Renoir in the 20th Century at Los Angeles County Museum of Art Feb. 12, 2010
Why bother with Renoir?
These were my thoughts driving into LA last Friday. After all, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was like an old friend, but someone I’d left behind over fifty years ago. Even before kindergarten, I could recognize his chubby pink women and pink-faced children as they lolled joyfully in their perennial April-in-Paris sunshine. My mother took me to the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art frequently and those rooms filled with Impressionist color and light were my Disneyland. Over the years my art education became more “sophisticated.” I rigorously studied the more challenging avant garde: Picasso’s daring line and confusing cubist vision, Matisse and his flattened reduction of forms. Then Pollack and the rest. It was too naive to stay in love with Renoir; he was just too easy!
The first thing the exhibit catalog pointed out, was their intention to feature Renoir’s later work –from 1913 when, at the age of 72 he declared “I am just learning how to paint.” Well, they had me now. I could once again identify with him… and therefore take interest!
Entering the show, the first paintings are the familiar portraits of young girls playing piano, guitar, reading, quietly self-absorbed. You can tell he’s done these compositions for rich patrons because they include a background filled with the patron’s art collections and furnishings (i.e. Degas’ pastels on the wall behind The Lerolle Sisters 1897). A beautiful self-portrait, done in 1899 shows his own soft features with a straight even gaze. In sharp contrast, the black and white photos of him in his studio taken 10 years later show his features shrunken, eyes in hollowed sockets as the ravages of age and rheumatoid arthritis have taken their toll. (And I want to draw and sculpt that face!)
This period of paintings shows his departure from the style of the Impressionists with whom he had been identified during the mid- to late 1800’s. Plein air landscapes are gone as he poses all his models in the studio, adding indistinct backgrounds that look like theater scenery, sketching in perspective and detail. Artists since the Renaissance and earlier had gone to great pains to describe the geology, plants and animals in their backgrounds even as the paintings focused on a monumental figure. Renoir’s lack of detail gives an abstract and timeless quality to his paintings.
The backgrounds are secondary to his involvement with the figures which remind you of classical statuary in their solidity and presence. Everyday women in ordinary gestures are imbued with the gravitas of classical figures. A meditative atmosphere is created with blended pastel colors and soft edged brushwork caressing their placid expressions. Far-off gazes, relaxed, near somnambulistic expressions, and yet the women powerfully occupy the canvas because of his composition and use of color. He creates a meditative atmosphere – perhaps like his own at 70+ years of age.
Renoir’s classical gravitas comes lightly~ his weightless forms, soft curves and colors remind me of Boucher’s luscious nudes floating on clouds—without evoking a leer! The U-turn Renoir takes, away from Impressionism, leads some to say his paintings are in the spirit of Raphael…without the mythology. These two differences might bring his art into the 20th Century. But there’s more.
Those rubber arms! The lack of visible bone structure is a bit disturbing. You see none of the musculature of, for instance, Rodin’s heaviest figures (a contemporary born in 1840). Is this curved line a foretaste of modern abstraction or just part of Renoir’s refusal to interrupt his soft dreamy atmosphere? Then you see this soft line in Matisse’s lounging women, and you realize that those lines plus Renoir’s new ability to include simultaneous views are what give Renoir entree into the world of 20th Century Modern Art (on exhibit a rare view of “Nude on Cushions” 1905).
Looking at the six or seven Renoir drawings in the show, I began to see how his monumental figures and his ability to detach from direct observation, influenced Picasso’s paintings and drawings. Picasso added exaggerated flattening to the forms and volumes but he derives his compositional strength from Renoir’s monumental proportions and layout. In another example “The Saone turns herself into the Arms of the Rhone,” I saw how Renoir’s reference to mythology became a fundamental part of Picasso’s allegorical Minotaurs –and generally all his women with their mythological powers in his life! In fact, as I realized this, I heard or saw a museum note that Picasso owned some of Renoir’s drawings, and there were other references to the two artists having known each other.
Renoir’s explorations of the female body in bronze sculptures (mostly executed by Richard Guino) also influenced Maillol’s (1861-1944) sculptures, some of which were shown in the exhibit. I personally felt Maillol more fully realized those beautifully attenuated and distorted forms in the elegant torso shown in this exhibit.
(From the NY Times, February 14, 2010) RENOIR dallied with sculpture early in his career, but the bronzes for which he is famous were not modeled until just before his death in 1919, at the age of 78. Nudes, mainly, they are as recognizably the master’s work as his canvases – the models and poses are the same, the surfaces even evoke his brushwork as it was in the late years. At the same time, the figures – Aphrodites all, even when posing as washerwomen – are very like Maillol’s, having similar proportions and the same heavy, tubular limbs. The likeness isn’t exactly a matter of influence, for while Renoir admired Maillol, and the sculptor, 20 years his junior, saw himself as the painter’s spiritual son, each in his own medium had long been pursuing the classical ideal.)
Before this exhibit, I hadn’t made the connection between Renoir’s artistic vision and that of modern artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Maillol. Since the exhibit, I’ve once again made contact with a very dear old friend and am truly thankful to have found many new reasons to acknowledge his genius.
The last painting I saw in the show was “The Bathers” dated somewhere between 1895 and 1919. Matisse called this painting Renoir’s masterpiece. By this time, Renoir was confined to a wheelchair and painting with his brushes tied to his arthritic fingers. It’s a large canvas and he is said to have told another artist that it was his best work yet! He’s painting. Painting. Painting. Looking back on the whole exhibit, I can feel the abundance of life in his work. I emerged from this exhibit with the happiest feeling, passionately warmed by Renoir’s unquenchable love of paint.
My friend Phil, who has traveled the world and had the most amazing adventures, wrote to me: “One of my dearest, most intelligent mentors asked me the following: What do you think you will truly own in your lifetime? While I was thinking it over, he pointed out that you don’t own a house … “when you die, the house goes on.” Then he gave me the correct answer: ”Phil, the only thing you will ever truly own is your allotted time on earth … and you don’t know how much you’ve got. Don’t waste any of it.” Nan, one thing I’ve learned: The more risks you take the better you get at measuring them. And, as you commented, I really have been a lucky sunofabitch!”
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