Pissarro: The First Impressionist
Conference Report

Concept
The conference was planned to coincide with the exhibition, ‘Pissarro: The First Impressionist’ at the Art Gallery of NSW. This was the largest exhibition of the work of a major Impressionist artist ever held in Australia. Curated by Terence Maloon and comprising more than 100 paintings and works on paper, it included some of the artist’s best known paintings. This conference was presented by the Art Gallery of NSW in association with the HRC, ANU, and involved leading experts presenting new research and discussion of many hitherto unexplained and unresolved aspects of Pissarro’s achievements. The Art Gallery of NSW invited the HRC to participate in running the conference because of the HRC’s long commitment to joint research projects with cultural institutions.

In 1984 the Humanities Research Centre annual theme was ‘Landscape and the Arts’, confronting the relationships between ideal and real landscapes and the role of landscapes in a culture’s projection of itself. Twenty years later as part of a broad treatment of ‘Cultural Landscapes’ as the annual theme for 2005 the HRC wished to reassess approaches to representation of landscape in the arts. The conference allowed us to explore French Impressionism and in particular the landscapes and cityscapes of Camille Pissarro and his experiments with pictorial composition in the context of the contemporary ideas surrounding Impressionism and neo-Impressionism. A new catalogue raisoneé of the artist’s work was launched during the conference. Attendances at the highly successful conference were 200 and included scholars, students and members of the public interested in the connections between art and cultural landscapes.

Speakers:
Richard BRETTELL, University of Texas, Dallas
John HOUSE, Courtauld Institute, London
Joachim PISSARRO, MoMA, New York
Richard SHIFF, University of Texas, Austin
Virginia SPATE, University of Sydney
Roger BENJAMIN, University of Sydney
Ted GOTT, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne