ETERNAL SPRING WITH THEIR FOCUS ON NATURE, CEZANNE AND PISSARRO OPENED OUR EYES IN 20 REVOLUTIONARY YEARS.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

Among other elements, ``Cezanne & Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting 1865-1885'' can lay claim to being the greenest art exhibition in town.

In gallery after gallery at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, landscapes by the crucial French Impressionists/post-Impressionists Paul Cezanne and Camille Pissarro are shown side by side: the forests, farmlands, villages and hillsides of rural France.

In rejecting the conservative subject matter of the traditionalist, formally trained painters of the day, the two artists made landscape the subject of their work rather than background for a history painting or religious allegory.

They reveled in the greenness of nature, as well as in the use of paint that they applied thickly and passionately to symbolize the beauty of what they saw around them. At times the paint appears to become the subject itself, rather than just a means to depict an object.

That may be the reason their art - as well as that of so many of the other young, rebellious French painters of the late 19th century who created Impressionism and its variants - has remained so popular. Looking at it today in a show like this is like being engulfed in a verdant, vibrant, eternal spring.

That feeling is evident here when looking at oil paintings such as Cezanne's ``Forest,'' in which the clumps of leaves fan out from tree branches like a peacock's spread feathers. Or in Pissarro's large ``Edge of the Woods Near L'Hermitage, Pontoise,'' in which the greenery is so luxuriantly enveloping, one can barely tell if an abstracted figure in the picture is a person or not.

It hardly seems to matter amid such beauty. ``Art is a harmonious parallel to nature,'' Cezanne once said.

Letting viewers understand and appreciate this accomplishment is an important reason for this show. It defines the time and place where modernism in painting started. But the exhibit has other purposes, too. It aims to show how these two friends influenced and challenged each other. For more than 20 years, they were the artistic equivalent of brothers-in-arms. Their paintings were a pictorial conversation, with Cezanne sometimes painting the same locations as Pissarro.

This show was organized by Pissarro's great-grandson, Joachim Pissarro, curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art. It opened in New York and goes to Paris after Los Angeles.

Pissarro, in his early 30s, was almost 10 years older than Cezanne when the two met at a studio in Paris in 1861. Pissarro was more worldly, having been born in the West Indies to parents of French (father) and Creole (mother) heritage, while Cezanne was from rural Aix-en- Provence.

Both were primarily self-taught and in rebellion against what they saw as the stultifying predictability and formalism of France's annual juried Salon exhibition. In an 1865 letter to Pissarro, Cezanne said he wanted to paint in a manner that would send members of the highly conservative Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture ``up the wall with rage and despair.''

``I think that they both were looking for something (when they met),'' says J. Patrice Marandel, chief curator at LACMA's Center for European Art. ``Cezanne had a small career behind him - his early paintings were strange, to say the least. He was trying to be a painter of mythological subjects, scenes with erotic overtones, and was not very skilled at painting figures. Pissarro, having grown up between the West Indies and France and having studied in Venezuela, was a bit more trained. But he was still a pretty young, green artist. Both were against the academic training doled out in France at the time.

``I think what they discovered together is landscape,'' Marandel says. ``They discovered that by going outside and painting, but also by looking at the example of Courbet (Gustave Courbet, the early- to mid-19th century champion of realism and naturalism in French painting), who had taught everybody how to look at landscape and then how to paint it differently. And then they did their own thing from there.''

They didn't just do landscapes, although those dominate this exhibit. The fearless qualities of their explorations also were suitable for self-portraits and still lifes. Cezanne's 1873-76 ``Self Portrait'' already starts to feel like it's moving into the realm of expressionism. The patches of strong color on his face are unblended, and the hair is tangled.

One can see Cezanne moving beyond interest in the representation of the way things outwardly look and toward something far more personal and psychologically inward. Pissarro's 1873 ``Self Portrait'' isn't as radical but nevertheless has a fresh, invigorating freeness in its use of light colors.

Cezanne was deeply influenced by Pissarro's early landscapes of the 1860s, especially those painted around the village of Pontoise, with their high horizon lines and sense of airiness. But this show reveals early differences that would grow more pronounced with time.

Cezanne's landscapes, like 1873's ``The House of the Hanged Man'' or 1874's ``Small Houses near Pontoise,'' show little interest in depicting people. Pissarro's 1874 ``The Conversation,'' by comparison, features a man and woman talking, even though they're dwarfed by the countryside around them.

Eventually Cezanne's interest would lead to a revolutionary, near-mystical interpretation of landscape as a series of light-infused, shifting, geometric planes delineated by brush strokes and color. This show's 1894 ``Forest'' is a powerful example. He also explored figuration with the same vision, leading to the late-in-life masterpiece ``The Bathers'' that earned him the title of Father of 20th-Century Art. (That period is outside this show's purview.)

Pissarro, meanwhile, renewed himself from the late 1880s onward by being receptive to the neo-Impressionist style known as pointillism, as practiced by the younger Georges Seurat. He became accomplished and influential in this pinprick-precise use of small brush strokes to apply color and also created late-period masterpieces. He died in 1903, Cezanne in 1906.

``I think the two artists by 1885 were practically worlds apart,'' Marandel says. ``But for those 20 years that they were in a relationship with one another, actually physically in the same space or corresponding to each other, their exchanges were very real.

``But after 1874-75, their relationship was really one of memories - Cezanne remembering Pissarro doing a landscape and (Cezanne) doing it from that same spot, but at the same time, he paints through what he remembers that Pissarro did. It's part of his visual background. But always in his mind there's Pissarro.''

CEZANNE & PISSARRO: PIONEERING MODERN PAINTING 1865-1885

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, noon to 9 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; through Jan. 16.

Tickets: $15 adults, $13 seniors and college students; includes admission to LACMA's permanent collection and nonticketed exhibitions. To purchase, visit lacma.org, or call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) CEZANNE'S ``ROAD AT AUVERS-SUR-OISE,'' CIRCA 1873-74

(2 -- color) PAUL CEZANNE'S ``THE HOUSE OF THE HANGED MAN,'' 1873

(3 -- color) CAMILLE PISSARRO'S ``THE CONVERSATION,'' 1874

(4 -- color) CAMILLE PISSARRO'S ``L'HERMITAGE, PONTOISE: WINTER,'' CIRCA 1874.