This founding member of the Impressionist movement initially learned to create art not amid the frenzied and ideologically driven art world of Europe but alone on the beaches, jungles, and villages of South America and the Caribbean. Paul Cezanne remarked on his friend and mentor's creative beginnings: "Pissarro had the good luck to be born in the Antilles. There he learned to draw without masters." Pissarro's reliance on his own vision became a defining aspect of his art.

Light and Time and Motion as Subjects of Art

Eventually, Pissarro left for France, where he encountered a society in a state of rapid transformation: the explosion of the industrial revolution; the political revolutions of 1848; Baron Haussmann's complete reconstruction of Paris over a mere 20-year period; the rise of nationalism; the Paris Commune of 1870. The expansion of railroads had a profound affect on both people's reality and their perception of it. Prior to 1830 the fastest one might travel would be about 15 miles per hour, by horse-driven coach. By 1850 one could travel about 60 miles per hour, by train. To see life move by, or to move through life, at a speed increased by a factor of four changed consciousness about how fixed the moment was.

Beyond the fields, the flowers, and the seascapes, the real subject of the Impressionists' art was time, its fleeting presence. Pissarro led the way not only in illustrating this new awareness of the contingency of reality but also in demolishing the social structures that underpinned authoritarianism of any kind. He was an avowed atheist, who saw religion as a constraint on human development. He embraced anarchism as the political philosophy best aligned with his notion of total freedom. Using the charter of the Pontoise bakers' union as a template, Pissarro drafted the details of a joint stock company, which formed the basis for the revolutionary independent exhibition and marketing of paintings by the Impressionists.

This attack on established social structures of all kinds - political, commercial, religious - was also reflected in the art of the Impressionists. For hundreds of years the perfection of form had been at the center of artistic aesthetics. With Impressionism began the dissolution of form, in favor of the artist's experience. This dissolution of form and elevation of experience accelerated with the succeeding art movements: Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism.

A New Art Form to Preserve Something Quite Ancient

Yet, Pissarro's radical new approach was meant not to destroy but to liberate - to give new breath to life, to open up space, and to expand human initiative. He and his colleagues critiqued the dominant art styles as imposing constraints on human expression and development. They had become an impediment to rather than a facilitation of beauty. Emile Zola, a great supporter of the Impressionists, noted that the establishment painters claimed to follow rules inherited from tradition; but, he argued, those rules had become ossified in their hands, which was reflected in their work. The true followers of tradition, he wrote, were those such as Pissarro who had the capacity to reinvent and transform the rules: subversion for the sake of restoring art to its elemental purpose, the exploration of truth and beauty.

Seeing What is Gained and What is Lost

Working amid a rapidly changing world can provide the excitement of new discoveries and possibilities. Even so, there are moments of pause. To wonder not only what is being achieved as the future hurtles toward us but also what is passing away. Consider this painting by Pissarro, The Railroad Crossing at Les Patis, painted in 1873-74:

Railroad tracks cut through the middle of the image. A gate blocks the way. On the far side of the gate are fields and farms. Tall cypress trees stand proud. In the foreground, to the left of the gate, is a telegraph pole claiming its own vertical place in this world. Two figures walk toward each other. Are they cut off from the bucolic background? Will they meet and speak to one another? Are they optimistic about the future, represented by the railroad? Or are they mourning a world that is passing?

Pissarro would likely say: "Too much story! I ascribe no intentions to the people in my picture. I just paint what I see as I encounter it." He might also encourage us: "You too are a reader of this world. Don't let any guardians of standards tell you otherwise. Go outside. Behold what and who is there. Bring to it your own perspective. Paint your picture."