Renoir

February 25, 1841. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau." In this image: A visitor looks at the 1874 painting 'La Loge (The Theatre Box)', right, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir on display in an exhibition 'Renoir at the Theatre : Looking at 'La Loge' at the Courtauld Gallery in London, Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008. The exhibition for the first time brings together 'La Loge' with Renoir's other treatments of the subject and loge paintings by his contemporaries. On the left is a small version of the same painting recently bought by Diane B. Wilsey of U.S. in an auction at Sotheby's for three times its pre-sale estimated.

 Le Moulin de la Galette, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

 "Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Monet worked closely together during the late 1860s, painting similar scenes of popular river resorts and views of a bustling Paris. Renoir was by nature more solid than Monet, and while Monet fixed his attentions on the ever-changing patterns of nature, Renoir was particularly entranced by people and often painted friends and lovers. His early work has a quivering brightness that is gloriously satisfying and fully responsive to what he is painting, as well as to the effects of the light.

"Renoir seems to have had the enviable ability to see anything as potentially of interest. More than any of the Impressionists, he found beauty and charm in the modern sights of Paris. He does not go deep into the substance of what he sees but seizes upon its appearance, grasping its generalities, which then enables the spectator to respond with immediate pleasure. "Pleasure" may be decried by the puritanical instinct within us all, but it is surely the necessary enhancer that life needs. It also signifies a change from Realism: the Impressionists' paintings have none of the labored toll of Millet's peasants, for example. Instead they depict delightful, intimate scenes of the French middle class at leisure in the country or at cafes and concerts in Paris. Renoir always took a simple pleasure in whatever met his good-humored attention, but he refused to let what he saw dominate what he wanted to paint. Again he deliberately sets out to give the impression, the sensation of something, its generalities, its glancing life. Maybe, ideally, everything is worthy of attentive scrutiny, but in practice there is no time. We remember only what takes our immediate notice as we move along.

"In The Boating Party Lunch, a group of Renoir's friends are enjoying that supreme delight of the working man and woman, a day out. Renoir shows us interrelationships: notice the young man intent upon the girl at the right chatting, while the girl at the left is occupied with her puppy. But notice too the loneliness, however relaxed, that can be part of anyone's experience at a lunch party. The man behind the girl and her dog is lost in a world of his own, yet we cannot but believe that his reverie is a happy one. The delightful debris of the meal, the charm of the young people, the hazy brightness of the world outside the awning - all communicates an earthly vision of paradise." Sister Wendy

 "One of Renoir's early portraits, A Girl with a Watering Can, has all the tender charm of its subject, delicately unemphasized, not sentimentalized, but clearly relished. Renoir stoops down to the child's height so that we look at her world from her own altitude. This, he hints, is the world that the little one sees - not the actual garden that adults see today, but the nostalgic garden that they remember from their childhood. The child is sweetly aware of her central importance. Solid little girl though she is, she presents herself with the fragile charm of the flowers. Her sturdy little feet in their sensible boots are somehow planted in the garden, and the lace of her dress has a floral rightness; she also is decorative. With the greatest skill, Renoir shows the child, not amid the actual flowers and lawns, but on the path. It leads away, out of the picture, into the unknown future when she will longer be part of the garden but an onlooker, an adult, who will enjoy only her memories of the present now depicted."

- Text from "Sister Wendy's Story of Painting", by Wendy Beckett

Renoir: Lately it's become trendy to disparage and insult Renoir for being too "Pretty." What is wrong with beauty? Doesn't the world have enough ugliness? Their reasons for hating Renoir seem ignorant and stupid. Of course, we should question loving the old masters but then, look and look again. There is a reason these paintings have survived. They evoke or can evoke the deepest positive reactions that humans are capable of.

The play of light on the bodies and faces in the "Moulin de la Gallette" is revolutionary - the sunshine, the fluent shadows, the intense color were a revelation in their day (and probably since).

