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Rating: Impressionism, its masters, the achievement towards full freedom of form and color, the rejection of the Academy and iconic classicism, the effusion of light and "en plein air", the marginalization from the austere Salon, poverty, and the continuation of an unprecedented artistic revolution: these are the main themes that Irving Stone, novelist of the lives of famous artists and apologist for Van Gogh in Lust for Life, presents in the voluminous The Passions of Art: Whirlpools of Glory, a fantastical story of fifty years of Impressionist experimentation narrated with a focus on the leading human bond among the rejected painters of nature filtered through the eye of the aesthete, specifically Camille Pissarro.
Jewish by origin and social extraction, Pissarro is a young rebellious and nonconformist artist, the son of a religiously orthodox family, who, having returned from a carefree escape in Latin America, returns to France to dedicate himself essentially to the birth of a new way of conceiving nature and its figurative representation. Approached by the realists Courbet, Corot, and the romantic Delacroix, Pissarro begins to develop the Impressionist thought by painting in the open air and rejecting the old iconic tradition of the academies. His choices, contested by his mother, soon become a subject of curiosity and interest for the "bonne" Julie, the Catholic maid of the Pissarro family, with whom he weaves a genuine love story that leads to the birth of no less than nine children, many of whom died in infancy.
After breaking through the reservations of the Salon in the early 1850s with a pre-Impressionist work, Camille immerses himself, together with friends and colleagues Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Morisot, and Manet, in the drafting of the programmatic manifesto of the new artistic movement which, unfortunately, will be opposed by the majority of the Parisian and French bourgeois elite: the Salon des Refusés, created specifically by an annoyed Napoleon III due to the protests of a group of artists expelled from the very formal official Salon, results in a fiasco, as does the official debut in 1874 with the exhibition in the photographer Nadar's studio and many other similar exhibitions. Pissarro, active between France and Great Britain, does not give up and, although weakened by fluctuating poverty and a large family to feed, continues to paint, also supported by his father and the art dealer Pere Tanguy, creditor to the Impressionists and major architect of the success once achieved. The adventure of Camille, Monet, and the Batignolles group goes on with the discovery of Van Gogh and Gauguin, the struggles of merchant Durand-Ruel in attempting to market their works also positioning them in the United States, the artistic ambitions of the children Lucien, Felix, and Georges, the attempts to exhibit without their teammates, and finally, the milestone of the Seventies in 1900, finally appreciated and able to live a dignified existence free from misery.
A complex and extremely rich work, The Passions of Art: Whirlpools of Glory is a grand compendium of a flourishing cultural and artistic period and, more generally, a respectful picture of France in the late 19th century. Stone illustrates the Impressionist outburst as a revolution with deep roots and not confined only to the fields of pictorial representation (in addition to the Realism of Courbet and Corot, authors and novelists like Flaubert, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire are mentioned, all advocates of an unprecedented shake-up). Impressionism is thus explained as the definitive emancipation from the academies and the closed formal and elite environments in favor of a more attentive reflection on nature and new possible ways of representation and idealization. The Passions of Art: Whirlpools of Glory, however, has a flaw that is understandable when compared to Van Gogh's more novelized profile: Stone, in fact, dilates the chronology of the era and Pissarro's life into an endless flow, which in the last chapters of the work, fails to detach his novel from a simple orthodox and sober biography. The essential intertwining between the life of the most courageous Impressionist, the vicissitudes of his colleagues, and the entrances on the scene of the so-called post-Impressionists (the pointillist Seurat, Signac, and the aforementioned Gauguin and Van Gogh) considerably increases the reading's weight, previously strained by fifty years of narration. Finally, the whirlwind of poverty and recovery of the Pissarro family, perpetually seeking money to feed the offspring, is repeated too many times.
We can, therefore, assert the albeit slight predominance of Lust for Life, focused on Van Gogh's tragic trajectory, over the Impressionist compendium of The Passions of Art: Whirlpools of Glory, also because of Stone's greater ability to "novelize" a single profile better, that of the Dutch proto-Expressionist, moreover rich in much more pathos, emotion, and suffering compared to the more "balanced" existence of Pissarro and company. Both works, however, remain commendable, successful attempts at combining art and literature into a great unicum of senses and spirituality.
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