‘PARBLEU’: PISSARRO AND THE POLITICAL COLOUR OF AN ORIGINAL VISION

To judge from their own accounts, and from their later work, both Monet and Cezanne eventually succeeded in seeing their motifs only as blocks of colour or coloured 'taches', as if they were free from knowledge of what they looked at, like men who had just gained their sight.' As Charles Stuckey points out, it was Ruskin's injunction to see with an 'innocence of the eye . . . as a blind man would see . . . as if suddenly gifted with sight' that guided Monet to see 'flat stains of colour' and 'patches of colour'; and he also suggests that Taine's ideas on the retina1 data of pre-conceptual visual experience might have been equally influential on the Impressionists at large.' From Richard Shiffs work, i t is clear that this characteristically Impressionist vision was motivated by a search for na'ive ' ' impressions', and for personal 'sensations' supposedly corresponding to a 'double origin' where nature and the self met.? By these accounts, therefore, Impressionist vision was meant to result from an intentionality free of interest in a reified world, and instead to be expressive of a more primal and 'original' experience of reality. Putting aside the vexed question of whether seeing in this way is actually possible for a normal adult, the Impressionists' search for sensations untouched by culture or language remains at least doubly paradoxical. In the first place, their frequent statements on the matter suggest the Impressionists adhered almost religiously to the principle that sensations were the basis of a way of painting free from rules. Moreover, while sensations were meant to be pre-conceptual experiences, it is plain that both Monet and Ctzanne had quite specific concepts about them and the vision corresponding to them, and that these concepts were themselves contingent upon particular nineteenth-century beliefs such as Positivism and ind i~ idua l i sm.~ Moreover, to follow Meyer Schapiro, the list of contingencies determining Impressionist perception would also include their desire to find an alternative to the perception characteristic of a society in the thrall of the 'advance of monopoly capitalism' .' In effect, then, and despite the rhetoric of their own statements, it is precisely because the Impressionists' vision was contingent upon the rationality of a particular