Max Geller’s (Founder of the "Renoir Sucks" movement) claim that Renoir fails to show the “beauty” of nature is astonishingly and crassly wide of the mark. Not only is the art of Renoir beautiful but he, personally and single handedly, taught the world to appreciate new dimensions to the beauty of the world we live in. By getting closer to the way we actually see, he showed us jewels that previous generations had never noticed. This can be seen gloriously in his sensual appreciation of a rainy day in the city, "The Umbrellas."  (Wednesday 7 October 2015 09.46 EDT).
The Umbrellas at the Frick.

Yet here is a painter who asked: "Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.”

Renoir's late work was an inspiration to another generation of painters, including Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard. He loved to paint and the work from the final three decades of his life, roughly 1880 to 1919, is among his best.  Early Renoir was all about Impressionism –  color, light, movement. Then a break came in the early 80s and the work became more disciplined in a crisper, drier style,  reminiscent of the frescoes  he admired in Pompeii. About his late works, Renoir said:  "I'm starting to know how to paint. It's taken more than fifty years to get this far, and I've not finished yet.”

At the end of his life, Renoir developed serious rheumatoid arthritis which crippled him. Yet, in a silent film from that period, you see a giggling, old grizzled man, a cigarette  dangling from his lips, joking with friends, one of whom helps him hold a paint brush in fragile, injured fingers.  At the time, Renoir  was living in Cagnes, near Nice in the south of France in a house by the sea, a timeless Arcadian world of beauty. Here he captured feminine beauty, adorable children, man and nature in its most idyllic state. He may have been a fashionista, given that his father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress but Oh, what a painter. Could Degas have painted a dancer more beautifully and yet, look at her enigmatic expression. You want to know more about her and her world. How many painters have achieved so much.

His lush late nudes are the personification of Mother Earth in all her abundance. Only those enchanted by anorexic nudes and heroin chic would fail to respond to their curvaceous sensuality.

 Tilla Durieux

Essays on the Renoir paintings at the Frick.
Ten things Renoir taught us about painting.
Renoir at the Met.

Weekend Picks for March 28 - 30

Bonnard. "Paris, Rue de Parme on Bastille Day, 1890." part of "Intimate Impressionism," on view at the Legion of Honor. (@FAMSF)

The big opening this weekend is "Intimate Impressionism" at the Legion of Honor. Small exquisite masterpieces of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art - landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, interiors, and portraits are on view. The 70 paintings are from the Mellon collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. which is currently closed for renovations.

Vollon. "Mound of Butter." A creator of realist genre scenes and still lifes inspired by 17th century Dutch art, Vollon was admired for his technique(@FAMSF). I wanted to just lick that mount of butter or, better yet, put it on some crusty French bread.

 The works make up what in French might be called a "catalogue raisonné" of small-sized, "intimiste" paintings of French Impressionist art. Giving reasons for the emphasis on "plein air" first laid by Corot, the show goes on to present us with small canvases of what came to be known as the 'Impressionist' group (Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, Berthe Morisot).

 Vuillard. "The Conversation." No artist has ever so suggested the soul of an interior—the sense of habitation.—Julius Meier-Graefe, on Vuillard (@FAMSF)

The paintings' dimensions reflect their intended function: display in domestic interiors. Their intimate effect also extends to the paintings' themes-many are studies of the artists' favorite places and depictions of people familiar to them, and the works often became gifts shared among friends.

 Édouard Vuillard's (1868-1940) long career spanned the fin-de-siècle and the first four decades of the 20th century.

The real treasure of the show comes at the end with a wall of paintings by Vuillard whose thickly pattered works are seldom seen in the Bay Area.

More at: http://www.examiner.com/article/weekend-picks-for-march-28-30

'Intimate Impressionists' coming to the Legion of Honor

Mark your calendar for the upcoming exhibit at the Legion of Honor. The National Gallery is closed for renovations and San Francisco will benefit from this with a show featuring 19th century avant-garde painters such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh.

