Renoir And Love

Renoir and Love was the major of the two Renoir exhibits at the Orsay this spring, and even at the members-only early openings, it was crowded. The exhibit emphasizes love, friendship, harmony, etc., in Renoir's paintings, 1865-1885. Contemporaneous comparisons with Watteau seemed to me spot on...Watteau mostly painted happy French elites, before The Deluge. But Watteau had his deeper and darker side...Pierrot, and The Embarkation for Cythera. Renoir had no such side in his painting. Yet he lived in an age hardly brighter than Watteau's...the destruction of old Paris for Haussmans's boulevards, the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune...it's a wonder his work, and that of the other Impressionists, is as bright as it was. It was an age of upheaval, scientific, intellectual, and artistic...Darwin, Marx, and Wagner, as Barzun wrote, and an age of social upheaval as well. Renoir's own relationships with women, mostly lower class, models, whose children with him he often did not recognize, belies any sort of harmony. It was exploitation as usual. Yet, for ages, we have enjoyed and loved his work, the color, the feminine images, and still do. Perhaps our escapism was his and his age's as well. (End of rant).

Click, enlarge, read

The Promenade, 1870, "We're all alone, no chaperone can
get our number..."

La Grenouillere, 1869, painting alongside close personal bud Monet

Woman Under an Umbrella in a Garden, 1875; a landscape? I am coming
to the conclusion that it is not a landscape if there is no sky, no horizon...

Confidences, 1875

La Balancoire, 1876...the Swing...perhaps a reference
to Watteau...we walked by the house and garden in Montmartre 
this morning...the house is now the Montmartre Museum, and
for a price you can see lots of art plus the swing

Confidences, 1876-78, girls from the Montmartre streets....
Renoir did not use professional models

Bal du Moulin de la Galette, 1876; Renoir's largest up to this time; a break-through for Impressionism

Real people, not models!

Moulin de la Galette as we saw it Monday morning

At the Theater, 1876-1877; being seen

The Conversation, 1878; who's doing the talking?

The Reader, 1874-76; Nini Lopez, Renoir's favorite model
of the later 1870s

A Loge at the Opera, 1880

Aline Charigot and Dog, 1880; became his favorite model in the 1880s
whom he finally married after two children; figures most prominently
in Luncheon of the Boating Party; also her dog

The End of the Lunch, 1879; lighting up

Au Bord de l'Eau, 1879-1880; the museum notes this is one of very few
Renoir paintings showing an older man with a child...fatherhood not one
of his things...

The Canoeists, 1875

Star of the show: Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881; purchased by Duncan Philipps in 1923, and not seen again in Paris until now; returns to the Philipps Collection in DC in August, where I hope maybe to see it again a fourth time; possibly the most important European painting not permanently in Europe; does not travel, except for this very historic occasion

Real people

Danse a Bougeval, 1883

Daughters of Paul Durand-Ruel, 1882

Young Mother, 1881, in Italy

Les Parapluies (Umbrellas); interestingly, the right-
hand side was begun in 1881, the left not until 1885;
the right side rather more family-oriented, the left, not
so much...difference in technique as well...