Albert Skira Editeur (Unpublished drawings by Camille Pisarro) - Torpitudes Sociales

This precious editorial work is a perfect replica, in exquisite graphic design, of the album of drawings created by Camille Pisarro in 1890, entitled "Turpitudes Sociales." Pissarro shared socialist ideas with the literary and artistic avant-garde of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, as the social question spread throughout European societies, the work of painters such as Millet and Daumier, for example, favored subjects related to life in the fields, factory work, or strikes, precisely to denounce the inequality and injustice of the post-Industrial Revolution era. Pisarro, with his rural and urban landscapes, allows only subtle traces of this orientation. But in November-December 1889, he secretly composed twenty-eight pen drawings on the theme of the misfortune of the poor and the indifferent greed of the wealthy: thus was born the collection of "Social Horrors." In twenty-eight episodes, Pissarro recounts bourgeois marriages for money, the sumptuous burial of a cardinal, the horrific working conditions in factories, and the corruption of bankers. His parade of images depicting suicide, hunger, poverty, drunkenness, and exploitation concludes with a scene of violent insurrection by the urban working class. Unknown until 1972 and held in the Jean Bonna collection in Geneva, the collection was published for the first time in France, with an introduction by Henri Mitterrand.

In this work, Pissarro proves himself a true follower of Daumier, precisely because of the force of his social commentary. The drawings appear to have been hastily sketched, although it is well known that Pissarro worked on them with great dedication, carefully selecting scenes, characters, and captions. Indeed, the great artist's virtuosity in graphic line and hatching, as well as his optical variations and lighting effects, modulated with absolute artistic freedom, perfectly harmonize with this populist and socially inflammatory inspiration.

Camille Pissarro (Saint-Thomas, 1830 - Paris, 1903) was born in the Antilles, then known as the West Indies. His education, however, took place in France, and in 1855 he settled permanently in Paris, where he attended the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts for a time. In 1874, he was among the most committed and enthusiastic organizers of the first Impressionist exhibition, held at Nadar's studio, and in subsequent years he was the only one to participate in all the exhibitions held until 1886, also adhering for a time to the young Seurat's exaggerated Neo-Impressionist Divisionism. Along with Monet, however, Pissarro is widely considered the most "diehard" of the Impressionists. Indeed, the master's art draws its truest inspiration from open-air rural landscapes.

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