Renoir in the 20th Century, seen by this reviewer at the Grand Palais, Paris (23rd September 2009 to 4th January), then shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (14th Feb­ruary to 19th May), and opening this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (17th June to 6th September), was an unqual­ified triumph.1 Rigorously selected, sensitively installed, surveying almost thirty years of Renoir’s production in all media, the exhibition contained nearly ninety-eight works by Renoir, supplemented in Paris by twenty-seven by younger acolytes – including superb paintings by Picasso and Bonnard. A rich crop of period documentation complemented the display: seventy-eight photographs, many previously unpublished, and Sacha Guitry’s beautiful silent biopic, Ceux de chez nous, made in September 1915. Particularly notable in this regard were the Arbus-like print from the Vollard archive of Renoir’s family in the studio on the rue Caulaincourt in 1902–03 (cat. no.145) and Konrad von Freyhold’s poignant photograph of the bald artist, taken in Nice in November 1913 (no.161) – the single occasion on which the ageing Renoir allowed himself to be portrayed in any medium without a cap.

A show devoted to late Renoir presents formidable challenges to its organisers, not the least of which is the pervasive scepticism, if not outright hostility, of many art historians, curators and critics, who question whether the artist’s production after 1900 deserves more than the most passing scrutiny. On a practical level, the restrictions on loans from the Barnes Foundation might have rendered the project still-born, since the majority of the 181 paintings by Renoir in Merion are from the period covered in the exhibition, and Barnes, who believed that Renoir’s best paintings had been made between 1890 and 1919, assembled the most comprehensive survey of the late career in existence. Happily, the current exhibition has benefited from the collaboration of the Barnes Foundation, something that was not possible at the time of the great Renoir retrospective a quarter of a century ago. The catalogue reproduces in colour many of the Barnes’s Renoirs as comparative illustrations, and there is a fine essay by that institution’s associate curator, Martha Lucy, on Barnes and Leo Stein. Future studies of Renoir’s late work will make even greater strides after the publication of the Barnes’s catalogue of its Renoirs, undertaken by John House and Martha Lucy, both contributors to the present catalogue. 

The curators of Renoir in the 20th century succeeded in bringing together exemplary and representative works in every category that preoccupied Renoir in the last thirty years of his life – with one notable exception. If the decision to avoid the innumerable pochades, scraps and tiny sketches that Renoir made compulsively from the 1890s onwards, was understandable, a more serious shortcoming was the absence of a room devoted to still-life painting. Jean Renoir’s memoirs begin with the convalescing soldier being ushered in to an expectant father who is painting a still life of roses.2 René Gimpel was struck by the anecdote of Vollard presenting the seventy-seven-year-old artist with fish from the market and ordering him, ‘Peignez-moi ça’.3 A group of still lifes spanning the last decades of Renoir’s career would also have provided a survey of the various inflections within the late work, acting as a sort of control group for Renoir’s stylistic evolution in general, which the largely thematic display in Paris addressed only episodically.

