A Certain Slant of Light
The visual drama of the
Impressionist breakthrough into color and light has sometimes been dimmed in
the frequent telling and retailing. As you walk through the early rooms of the
sumptuous exhibition of Renoir portraits at the Art Institute of Chicago, the
effect of following Renoir's career is like that of traveling through a tunnel.
You pause before the precocious Inn of Mère Antony (1866), where dinner
guests modeled on the peasant forms of Millet and Courbet huddle around a
candle-lit table. Caricatures scrawled on the dim walls behind them echo their
dark shapes. We could be in the caves of Lascaux, so gloomy are the grays and
blacks of Renoir's early palette. Then, in a small, circular room, the first
flickers of daylight: In Claude Monet Painting (1875), Renoir's close
friend stands in a darkened room in black hat and full bushy black beard, but
there's a wet blob of vermilion on the tip of his paintbrush, and more of that
red smeared on the palette in his left hand. Renoir, Monet, and their
associates in the Impressionist circle were beginning to find ways to leave
behind the shadowy chiaroscuro of earlier European painting, which they
associated with a rural world now lost to modern experience.
You follow the crowd to the
next room, and all that was gray turns into gold; the heavy, leaden shapes
dissolve in a shower of light. The painting before you is the Metropolitan's
huge Madame Charpentier and Her Children , the sensation of the Salon of
1878 and the work that made Renoir's reputation as a portrait painter. Madame
Charpentier, wife of a publisher, reclines in her Japanese-style boudoir. Her
daughter sits on the long-suffering family pet, a Newfoundland whose
black-and-white coat comically echoes Madame Charpentier's elaborate dress. Her
son--dressed identically to the daughter in pinafore and patent-leather
shoes--joins his mother on the sofa. The surrounding Japanese screens and mats
are red and gold. "Seen on the walls of a museum," Marcel Proust wrote,
Madame Charpentier "will give a greater impression of elegance than
anything since the great paintings of the Renaissance."
Of all the Impressionist
painters, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, alchemist of elegance, had the humblest
beginnings. Born in the porcelain manufacturing city of Limoges in 1841, the
son of an impoverished tailor and a dressmaker, Renoir was apprenticed at age
13 to a porcelain painter in Paris whose firm specialized in imitations of
Limoges ware. The 18 th -century rococo scenes that Renoir learned to
execute with great skill, dancers and performers and picnics in the country,
were a major influence on his later work. Then, at age 17, Renoir was abruptly
laid off, his paintbrush replaced by a machine.
Renoir's dazzling career as a
painter can be viewed as his effort to prove the factory wrong. As the art
historian Robert Herbert has pointed out, Renoir's famously feathery brushwork
(which, according to one hostile critic, left light "like grease spots on the
clothing of his figures") was meant to show the mark of the hand rather than
the mechanical "finish" of academic and salon art. Renoir went so far as to
write a manifesto in 1884 for a society of "Irregularists"--to include such
sworn enemies of mechanical perfection as "painters, decorators, architects,
goldsmiths, embroiderers, etc."--but he couldn't muster enough fellow members.
A late painting like Christine Lerolle Embroidering (1897), with its
complex weave of frames within frames, is a veritable catalog of the
craftsmanlike bric-a-brac Renoir admired: the embroidery frame constructed of
bamboo; William Morris wallpaper; a Japanese vase; the rough-hewed paintings of
Degas and Renoir himself that the connoisseurs are inspecting in the
background.
When
Renoir's well-off fellow Impressionists, the aristocrat Manet or the banker's
son Degas, strolled through the working-class neighborhoods of Montmartre, they
were consciously slumming. They could afford to disdain commissions for
portraits and to paint, instead, the class tensions of Paris--predatory males
and streetwalking women. Renoir, by contrast, had lived by necessity in the
slums of Paris. When he painted the two girls in his wonderful Acrobats at
the Cirque Fernando (1879), he was depicting members of his own social
class. In the background one can just make out the binoculars of an eager male
viewer and the stripe on the trousers of an erect soldier, but all our
attention gravitates toward the innocent isolation of these two performers, one
of whom has gathered as many oranges, thrown as tokens from the appreciative
crowd, as her small arms can hold.
The harsh social vision of
Acrobats makes one wonder why Renoir's critical reputation has fared so
badly in recent years, particularly at the hands of such leftist critics as
T.J. Clark, who contemptuously dismisses the artist's "boulevard pastorals." On
the occasion of the last big Renoir show a decade ago, Art in America
assembled a team of heavy hitters who took turns taking a swing at Renoir.
Peter Schjeldahl of the Village Voice called Renoir "the worst artist
ever to achieve canonical status"; art historian Michael Fried remarked that
"Renoir's native gift was perilously slight"; and critic Robert Rosenblum
worried about the "sugar content" of his paintings.
Only Linda
Nochlin (whose contribution to the catalog of the Chicago show is an overview
of Impressionist portraiture with almost nothing on Renoir) used the Art in
America occasion to say something serious and illuminating about Renoir's
art, noting that Renoir's men--in such idylls as Luncheon of the Boating
Party (1881) and Dance at Bougival (1883) (both great paintings,
which blur the distinction between portrait and genre painting, are in the
Chicago show)--offer a masculine ideal counter to the male predators and
businessmen of Degas and Manet: "Tough and tender at once," these men "are
luscious, peachy-skinned and downy-haired, with heavy-lidded eyes and yearning
red mouths." That androgynous tenderness is evident in Lunch at the
Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers' Lunch) (1875), where we can't tell if the
red daubs on the men's heads are ears or flowers.
Renoir's
portraits of children, which have a kindred prelapsarian innocence, now seem
the quintessence of cute. To his contemporaries, however, such paintings as
Child in a White Dress (Lucie Berard) (1883) and Girl With a Watering
Can (1879; not in the show, but hanging in the National Gallery in
Washington, D.C.) were alarming. Lucie Berard's father reported that the
portrait of his daughter, with its unorthodox coloring and swirling purple
background, "simply frightens people away." In this regard as in others, Renoir
has been the victim of his own success. He banished the sentimental,
"penseroso" poses and the comforting twilit faces favored by the fashionable
portrait painters he competed with. His children too have emerged from the
tunnel, and they stare frankly out at us, uncompromising and alone.
