Renoir et l’amour
Auguste Renoir’s colorful and joyful paintings, his iconography of open-air cafes and public dances, have earned him the title of “painter of happiness.” This reputation has sometimes led to his marginalization among the great painters of modernity, on the grounds that modernity can only be melancholic or ironic, disillusioned or disenchanted. Yet his work offers an original reflection on modernity, placed under the sign of love, understood both as a force governing human relationships and as a feeling guiding the artist’s gaze upon his models, the world, and painting itself.
“I know very well that it is difficult to convince people that a painting can be truly great while remaining joyful” (Auguste Renoir).
To mark the 150th anniversary of Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876), a masterpiece in the Musée d’Orsay’s Impressionist collection, this exhibition brings together for the first time this major body of “scenes of modern life”—multi-figure paintings depicting contemporary subjects (distinct from portraits and landscapes)—created by Renoir during the first twenty years of his career (1865–1885). During this period, he participated in the collective invention of a “New Painting” alongside Manet, Monet, Morisot, Degas, and Caillebotte. He distinguished himself from his Impressionist friends, however, by his singular sense of empathy and his capacity for wonder, choosing only joyful subjects and always highlighting his models. This “loving” gaze is manifested by a pronounced taste for connections – in his motifs (conversations, meals, dancing…) as well as in his way of painting, attentive to everything that can contribute to a feeling of unity (gestures of the characters, enveloping light, balance of colors, fluid and sketched touches that blend the objects into one another).
The exhibition also highlights Renoir’s predilection for depicting young couples but aims to deconstruct the common misconception that his painting is “sentimental.” On the contrary, he avoids overly direct expressions of emotion, romantic narratives, and erotic scenes. An admirer of 18th-century French painters (Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard), Renoir revived the atmosphere of “fêtes galantes” and promoted a form of sexual freedom and gender equality in Paris during the late Second Empire and early Third Republic. This choice must be understood in light of the Impressionist artist’s biography, which revealed his bohemian lifestyle marked by relationships considered “illegitimate” at the time, and placed within the context of the 19th century, characterized by marriage and bourgeois norms, religious morality, the prevalence of prostitution, and stark inequalities between men and women. In this context, Renoir’s large-format works devoted to the happy couple, to “camaraderie” (in the words of his friend Rivière) and to conviviality, appear as so many manifestos against the violence of relations between the sexes, class antagonisms and the growing solitude of urban life.
Co-organized with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, this exhibition offers a fresh perspective on paintings so famous that it has become difficult to perceive their full novelty today. For the first time since 1985 – the date of the last Renoir retrospective organized in Paris – an exhibition brings together a focused but significant group of works (approximately fifty paintings) from the first part of the artist’s career, including his greatest masterpieces: from La Grenouillère (1869, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) to The Umbrellas (1881-1885, London, The National Gallery), by way of La Promenade (1870, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum), Danse à Bouvigal (1883, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) and Le Déjeuner des canotiers (1880-1881), very exceptionally loaned by the Phillips Collection in Washington.