After the drum roll of Orsay’s two full-length Dance panels from 1883, accompanied by Picasso’s monumental pastel of the Village dance (Musée Picasso, Paris) of 1922 – indicating at the outset Picasso’s admiration for the older master, one of the leitmotifs of both exhibition and catalogue – the display proceeded in rooms devoted to the ‘new departure’ of the 1890s, signalled by the Young girls at the piano (no.3), acquired by the State at Mallarmé’s initiative (and over the objections of the Louvre’s curators) in September 1892. In his fifties, Renoir is the painter of ‘jeunes filles en fleurs’ – intimiste Parisian pastorals inspired by the well-born young women of the Morisot, Baudot and Lerolle households; of standing and seated bathers, in which the struggle to integrate his figures within the landscape is not always resolved; and of his growing family and its retainers, treated with tenderness, affection and not the slightest sentimentality. At the Grand Palais, the first rotunda, painted a Renoir red, grouped seven female half-lengths, ranging in date from 1890 to 1908, to show the solidity of Renoir’s figure painting and the sensuality of these genre scenes posed for by models and household staff. Despite the similarity of formats, Renoir’s style ranged from the tightness and detail of The young mother (1898; private collection, Baltimore; no.18) to the amplitude and vibrancy of Seamstress at window (c.1908; New Orleans Museum of Art; no.4). By hanging the piquant and more tautly executed Girl tatting (La Frivolité) of 1906 (Philadelphia Museum of Art; no.33) on a wall apart, this sequence reminded us that the development of Renoir’s handling does not progress in any straightforward way. Style may also be influenced by location and format. La Frivolité was painted in the summer of 1906 in Essoyes, not Cagnes; it is an interior scene, with little sense of enveloping daylight, and of greater concentration than the monumental and more fluidly painted Promenade (1906; Barnes Foundation), for which the same model posed in an identical blouse. The range in Renoir’s ‘late’ style over the decade 1898–1908 was well illustrated in this section, but I was troubled by the dating to 1890 of the first work in the sequence, The head of a young girl (no.37), acquired from Renoir by Durand-Ruel in June 1900 for 150 francs (according to Daulte) and donated to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, by Vladimir Horowitz in 1948. Its handling is certainly softer and more placid than the more sonorous later examples with which it was grouped, but it should be dated several years later, to the late 1890s, given its affinities with the Self-portrait of 1899 from Williamstown (no.19), whose arabesque-patterned background it also shares.

The following section held seven superb nudes from 1899 to 1916, vertical in format, celebrating Apollinaire’s observation that ‘le vieux Renoir [. . .] use ses derniers jours à peindre ces nus admirables qui feront l’admiration des temps à venir’.4 The central work here was La Source (1906; no.31), one of the five paintings Renoir exhibited at the Salon d’automne of that year, immortalised in 1925 in Maurice Denis’s ceiling decoration of the coupole Dutuit in the Petit Palais.5 A homage of sorts to Ingres, Titian and Rubens, it is a work of the greatest concentration and plasticity, anticipating such masterpieces as the Barnes’s After the bath (1910) and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Seated bather of 1914 (no.62; Fig.58). This section also included two nudes that once belonged to Picasso, one of which is well known to visitors to the Musée Picasso, but the second of which – the mesmerising Portrait of a model, signed and dated 1916 (no.75; Fig.60) – is rarely on view there. Among the discoveries of the exhibition for this reviewer, this is Renoir’s most Titianesque nude, in which he unashamedly steals all the Venetian master’s tricks (to paraphrase a celebrated boutade reported by Walter Pach). Form emerges with absolute assurance from a vortex of inchoate, thinly applied strokes; the bare-breasted model seems to be resting her right arm on the back of a chair, but we cannot be sure if this is an interior or exterior scene. The abbreviation and extreme sketchiness of much of the canvas in no way detract from the consummate modelling of the woman’s face and torso, which impose themselves with absolute conviction – a striking example of Renoir’s ‘audace, abondance et générosité’.6 Picasso’s other Renoir, Seated bather in a landscape, called Euridyce (no.22; Fig.59), presented pleasures of a different order. When should this work be dated? Traditionally assigned to between 1895 and 1900, the painting evokes the Arcadian and the clas­sical that have come to be associated with Renoir’s move to the South of France. In terms of handling, subject-matter and luminosity, the Seated bather in a landscape, called Euridyce should be placed somewhat later, to around 1902. Here the relevant cognates are two smaller horizontal nudes, almost identical, for which the same model might have served: The sleeping nude in a landscape (formerly in Maurice Gangnat’s collection; present whereabouts unknown; the model also wears a white band in her chignon), and the Sleeping bather (La Boulangère), first owned by Gangnat’s friend the playwright Henry Bernstein, and today in the Niarchos Collection. Julius Meier-Graefe considered them to have been painted at roughly the same time and dated them both to 1902.7 

