Chrissy and I braved the chilly weather and hightailed it to the Camille Pissarro show at the Legion yesterday. I’ve never been particularly fond of Pissarro’s work, but appreciate his anti-establishment demeanor, elder Impressionist status, and for what he gave Cezanne. There’s a kind of tightness, or rigidity, that seems too perfectly confined by his framing, but when he does loosen up, the paintings are quite lovely, and at times the technique is just dazzling. But still, jousting with all those blue-haired ladies to get close to one of those things…
On to Impressionist offspring, Dean Smith and I saw Renoir’s Woman on the Beach, his last film in Hollywood, starring Joan Bennett, the darling of all the european ex-pats during those years, and who gave one of her most sensitive performances. “Go ahead and say it, I’m a tramp.” The story was pretty lurid for the time, with Joan married to a blind painter—she caused his blindness—but carrying on with Robert Ryan, who believes that the painter can really see, and is using his blindness to keep Joan from leaving him. He hoards his increasingly valuable paintings in a closet, the only record of what his eyes had seen. They all get along swimmingly and try to kill each other, and then in the sensational climax, the painter burns his work and, excited about the possibility of finally starting a new project and with flames leaping high into the sky, asks Joan to drive him to New York. She can do whatever she wants, he says, she’s free. Finally freed of him and the security that the paintings brought, she clamps her arm around him and off they go, destitute and with nothing but possibility ahead, just love and art in the city that never sleeps. Bye bye Robert.
How romantic. Sigh.
I would love to see the sequel, where they get to New York and discover how high the rents have risen since they moved to their shack on the beach and how impossible it is to get a show after all the galleries moved to Chelsea and painting became less about expression than cleverly manipulating the viewer and critic into embracing facile surface and commodity fetishism. They should have worked it out with Robert and stayed on the beach.