Exhibition of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

Pierre-Auguste Renoir gets a bad rap, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. “His art doesn’t get nearly the respect, nor the scholarly attention, given that other impressionist idol, Claude Monet.” Monet’s landscapes are identified with impressionism’s “good” side: the formal experimentation that led to modern art. Renoir typically represents the “bad”: bourgeois self-satisfaction and self-indulgence. Given such deep-seated and incorrect presumptions, Renoir Landscapes “should be a revelation for Renoir idolaters and skeptics alike.” Early in his career, Renoir often painted side by side with Monet and his works here show him as “a kind of ventriloquist,” capable of producing some of the same effects as Monet, Degas, and Cézanne. But all the time he was pursuing his own agenda, “locked in a struggle to subject impressionist technique to a personal brand of realism, one that saw nature with something of a naturalist’s eye for detail.” Renoir more or less stopped painting landscapes around 1883, said Edward J. Sozanski in The Philadelphia Inquirer. His nature paintings don’t adhere to many traditional requirements of the form, and “you wonder whether some of these pictures really should be considered landscapes.” They often, for instance, include people. But what Renoir’s paintings share with Monet’s relatively less populated scenes is a preoccupation with natural light and color. “A committed impressionist, Renoir was engaged in capturing the transient qualities of both in the open air.” This is what links simple studies of the Seine to his stunning portrait of a woman in a rose garden to the couple on a log in Confidences (La Tonnelle). The finest works here—Springtime, In the Woods, and the two versions of Duck Pond— “are as chromatically complete and luscious as anything Monet or Alfred Sisley ever managed.” Swirling, surging paint strokes push Renoir’s late landscapes to the edge of abstraction, said Souren Melikian in The International Herald Tribune. The Wave (1882) is as much red, white, and yellow as it is blue, suggesting a tempestuous sea. Only a thin band of sky indicates which way is up. In Arab Festivities, “the artist even manages the tour de force of rendering the geometrical volumes of North African architecture without drawing any lines.” For a while, Renoir seemed to dogmatically shun the very idea of outline or clearly defined shape. Yet soon after, his subjects and style became more conventional. Renoir would later produce “many syrupy scenes with languid ladies,” but he should be remembered for more than lugubrious nudes. Renoir Landscapes “demonstrates beyond any possible doubt that these were his supreme achievement.”