From these late nudes, the next sequence was devoted to six radiant landscapes from the South of France, a section that could easily have been larger, but which elegantly introduced a small group of late mythologies – paintings and sculpture – under the rubric ‘Un Paradis des Dieux’. Renoir’s decorations, discussed at length in Sylvie Patry’s catalogue essay, were represented by three sets of vertical panels: Durand-Ruel’s folkloric dining-room paintings of 1890–91, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (nos.6 and 7); one of the pair of unfinished and stamped Caryatids (c.1897; no.10), on deposit at the Musée Renoir, Cagnes-sur-Mer; and the little-loved and frequently lent Dancing girl with tambourine and Dancing girl with castanets from the National Gallery, London (nos.40–41; Fig.61), painted in 1909 for Gangnat’s narrow dining-room in his apartment on the avenue de Friedland. Despite being shown in rather restricted quarters at the Grand Palais, the London pictures, hanging alone on a red wall, had never looked so beautiful. These Rubensian figures are clothed in riotous North African costumes painted with the brevity and sureness of touch that Renoir admired in Velázquez. Appropriately, their most eloquent champion was Henry Moore, who – in supporting their acquisition by the National Gallery in 1963 and acknowledging the general distaste for Renoir’s ‘best period’ – wrote eloquently of their ‘rounded forms [. . .] and marvellous, supple rhythms’. 

From decorations, via a second documentary section, the exhibition surveyed Renoir’s graphic art of the period – the most neglected aspect of his production, and long overdue for reappraisal. No exhibition has since approached the survey mounted by Durand-Ruel in April 1921, which included 142 sheets, in all media. As early as January 1886, Berthe Morisot, struck by one of Renoir’s preparatory sanguines for his Maternité, noted that he was ‘un dessinateur du premier ordre’, whose large number of preparatory drawings for a given picture would be of interest to the public, ‘qui s’imaginent que les impressionnistes travaillent avec la plus grand rapidité’.8 Although Jean Renoir stated that his father did not routinely use drawings to trace his compositions, other contemporary observers claimed the opposite, notably artists such as Jeanne Baudot, Albert André and Maurice Denis (the last mentioned in a journal entry for Pentecost 1897: ‘Renoir dessine sur des calques et modifie ses tableaux au moyen des calques successifs’).9 With Degas in mind, perhaps, Georges Rivière suggested that Renoir’s drawings might on occasion postdate his paintings and serve as a corrective to them.10 A little disappointingly, the exhibition was unable to assemble pairings to demonstrate the validity of any of these assertions. While it was able to borrow the monumental red-and-white chalk drawing of The coiffure (1900–01) from the Musée Picasso (no.84), the related painting in the Barnes was of course unavailable. That the works are illustrated pages apart in different sections of the catalogue only adds salt to the wound. As noted in the entry, the drawing is slightly larger than the painting, has been dated a year later and does not show exactly the same composition. In the painting, the attendant is brushing the bather’s hair; in the drawing she is wringing it dry by hand. Comparison with the Louvre’s large sanguine for the Judgment of Paris of around 1914 (no.67) – claimed to be the tracing of a painting of 1908 (also unavailable for the exhibition) – draws attention to the intense and somewhat leaden passages of brilliant white chalk in the Musée Picasso’s sheet, uncharacteristic of Renoir’s practice in these large sanguines (as far as one can tell). Might they have been strengthened by another hand? 

Following the somewhat truncated display of works on paper, the exhibition reached its conclusion in four magisterial sections devoted to Renoir’s figure paintings, with superb examples of his grand-format nudes and portraits. The somewhat sketchy horizontal Reclining nude (Bather) of 1902 (no.28), in the Beyeler Foundation, Basel, deaccessioned in 1989 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, also did duty for the more resolute and developed painting of the same subject at the Barnes Foundation, dated to 1910 – but is there really eight years between them? The Reclining nude was paired with Orsay’s long-limbed Nude on cushions (Large nude), signed and dated 1907 (no.39) – the most significant Renoir to have entered the French national collections since the Durand-Ruel Dance panels in 1979 and one of the artist’s most serene and perfectly crafted odalisques. The sense of plenitude and monumentality that is conveyed by these late nudes – in this same section were displayed São Paulo’s Bather drying her leg of c.1910 (no.60) and the previously mentioned Seated bather (no.62; Fig.58) – give the lie to the argument that these figures inhabit a ‘cottony world [. . .] a world of chiffon’ (the words are taken from the catalogue’s most engaging essay, Roger Benjamin’s ‘Why did Matisse Love Late Renoir?’). Renoir’s figures are far from being diaphanous and roseate confections. Once established at Les Collettes, he might claim to live in ‘une atmosphère ouatée’ (‘cossetted by the atmosphere’),11 but in his work Renoir strove for absolute solidity and the conquest of volume. Look at Renoir’s nudes, Maillol is reported to have said: ‘Ça c’est de la sculpture’.12 

