After a bracing Sunday morning breakfast at O Cafe and Deli along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, I boarded a Metro 720 Rapid bus for the long ride up Wilshire Boulevard to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to view the recently opened special exhibition of works by the Impressionist artists Cezanne and Pissarro.

The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were much influenced by Japanese woodblock print artists and their use of flat blocks of color, the tendency to frame a view so as to suggest its continuity beyond the scene's border and their essentially decorative aesthetic approach to their art. Both Cezanne and Pissarro exhibit these influences, to be sure, but I was struck by the host of other influences also a work in their paintings.

The two often worked side-by-side, particularly in the paintings undertaken in the French country villages of Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise in the mid-nineteeth century. They collaborated with and influenced one another to a degree that makes it difficult for the viewer to tell who impacted whom and how. Viewing their works next to one another on the gallery walls made comparisons between the two easy to make: Pissarro frequently incorporated people into his scenes; Cezanne did not; Cezanne worked with geometric blocks of color emphasizing their shape, interaction and placement; Pissarro washed his works with wide swaths of color, using color to capture the effects of light and atmosphere.

The exhibit was a delight, especially in connection with visits to the museum's permanent (and beautifully lit) collection of Japanese screen paintings, shop and bookstore. The audio tour, too, was wonderful.

I left the museum impressed with the way in which one's primary interests (in Japanese history and culture, for example) can open one to all kinds of new experiences and enlarge one's appreciation of the world in general. I now know more than before about the myriad of influences at work in the aesthetic world of the French Impressionists and will look at their works with different eyes as a result. And isn't this what a "Liberal Arts Education" is all about?

Not one to avoid the glitter and glamour of the LA Scene, I spent much of the remainder of the day wandering along Rodeo Drive. Didn't see one celebrity; just a lot of fellow tourists and more fancy automobiles than you could count!

- OCTOBER 25, 2005

Click on any of the report titles in the column 
at the left to continue.