The exhibition includes nearly 70 paintings from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and features a selection of intimately scaled impressionist and post-impressionist still lifes, portraits and landscapes, whose charm and fluency invite close scrutiny.

“Intimate Impressionism resonates with the outstanding impressionist and post-impressionist works from the Museums’ own holdings,” says Colin B. Bailey, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “This exhibition is the latest in a rich history of collaborations between the Fine Arts Museums and the National Gallery of Art dating back to the 1940s. We are pleased to host these national treasures and provide our audience with the opportunity to view them here at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.”

 Kenneth Baker had the privilege of talking to the curators of the show, Mary Morton of the National Gallery and Melissa Buron of the Fine Arts Museums and asked them to "single out a few favorites."

Vuillard's "Yellow Curtain" appeared on both their lists. Morton: "Vuillard lived with his mother much of his life, in small apartments where the brightly designed textiles of his mother's business as a seamstress covered most of the visible surfaces. Out of this environment, the artist created hundreds of small-scale meditations on patterns and colors, creating wonderfully abstracted spaces. In this picture, a figure, probably his mother, pulls back a uniformly ocher-yellow curtain to reveal an exuberantly patterned room beyond. These small works garnered the moniker "Intimistes" for Vuillard and his comrade Pierre Bonnard."

Buron: "The title doesn't give us a lot of information, but we know that it's a snapshot of Vuillard's mother in her dressing room. We know because of how she's dressed and groomed that she's either just gotten up or is getting ready to retire. We don't know whether she's aware of being watched. The fact that she's shown in this setting with a bright curtain and pattern, and the flatness, make it feel very tightly enclosed. It conveys the intimacy of a family connection."

More on Vuillard: http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/vuillard

'Self Portrait Dedicated to Carrière. 1888/89, Paul Gauguin. Mockery and malice in equal measure.

Morton: "Gauguin painted multiple self-portraits across his career, and he was intensely concerned with his own persona, with creating, in dress and manner, a particular vision he had of the avant-garde artist. Here he wears a brightly colored Breton shirt, signaling his affinity with this remote region in northern France and the culture there that Gauguin felt was more "primitive," closer to nature, a place apart from the decadent modernity of Western capitals like Paris. He gazes out with a kind of knowing look, and with his ears slightly pointed, he looks like a troublemaker."

'Mound of Butter' 1875/1885, Antoine Vollon

Morton: "Here an artist who is not well known makes a veritable masterpiece out of a mountain of soft, churned butter. There is a marvelous way in which the viscous texture of the paint he smears around with his brush serves as a kind of analogue for the substance of butter, the butter knife standing in for the paint brush."

'Tama, the Japanese Dog' c. 1875, Edouard Manet

Buron: "This picture was owned by Théodore Duret. He traveled in Asia and became one of the first great European collectors of Japanese art. He brought back this dog, and convinced Manet that he should paint it. We know its name because it's stamped on the upper corner. ..."

"Manet made the dog look like he's just gotten into or is about to get into some mischief. Manet may have put a Japanese doll in the foreground to suggest this. Tama looks completely indifferent to the fact that someone of Manet's stature is painting his portrait. "

All images from the National Gallery Web Site:
https://images.nga.gov/en/page/show_home_page.html

Quotes from Kenneth Baker's interview in the Chron

"Intimate Impressionists" opens at the Legion of Honor March 29

http://www.examiner.com/article/friday-night-at-the-de-young-impressionists-at-the-legion

'Impressionists on Water' at the Legion

 Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) Oarsmen at Chatou,1879

 The "Impressionists on Water" show at the Legion has received, at best, tepid reviews from our local art critics. I suppose that they prefer work that is considered more challenging, like the current show of work by Nicole Eisenman at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. 

Impressionism is so familiar to us by now that we have forgotten what a radical movement it was, a new way of experiencing the world through quick sensations, expressed in paint. Even their preferred mode of painting - en plain air - was considered revolutionary. They experienced nature directly, instead of through the medium of staged sets within a studio setting. Their art making depended on the radical changes in art supplies which included portable easels and manufactured paint in tubes. The impressionists created a work without mythology or kings or monsters; one which still speaks to the sensual and sensitive within us.