The sections devoted to Renoir’s late portraits were flaw­lessly selected: Renoir’s three sons and all his dealers were represented by his finest portraits of them, and 1910 emerges as an annus mirabilis. It was in that year that Renoir signed and dated works as different in mood and facture as the affectionate full-length of Jean as a hunter (no.56; Fig.62), the immensely dignified portrait of Paul-Durand-Ruel (no.50) and the Titianesque Madame Thurneyssen and her daughter (no.54). Of particular interest were two portraits of members of the Bernheim families, also signed and dated 1910: the chic, mondain Monsieur and Madame Gaston de Villers (no.52) and the over-the-top, richly impasted Madame Josse Bernheim-Jeune and her son Henry (no.53), of a quite different vibrancy and opulence. In a journal entry for 21st March 1910, Denis recorded Renoir working on these portraits at Les Collettes, but both portraits evoke the refinement and luxury of the Parisian residence that the Bernheim families shared on the avenue Henri-Martin. In addition to the sitters’ fashionable and formal costumes and jewellery, Renoir includes Louis XVI furniture, framed pictures and a Maillol statuette. As in all his figure painting of these late years – regardless of genre – Renoir’s process entailed direct observation and working from the motif, unquestionably, but also recollection, memory and revision, with certain canvases following him from Cagnes to Essoyes to Paris (and back again). ‘Aujourd’hui encore, le modèle doit être présent à l’atelier quand il travaille’, noted Meier-Graefe in 1911. ‘S’il le regarde, c’est une autre question’.13 Around the same time, Renoir confided something of this peripatetic means of production – if such a term can be used for someone immobilised by rheumatoid arthritis – in a letter to Bernheim-Jeune. Responding to the dealer’s request for more canvases, Renoir explained his need for time and maturation: ‘J’ai en effet pas mal de choses en train, mais rien n’est au point et ne pourra l’être qu’après un arrêt et retouches que je me réserve de faire à Paris à tête reposée’.14 As a result of the misreading of the last digit, this letter, written on 16th March 1911, has been incorrectly published as from ‘1915’.15 

From commissioned portraits to fantasy (and family) portraits, the exhibition devoted a penultimate section to canvases of orientalising and Hispanic themes. Here were also included such masterpieces as the Orangerie’s Claude Renoir as clown (1909; no.43) – the colour reproduction of the actual costume donated by the sitter to the Musée Renoir in 1967 confirms Renoir’s ruthlessness in obliterating all four black embroidered motifs so that nothing would interfere with his sonorous reds; Orsay’s Gabrielle with a rose of 1911 (no.59; Fig.64), and the unsurpassed Vollard in the costume of a toreador (1917; no.51), whose ‘unexpected gravitas’ is well elucidated in Patrice Marandel’s catalogue entry. 

