Humans are forgetful. They are also egocentric, which means that the trials and tribulations and mindsets of their own time appear inordinately extreme and far-reaching and important while those of the past, which have already been assimilated into everyday life, appear ordinary and passe: "givens."
Impressionism is a case in point. In the nineteenth century, it was a change in "acceptable" art that set the art connoisseurs of France into a tizzy. "Impressionism" was not even the label adopted by the related artists; like so many enduring labels, it was applied by detractors and adopted by history.
Impressionist paintings are now entirely ubiquitous, a "norm." They appear on tea towels, coffee mugs, shower curtains, and mouse pads. Jigsaw puzzles. T-shirts. And so on and so forth. I can't say if Manet or Monet or Degas would have been pleased to see their works used in advertising and plastered on college room walls.
I'm not sure Renoir would have minded. Or he might have--but he would have made sure he got a cut.
What I discovered about Renoir was that not only did he rebel as a member of the revolutionary Impressionists, he rebelled against the Impressionists.
Unlike many of the Impressionists, Renoir came from the working class--the educated working class but still a step down from Degas and Monet, who both came from wealthy families. Also, unlike the leader of the movement, Monet, Renoir was only temporarily interested in Impressionism.
He wasn't alone. In fact, continual experimentation and change is quite typical of artists: "[F]or all members of the movement, with the exception of Monet, impressionism represented a very short period in their artistic lives" (9). The same is true, Neret later points out, of cubist painters, such as Picasso. Although history likes to set artists and writers into categories (and I use the capitalized Impressionism to denote a particular art movement), people quite literally out-live their pigeon-holes.
The movement was hardly a coherent collection of individuals in any case, running from Seurat to Manet to Cezanne. And some of them didn't like each other's art very much (although they did all know each other).
Renoir did exhibit with other Impressionists in several of their "anti-" Salon shows, in part because he was drawn to scenes of everyday life; the Salon clung to its requirements of "acceptable" paintings of history or scenes from the Bible. But Renoir exhibited with the Salon when he was able to get in. He acquired impressively loyal and kindly backers and his works sold very well, especially when he began to paint portraits of individuals and families.
"He decided to exhibit in the Salon in 1881 despite knowing that his fellow-painters would consider him a traitor to their cause [against the Salon]" (Neret 175).
But, as Neret points out, Renoir wasn't abandoning a cause. He never really believed in it. He was interested and admired certain techniques of impressionism. But he wanted other things.
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| Aline Renoir: model to wife |
"I believe one must try to paint as well as possible. That's all there is to it. I want to paint wonderful paintings for you that you will be able to sell for a very high price," he stated to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (175).
And he truly didn't want to paint endless paintings of landscapes and light and wind, etc. etc. etc.
He truly wanted to paint people.He excelled, especially, in painting women and children, and he painted them without artifice. He gave them a romantic gloss but he painted them as solid, tangible, real beings in a tangible world. He spent a great deal of his post-Impressionism life painting nudes, which, Neret argues convincingly, Renoir couldn't have done before his training in impressionism. He had to unlearn some of his prior techniques in order to capture easy relaxation.
Renoir even indulged in sculpture towards the end of his life, which I did not learn until I read Neret's book.
At 427 pages with hundreds of color prints, I enjoyed Neret's book but was glad to get it over and done with, which makes me reluctant to recommend Neret's book except as a supplement to another text. I came away with a thorough understanding and appreciation of Renoir as a painter but I was continually stymied by the book's layout. It uses a chronological set-up--chapters split up by years--yet the text skips around. The images do not even vaguely correspond to the text, which was highly irritating since I was constantly having to skip forward or back (sometimes several hundred pages) to find the painting being discussed. I realize that organizing color prints in a book may be inherently problematic, but I could discover no organizational purpose behind the layout choices. They didn't seem to be based on anything except that the famous Impressionist paintings do mostly come first and the nudes do mostly come last.
In fairness, the book is an art book, not a biography (many artists' "lives" are split between both areas in the library). But, still, the layout comes across as oddly unprofessional for such a professional-looking book.
However, the text did an excellent job of communicating the revolutionary tendencies of the time, the non-revolutionary ideas of Renoir and consequently, his inadvertent personal revolution on his own terms.
And it left me with a love for Renoir, who felt true affection for women and children and communicated that affection in his work.
I can relate to his love of people over scenery. When I was a young teen, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, I saw the below painting of Margot Berard. A few years later, it is one of the few art pieces (a print, not an original obviously) that I ordered and framed. I was twenty, in college at the time, and the process was a lot more laborious than it would be now. I have carried that framed print with me for over 25 years. It has hung in every one of my apartments.
And yes, it is a Renoir.
1 comment:
Artistic movements are often more cliques than anything else. That is people who run together. They are often this more than any kind of revolution.
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