Paul Signac (French, 1863–1935). À Flessingue (At Flushing, Netherlands),1896

But in these perilous times, where it looks like we might be throwing more money at yet another Middle Eastern country in the middle of a confusing civil war, what would be better for the spirit than experiencing beautiful art? 

Why art that is beautiful became suspect and then, denigrated and even despised is an essay for another time. But for now, imagine yourself floating down the Seine on a summer day in 1898. The Franco-Prussian war is over and the horrors of WW I not even on the horizon. Enjoy a brief moment of tranquility before the 20th century arrived, beginning with optimism and ending with the destruction of so much that was promised but seldom delivered.

Paul Signac (French, 1863–1935). Le Soir (Abend-La Jetée de Flessingue) (Evening), published in Pan,1898


http://www.examiner.com/list/impressionists-on-water-opening-at-the-legion-of-honor

At the Legion: 'Impressionists on water'

The marketing people at the Legion have linked the upcoming America's Cup race with their upcoming exhibit on an exhibit of works about boats, sailing and fun on the water by the Impressionists.

Caillebotte, Regatta at Rrgenteuil. 1893.

The upcoming show at the Legion does not need this dubious honor. Unlike the multiple fails of the America's cup, including a death, these works never fail to delight. While Impressionist paintings now sell for millions of dollars, the artists were not rich or famous when these works were painted. These are the visions of men who rebelled against the establishment of the time. The fact that their paintings still delight us, 100 plus years later is a testament to the enchantment of their art. 

 Monet. Boats Moored at Le Petit-Gennevillers. 1874.

The play of light, sense of atmosphere and physical experience of floating in a groundless world were irresistible for artists like Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Signac and Caillebotte (an accomplished sailor in his own right) -- key Impressionists who spent many hours at sea, on river boats, leisure craft and floating studios. Opens June 1

http://www.examiner.com/list/impressionists-on-water-opening-at-the-legion-of-honor

Next show at the Legion - Impressionists on water

Pissarro's People at the Legion

Self Portrait

 “Pissarro’s People,” opening this weekend at the Legion of Honor, brings together more than 100 paintings, showing his humanistic viewpoint through portraits of his family and paintings of working class people and peasants of late 19th century France. Pissarro was the most modest, the most committed and the most politically radical of the impressionists and for us, the least known.

Apple Pickers

Those who believe impressionism viewed the world through misty idealistic glasses should ponder Pissarro's commitment to "our modern philosophy, which is absolutely social, antiauthoritarian and antimystical ... a robust art based on sensation,"- a philososphy he expressed in paint. He was a committed anarchist and believed that Impressionism was the natural way to present social progress, science and ethical behavior. He believed that natural vision was a primary value in art, achieved through a direct encounter with the "thing seen."

His paintings of the working class and peasantry of 19th century France were far from the usual contemporary genre scenes but portraits of those who he saw as active and individual forces in contemporary life. Ordinary people, rather than gods, goddess and mythological beings, were important subjects. His working men and women, albeit somewhat idealized, were were seen as harmonious with nature, productive, working, leading a fulfilling life, neither brutalized or sentimentalized.

Maid making cafe au lait.

As Robert Hughes wrote, "There has long been a tendency to repeat, without checking it against the pictures, Gauguin's irritable verdict that Pissarro was a good second-rater, "always wanting to be on top of the latest trend ... he's lost any kind of personality, and his work lacks unity." So although there has been no lack of Degas shows, Monet retrospectives, homages to Cézanne and museum tributes to Bazille or Caillebotte, Pissarro has remained less known—an irony, since, with his peculiar steadfastness and probity, he was the linchpin of the impressionist group."
 

More at: http://www.examiner.com/museum-in-san-francisco/pissarro-s-people-at-the-legion

all images courtesy of the FAMSF.