Fittingly, the final room at the Grand Palais was devoted to a single picture, The bathers (no.80; Fig.63), ‘his masterpiece’, as Matisse confided to Frank Harris in 1923, ‘one of the most beautiful pictures ever painted’. Energised in handling and heroic in scale, its figures and landscape in perfect equipoise, The bathers has always been one of Renoir’s most contested paintings. Quoting from Georges Besson’s unpublished letter to Matisse of 28th October 1920, Sylvie Patry notes the incomprehension with which it was greeted when first exhibited at the Salon d’automne that year with twenty-nine other late works. Such was the lack of sympathy even of older critics (and former champions of Renoir), such as Alexandre, Lecomte and Vauxcelles, that ‘ce pauvre Jean Renoir voulait cassait la gueule aux gens qui s’esclaffait devant les œuvres de son père le jour du vernissage’. Indifference is almost as damaging as derision and contempt, and so the placing of The bathers as the exhibition’s conclusion and apotheosis was forthrightly polemical. The exemplary discussion in the catalogue (pp.328–31) identifies the painting’s various sources (Veronese, Manet, Courbet), models (Andrée Heuschling and Madeleine Bruno), preparatory works (surprisingly few; a pencil drawing once owned by Henry Moore and two painted head studies, perhaps executed as early as 1915). There is no consensus as to when Renoir embarked on such a work – certainly intended as a posthumous bequest to the Louvre – or how long he laboured on it. Barbara White’s suggestion that Renoir was inspired to paint The bathers in celebration of the Armistice of November 1918 is appealing, if undocumented. And while Matisse claimed that Renoir worked on the composition for three years, Albert André noted in 1931 that it had been executed ‘en quelques jours’.16 A previously unpublished letter from André to Durand-Ruel, cited by Patry, provides the date of the painting’s completion. Written on 25th April 1919, it notes that, though worn out (‘très usé’), Renoir was painting every day: ‘[il] a fait une toile de 2 m x 100 [sic] avec deux grandes femmes grandeur nature, une merveille’. Coming upon the work on its solitary wall, I was struck more than ever by its affinities with the great figure paintings of Courbet’s maturity, less the Young ladies on the banks of the Seine (1857; Musée du Petit Palais, Paris) than his celebratory, fleshy and unrepentantly erotic nudes, although Renoir in his later years could not have seen Courbet’s Sleep (1866; Musée du Petit Palais), which had last been exhibited in Paris in 1878 and remained in Switzerland for the rest of Renoir’s lifetime.17 During the sixteen visits that Matisse made to Les Collettes between 1917 and 1919, Courbet was often evoked in the artists’ discussions. 

Renoir in the 20th century provided a rare opportunity to consider the various phases and inflections of Renoir’s late style, and to chart the shifts and evolution of his technique after 1890. While by no means as dramatic as the changes of the first twenty-five years of his career, the morphology of Renoir’s late production cannot be adequately characterised simply as a retreat into a generalised, Arcadian classicism. Renoir’s painting after 1916, at a time of extreme physical frailty, is perhaps the most authentic flowering of his late style. A reliable catalogue raisonné for his later decades is still years away, but there is now a wealth of documentation at our disposal to construct a more accurate chronology for the last years (and there will be more when Augustin de Butler’s edition of Renoir’s Correspondance is completed). The present catalogue’s generous sample of excellent comparative illustrations is another important contribution in this regard.

With thirteen essays dominating the catalogue, and the entries grouped loosely by theme as well as chronologically, consulting this somewhat hastily prepared book is at times a frustrating experience; but the rewards are considerable. Drawing upon unpublished letters and photographs, overlooked references in journals and reviews, and exhibition catalogues and monographs from the first half of the twentieth century, the authors have amassed an enormous amount of material. There are excellent essays on Renoir’s sculpture and drawing, as well as his involvement in the decorative arts. The essay devoted to his relationship with the Nabis offers a new perspective on Renoir’s poetic, crypto-symbolist production of the 1890s. The excellent research initiated in recent years by the Musée Renoir at Les Collettes is reprised in an essay on Renoir and Cagnes, and there are good surveys of Renoir’s relationship with his dealers and collectors in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the shifting critical fortunes of his late work. 

As Proust noted, in the hermetic and self-contained world that Renoir created, everything becomes a Renoir: women, forests, water, even the sky. In this regard, one would question the decision to punctuate the galleries with works by the most celebrated of Renoir’s younger admirers – Matisse, Bonnard and Picasso – however fine. The different pitches and inflections of Renoir’s language impose themselves with such conviction that while these intrusions do not disrupt the established harmonious groupings, they are ultimately superfluous to them. It is fascinating, for example, to see Picasso’s often reproduced drawing after the photograph of the arthritic Renoir (no.99); three times larger than the ‘original’, it is, not surprisingly, something of a self-promoting homage. Generally, though, one could not help feel that the addition of works by Picasso and Matisse served primarily as endorsement by association: a kind of art-historical special pleading that has never infiltrated exhibitions devoted to the late work of Cézanne, Monet or Degas.