LOS ANGELES, CA.-The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will present Pioneering Modern Painting: C閦anne and Pissarro 1865-1885 through January 16, 2006. Organized by the artist’s great-grandson Joachim Pissarro, a curator of painting and sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition focuses on the years 1865–85 when C閦anne and Pissarro worked closely with each other, often painting literally side by side. LACMA is the only West Coast venue for the exhibition, which will open in New York on June 26, 2005 and will travel to Los Angeles and to the Musee D’Orsay in Paris.

Pioneering Modern Painting: C閦anne and Pissarro 1865–1885 offers an unprecedented opportunity to examine the parallel creative paths of these two artists, both through their common choices of subject matter and through their intense exploration of new pictorial processes. Camille Pissarro and Paul C閦anne worked together intermittently from the moment they met at the Suisse Art School in 1861 until 1885. The exhibition reveals how modernism developed through acts of exchange and discussion as the artists painted together in Pontoise and Auvers in France’s Oise River Valley. The presentation features an insightful collection of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits—including many that depict exactly the same motif and that are reunited for the first time since they were created.

We feel these artists still have something to tell us, said Joachim Pissarro. This show is breaking the solitary model of the artist as a hero in his ivory tower who had no relationship to his peers. It’s trying to bring them to a much more human level, looking at how they function and their dialogues with each other.

The exhibition explores such subject areas as each artist’s portraits of the other and their self-portraits; an unapologetic interest in very common, earthly subject matters; the similarities and distinctions in the extraordinary itineraries that both artists took together and at separate intervals; and an exploration of how this artistic collaboration defines an important and little-studied facet in the development of modernism.

The collaboration between Pissarro and C閦anne will invite the viewers to question the relevance of the traditional art historical labels used to ‘define’ each artist’s position: Pissarro as the arch-impressionist and C閦anne as the pioneering post-impressionist, said LACMA Chief Curator of European Painting and Sculpture Patrice Marandel. This exhibition produces revealing sets of works by both artists that illustrate the very intense engagement each artist had in the other’s works.