Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) met in Paris in 1861. There they forged an artistic relationship – painting side by side in the French countryside, showing together, and critiquing each other’s works – that would last nearly 25 years. Cezanne referred to himself as Pissarro’s pupil. It can be said that after nature and the Louvre, Pissarro was the greatest influence in Cezanne’s education as a painter.

“Cezanne and Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting,” an exhibition of 85 paintings and 10 works on paper that opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, explores the relationship between the two artists, as it attempts to redress the legacy, influence, and importance of Pissarro. Curated by art historian Joachim Pissarro (the artist’s great-grandson), the show is loosely chronological and begins with two nearly identically structured, three-quarter-view, bearded self-portraits from the 1870s.This is a perfectly suitable way to begin a two-person exhibition, but it sets the stage for a show organized around side-by-side comparisons.

The thesis also demands, much to the show’s detriment, that the exhibition end abruptly around 1885, when the two artists went their separate ways. Both the show and the artists feel cut off at the neck. It leaves us wondering: “And then?” This is especially detrimental to Cezanne, whose unique genius cannot be attached to anyone, who was never part of a movement, and who did his best work in the last decade of his life. The show does end with his “Forest” (c. 1894), from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a masterpiece whose rustling color strokes fracture the plane in areas that appear to leap forward to the abstractions of Robert Delaunay, but “Cezanne and Pissarro” could only have benefited from a last room in which both artists could be seen disjoined, apart – allowed to be only themselves.

Especially as the exhibition has brought together so many privately owned works that have never before been publicly exhibited. I was mistaken when I thought I knew Pissarro, who is here broadly exhibited. There is an enormous amount to be learned and savored. The danger, though, in organizing a show around how two artists responded to one another – which stresses the artists’ connectedness through a back-and-forth approach to the works – is that it puts emphasis on the experience “between,” or “outside,” rather than “in” the paintings. The show underlines the importance of influence over independence: It stresses the paintings’ similarities and dissimilarities at the expense of their standalone individuality, which is the lifeblood of art.

This is not to say that much is not gained by seeing works next to one another, especially when, as is often the case in “Cezanne and Pissarro,” the artists are working from the same motif; or when, for example, Cezanne actually borrowed Pissarro’s landscape “Louveciennes” (1871) and made his own copy, “Louveciennes” (c. 1872). The two paintings, exhibited together at MoMA, show Cezanne finding his own voice, as well as that of other artists (Corot, for instance), in Pissarro.

Compare a landscape made by Cezanne to one made by Pissarro – of the same view, on the same day, under the same conditions – as in Pissarro’s “Path and Hills, Pontoise” and Cezanne’s “Houses at Pontoise, near Valhermeil” (both 1882), and you can see how each artist approached the motif’s light, foliage, and sweep of the countryside; how each composed his rectangle; and how each discovered more of himself as he took from the other.

And it isn’t always side-by-side work. Cezanne sometimes returned years later to paint a scene or motif of his friend’s. One of the best Pissarros in the show, the large masterful “Gardens at L’Hermitage, Pontoise” (1867-69), inspired Cezanne’s “L’Hermitage at Pontoise” (1881).

In the pairings we can see Cezanne leaning toward Pissarro’s Impressionist handling of paint, as in “Village Framed by Trees” (c. 1881), or Pissarro unsuccessfully breaking the canvas with the elisions of Cezanne, as in the academic painting “Landscape at Osny” (c. 1883). Yet there are just as many times when the artists owe more to other painters than to one another: the architecturally ordered classicism of Poussin; the thickly impastoed, palette-knifed surfaces of Courbet; the insistent, hammered out strokes of van Gogh; the almost human presence felt in the delicately quivering trees of Claude or Corot.

“Cezanne and Pissarro” would like to join these two artists at the hip (the curator seems almost surprised that the two artists eventually went their separate ways). But because of this, when all is said and done, one of the inescapable things the exhibition makes clear is that Cezanne was the far greater artist.

Time and again here I was held by a beautiful Pissarro still life or landscape, only to be drawn to the brighter flame of an adjacent Cezanne. It is not merely a question of temperament. Cezanne’s paintings, from the first self-portrait in the show onward, reveal a unique power of intention – a monumental clarity – that escaped Pissarro. In his “Still Life: Apples and Pears in a Round Basket” (1872), Pissarro gave us a gorgeously bountiful and rocking basket of fruit; Cezanne, in his “Plate of Apples” (c. 1874), gave us an explosion – a vivisection.

Pissarro could orchestrate space. He was a great colorist who conveyed the various qualities of atmosphere: arid, dusty light; dense woods; active skies. Over and over again he achieved a vibrating, airy light in his canvases, through which you can move easily, breezily. The tessellating, Impressionist surfaces of his paintings feel sensual, intimate, and relaxed. “Small Bridge, Pontoise” (1875) is as lush and cool and rich as a Cezanne.

Yet in so many of Pissarro’s canvases forms feel attended to, at times almost coddled. Cezanne imbued each form, each brushstroke with feeling, with inner purpose and anxiety. His color strokes sing pure, clear, and strong, and his canvases are so tightly wound – yet tempered by such unequaled grace – that Pissarro’s Impressionist or, later, Pointillist strokes can feel itchy, borrowed, or mannered. In Pissarro I am aware of things – of the desire to touch; in Cezanne I am aware of the desire to possess – to own. Pissarro was a great painter; Cezanne the father of Modern Art.

Until September 12 (53 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400).