Contradictions Revisited
What, then, do these contradictions between Pissarro's apparent praise of industry in his artwork and his stated belief that urbanization and industrialization were detrimental to society tell us about Pissarro? To begin, they remind us that Pissarro is not a strictly rural painter, an advocate of the agrarian lifestyle. He leaves room for the city in his art. In fact, toward the end of his life, he clearly favored it. Speaking of an urban scene that he painted in Paris, Pissarro said: “It's so beautiful to paint! Maybe it's not very aesthetic, but I'm enchanted to be able to try to paint these streets in Paris which people usually call ugly, but which are so silvery, so luminous and so alive; it's quite different from the boulevards—this is the real modern” (qtd House “Anarchist” 141). This passage shows how Pissarro must have found beauty that others didn't see in the busy parts of the French cities that he painted, including an unseen beauty in the factories that were wan to appear in the cities. Otherwise, he would not have painted such a large number in the last decade of his life. Why then, would he advocate a political system which damned the factories that he apparently admired? Perhaps he advocated parts of the anarchist credo more than others. For example, anarchists held that human beings were “innately good,” and the factory was a direct product of human thought. While factories were owned by bourgeois capitalists, they also employed thousands of proletariats, thus benefiting the class of people that anarchy sought to free. So, the issue of anarchy and industry is far from cut and dry, especially for Camille Pissarro. While his political party dictated how he should view factories, clearly he saw things a bit differently. Maybe he wasn't as much an anarchist as he was an individualist, for instead of painting what he was told to see, he painted what he saw.