Art: Back to School

I am still suffering. . . . I am not content and I am scraping off, still scraping off. . . . I am like children in school. . . . I am still in the blotting stage—and I’m forty.

When Renoir wrote those words (in 1882) his deft blottings pleased his impressionist friends but not himself. Like Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, Renoir had learned to see nature as a dazzling cobweb of colored light, where the shapes of things melt and blend like mist. But at 40 the spare, scraggle-bearded painter grew suddenly sick of mistiness, went digging for solid forms. He became a student again, and spent the next two years in life classes, learning to draw.

Last week some of the A-plus results came out in book form (Renoir Drawings, Bittner; $15). Renoir’s freshman efforts were a touch too perfect—for a while he tried to imitate the exactitude of Ingres —but by his sophomore year the middle-aged master’s drawings were true-to-life and also true to the principles which had been formulated by Poet Charles Baudelaire : “A good drawing is not a hard, cruel, motionless line enclosing a form like a straitjacket. Drawing should be like nature, living and restless. . . . Nature shows us an endless series of-curved, fleeting, broken lines, according to an unerring law of generation, in which parallels are always undefined and meandering, and concaves and convexes correspond to and pursue each other.”

The pink and purple Bathers was among Renoir’s first postgraduate masterpieces. It took hundreds of preparatory drawings and three years of painting to finish, but with The Bathers Renoir got around to combining his new-found “living and restless” line and the vibrant, light-filled color which impressionism had given him.