The opening of the National Gallery’s “Renoir and Love” exhibition has triggered record-breaking ticket sales – and a new outbreak of loathing for one of the world’s most famous Impressionists.
Renoir “gets a hard time from critics – and makers of memes”, said visual-art magazine Apollo. Where others see “joyous, light-flooded paintings”, they see “indifferent compositions, careless brushwork, overly saturated colours and a sentimental gaze”. A US group called Renoir Sucks at Painting once picketed Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, demanding that his works be removed from display, and its Instagram account was immediately flooded with pictures of people pretending to vomit in front of his paintings.
As ‘soft focus’ as Doris Day
I grimaced my way around the “Renoir and Love” exhibition – to a soundtrack of “tweeting birds, splashing oars and crickets clicking in the grass”, said The Times’ chief art critic, Laura Freeman. The nudes are “puddingy”, with “clumsy hands” and “vacant expressions”, and Renoir’s “tendency to potboil” makes everything “formulaic” and “stupefying” – like eating slice after slice of French custard tart. “I left convinced more than ever that Renoir was the Barbara Cartland of Impressionism.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
Renoir’s paintings can be “bland and mediocre”, often tipping “into the saccharine”, said Artlyst. He was the “chocolate-boxiest” of the Impressionists, with works that seem “painted through a soft-focus lens reminiscent of a Doris Day film”.
“I’ve hated his work for decades,” said art critic Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. It’s chintzy and safe, lacking the “hard-edged absolute dedication to angular, prismatic experimentation” of other, better Impressionists. Last month, thieves grabbed four Renoirs from a French museum but ditched two “as they ran for it”, including a portrait of a boy “who looks almost exactly like Boris Johnson”. I’ve never pulled off a “piece of criticism as incisive” as that “bunch of criminals looking at a painting that they’d already nicked and thinking: ‘Leave it – it’s not worth it’”.
‘Life-affirming, pulse-quickening’
Yes, Renoir can look “soft touch”, especially when compared with the “tough, ironic realism of Manet”, said art critic and former Turner Prize judge Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. But he was radical in his “enthusiastic embrace” of people enjoying bourgeois French life. “He doesn’t just paint the changing light of the passing moment; he urges us to live in it.” His “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette” (pictured, above), the centrepiece of this exhibition, captures “flirtations, longings and consolations” in a “dappled, mobile dance of golden light and cool shadow”. It’s “as grand as a history painting and as light as a soufflé”.
“Renoir’s people dance, drink, flirt and sprawl,” said Country & Town House. “By the 1870s, the corsets – figuratively and sometimes almost literally” – were loosening, and he elevated these scenes of ordinary life “to the scale and seriousness once reserved for loftier subjects”.
His best pictures “are so seductive” that you are “soon swept up and whirling to the artist’s rhythm”, just like the “beaming, waltzing” people he paints, said Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph’s chief art critic. “Happy art doesn’t have to be vapid and dumb”; this is “life-affirming, pulse-quickening, sap-stirring stuff” that challenges the “entrenched notion that art is only great when it deals with darkness and conflict”.
“Renoir and Love” may not sway the haters but, for me, what shines through this exhibition’s early Renoirs is a “truly great modern artist”, said Jones in The Guardian. His later work “went off” a little but it’s still fun. “Be happy, be in love, mes amis.”
