Kunstmuseum Basel - Curator Josef Helfenstein on the exhibition “Camille Pissarro“

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) ranks among the most distinguished artists of nineteenth-century France. To retrace the arc of his exceptionally diverse oeuvre is to witness the birth of modernism. And yet today’s histories of art often cast Pissarro in a subsidiary role. It has been more than sixty years since a museum in Switzerland devoted a presentation to this eminent artist. The comprehensive exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel offers an overview of Pissarro’s output and puts the focus on his collaborative relationships with his contemporaries. As a friend and mentor, Pissarro was in close contact with artists of several generations, including Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt. His sustained exchanges of ideas with his colleagues may be regarded as a vital catalyst for seminal developments in the painting of the second half of the nineteenth century. As a central figure in Impressionism, Pissarro exerted considerable influence over the movement’s oth