Art: Summer Renoir

Because the paintings of Pierre Auguste Renoir are not only great but pretty, as he once said paintings should be, few years go by without a new Renoir exhibition in Paris or the U. S. In 1933 the Chicago Art Institute included a fine roomful of Renoirs in its Century of Progress loan exhibition, and two years ago the Durand-Ruel Galleries showed 30 choice canvases in Manhattan (TIME, March 25, 1935). Last week the most comprehensive U. S. exhibition of Renoir since the painter’s death in 1919 drew hundreds of Manhattanites to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To be on view through September 12, the Metropolitan’s collection of 62 paintings is appropriately a summer show of a master whose work seems always to have been done in paradisiacal temperatures.

It was probably a good thing for Renoir that before he was 18 he spent several years painting china for a Paris firm. A strong sense of how well clear colors looked on a light ground kept his later painting from dissolving into the atmospheric ultimates of the Impressionists, though he became as sensitive as any of them to the color effects of sunlight. When Painting china kept his color from dissolving. Renoir painted the summer gaiety of his friends he filled his canvas with flowing light and color, composed contented, decorous figures moving softly, if at all. Three of his best paintings, now at the Metropolitan, show how permanently he thus set down what he saw of Paris life in the 1870s and ’80s: Le Bal áBougival, just acquired by” the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (see cut); Au Moulin de la Colette, lent by John Hay Whitney, and Le Déjeuner des Canotiers, from the Phillips Memorial Gallery.

Hung on opposite walls are masterpieces of the painter’s early and middle styles: Lady at the Piano, painted in 1879, an example of the purest Renoir radiance, and Mine Renoir Nursing Pierre, in which the artist used flat, dry colors and a linear definition of forms very different from the technique by which he is commonly known. The same room contains a bronze relief, done in 1914, of a painting. The Judgment of Paris, done in 1908 and now the property of Actor Charles Laughton. Racked by arthritis during the last 20 years of his life, Renoir had to have his brush strapped to his arm to go on painting, could sculpture only with the help of one of his pupils.