La Vie en Rose

Some artists go out in a blaze of glory. Titian is an obvious example: his dark, sketchy late work would be influential for centuries. Van Gogh is another: The Starry Night was produced by a man who would take his own life the following year. Pierre-Auguste Renoir went out in a blaze of kitsch. At least, that’s the received opinion about the work of his final decades: all those pillowy nudes, sunning their abundant selves in dappled glades; all those peachy girls, strumming guitars and idling in bourgeois parlors; all that pink. In the long twilight of his career, the old man found his way to a kissable classicism that modern eyes can find awfully hard to take.

The determined-to-change-your-mind new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is called “Renoir in the 20th Century.” It could just as well have been called “Renoir: The Problem Years.” Take one look at a painting like Bather Sitting on a Rock, and the problem is obvious: cupcakes don’t get much more scrumptious than this. Which is another way of saying that a whole line of mildly lubricious babes, from the phosphorescent nymphs in Maxfield Parrish to Tinkerbell and the Playboy bunny, owe something to the old man’s influential wet dream of classical form. All the same, the Renoir of this period–three very productive decades before his death in 1919 at the age of 78–fascinated some of the chief figures of modernism. Picasso was on board; his thick-limbed “neoclassical” women from the 1920s are indebted to Renoir. So was Matisse, who had one eye on Renoir’s Orientalist dress-up fantasies like The Concert, with its flattened space and overall patterning, when he produced his odalisques. Given that so much of late Renoir seems saccharine and semicomical to us, is it still possible to see what made it modern to them?

Yes and no. To understand the Renoir of “Renoir in the 20th Century,” which runs in Los Angeles through May 9 then moves to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you have to remember that before he became a semiclassicist, he was a consummate Impressionist. You need to picture him in 1874, 33 years old, painting side by side with Monet in Argenteuil, teasing out the new possibilities of sketchy brushwork to capture fleeting light as it fell across people and things in an indisputably modern world.

But in the decade that followed, Renoir became one of the movement’s first apostates. Impressionism affected many people in the 19th century in much the way the Internet does now. It both charmed and unnerved them. It brought to painting a novel immediacy, but it also gave back a world that felt weightless and unstable. What we now call post-Impressionism was the inevitable by-product of that anxiety. Artists like Seurat and Gauguin searched for an art that owed nothing to the stale models of academicism but possessed the substance and authority that Impressionism had let fall away.

For Renoir, a turning point came during his honeymoon to Rome and Naples in 1881. Face to face with the firm outlines of Raphael and the musculature of Michelangelo, he lost faith in his flickering sunbeams. He returned to France determined to find his way to lucid, distinct forms in an art that reached for the eternal, not the momentary. By the later years of that decade, Renoir had lost his taste for the modern world anyway. As for modern women, in 1888 he could write, “I consider that women who are authors, lawyers and politicians are monsters.” (“The woman who is an artist,” he added graciously, “is merely ridiculous.”)

Ah, but the woman who is a goddess–or at least harks back to one–that’s a different matter. It would be Renoir’s aim to reconfigure the female nude in a way that would convey the spirit of the classical world without classical trappings. Set in “timeless” outdoor settings, these women by their weight and scale and serenity alone–along with their often recognizably classical poses–would point back to antiquity.

For a time, Renoir worked with figures so strongly outlined that they could have been put down by Ingres with a jackhammer. By 1892, the year with which the LACMA show starts, he had drifted back toward a fluctuating Impressionist brushstroke. Firmly contoured or flickering, his softly sculpted women are as full-bodied as Doric columns. This was one of the qualities that caught Picasso’s eye, especially after his first trip to Italy, in 1917. He would assimilate Renoir alongside his own sources in Iberian sculpture and elsewhere to come up with a frankly more powerful, even haunting, amalgam of the antique and the modern in paintings like Woman in a White Hat.

That picture is in the LACMA show, along with works by Matisse, Bonnard and Maillol, to demonstrate Renoir’s influence. What’s apparent from these, however, is that Renoir was most valuable as a stepping-stone for artists making more potent use of the ideas he was developing. The heart of the problem is the challenge Renoir set for himself: to reconcile classical and Renaissance models with the 18th century French painters he loved. To synthesize the force and clarity of classicism with the intimacy and charm of the Rococo is a nearly impossible trick. How do you cross the power of Phidias with the delicacy of Fragonard? The answer: at your own risk–especially the risk of admitting into your work the weaknesses of the Rococo. It’s a fine line between charming and insipid, and 18th century French painters crossed it all the time. So did Renoir.

The Artist in Winter

In the late 1890s, renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. It progressed until his fingers were bent into claws, the tips pressed against the palms of his hands. On the recommendation of his doctors, he moved from Paris to the dry climate of Provence, where, like so many other artists, he found a personal paradise, a garden tended by ghosts of the ancient Mediterranean. His was a farmstead in Cagnes-sur-Mer, not far from Nice. Though in constant pain, Renoir entered the most productive period of his career, producing hundreds of canvases, many of them painted while he could barely grip a brush.

In Cagnes, friends, family and servants were his models, dressed and undressed. That’s the second of his three sons in the life-size portrait Jean as a Huntsman, striking an aristocratic pose borrowed from Velázquez. At age 16, he looks as if he knows he’ll grow up to be one of the greatest of all filmmakers, the director of classics like The Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game. During the run of this show, LACMA has scheduled a Jean Renoir film festival. You can schedule one at home to decide for yourself who was the greater genius in this family. If it weren’t for Dad’s Impressionist years, my money would be on Junior.