Impressionist Camille Pissarro is not often thought of as a Jewish artist.
Born in 1830 to a Sephardic Jewish family on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, he did not paint particularly Jewish scenes, and he lived a secular life.
But Pissarro was in fact the only Jew among the most prominent 19th-century Impressionists, and he suffered at the end of his life because of his Judaism.
“Pissarro’s People,” a new exhibit opening Saturday, Oct. 22 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, offers a different look at an artist best known for his landscapes and urban vistas. It highlights his anarchist politics as expressed in utopian visions of rural folk working the land together.
In another life, Pissarro might have been a kibbutznik. But, says Jim Ganz, the exhibit’s curator, it is “tricky” to consider Pissarro a Jewish artist in the strict sense of the word.
“He wasn’t a religious man,” Ganz says.
Pissarro rebelled against his background by marrying a French Catholic, with whom he had eight children, and discouraged his son Lucien from becoming more observant when Lucien married into a conservative British Jewish family.
In “Les Turpitudes Sociales” (Social Disgraces, 1890), pen-and-ink drawings that criticized bourgeois culture, Pissarro utilized a number of anti-Semitic stereotypes. The sheet Ganz chose to display at the Legion’s exhibit shows a hook-nosed banker clutching a bag of money. But Ganz attributes this and other similar images more to Pissarro’s radical politics than to any anti-Semitic attitudes.
In the late 1890s, Pissarro became a victim of the anti-Jewish sentiment stirred up by the Dreyfus Affair, the case of a French Jewish officer wrongfully convicted of treason.
As anti-Semitism grew in France, Pissarro was shunned by many of his fellow Impressionists and former friends, most notably Edgar Degas and Paul-Auguste Renoir.
Near the end of his life, the artist holed up in a Paris hotel, where one day he narrowly escaped a street mob shouting “Death to the Jews” — an ironic end for a man whose Judaism so little informed his artistic career.
“Pissarro’s People,” Saturday, Oct. 22 to Jan. 22, 2012 at the Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave., S.F. $10-$15. http://legionofhonor.famsf.org or (415) 750-3600.