Author: Martin Cramer
While catching my breath after rushing up the stairs toward the ticket window at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I stood in awed silence beneath the towering architectural structures, eagerly awaiting the unique artistic display housed within the museum. In a special exhibition entitled “Renoir in the Twentieth Century,” LACMA displays a collection of the iconic impressionist painter’s lesser known and more controversial modernist works. The museum’s press release describes the event as an attempt “[to bridge] the perceived divide between the art of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries [through Renoir’s art].”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted during the 19th and 20th centuries and remained dynamic in his style throughout his career. Although best known for his earlier paintings crafted in the traditional impressionist style, he delved into more experimental methods in his later works. This exhibition, the first Renoir-intensive showing ever hosted by LACMA, illuminates a starkly realistic, albeit controversial, image of the artist.
In an effort to make this major exhibition more digestible and appealing to the general public, LACMA hosts complimentary slide talks to give background information on both the artist and the paintings. The slide talks involve volunteer docents acquainting the audience with Renoir through an hour-long lecture. The speaker refers to projected images of the actual paintings housed within the exhibit to facilitate the discussion.
Penni Wynne, the docent who spoke on the day I visited, explained why many criticize the last 50 years of Renoir’s work. Due to his commercial success in the 1870s, she said, he had earned enough to support both himself and his family; the threat of a starving artist’s existence no longer hindered his creativity. Then in the 1890s, a new and much graver affliction began to restrain the artist: his rheumatism. The disease not only left Renoir confined to a wheelchair but also severely limited the functionality of his hands. His knuckles contorted and turned his fingers inward, permanently pressing them against his wrists.
A brief series of archived film clips flashed real images of Renoir’s gaunt visage, debilitated by his rheumatism, capturing the tenuous journey he underwent to continue painting. He huffs rhythmically on a cigarette while one of his assistants ties a brush to his collapsed right hand.
Although the camera never panned to the canvas to give viewers a glimpse of his project, Renoir’s furrowed brow and focused gaze suggest that with each slashing brush stroke he spilled his soul onto the canvas. This unorthodox method creates vibrant, sensual masterpieces that set Renoir apart from other artists.
Along with these stylistic tendencies, Renoir overtly emphasized feminine sexuality in his later paintings of nude figures. He combined sporadic brush strokes, saturated colors and a nude woman in his 1892 piece “Bather Sitting on a Rock,” creating a piece that pulsates with unbridled sensuality. Pictured above, to the right, this painting’s blurred, unobtrusive background helps emphasize the woman in the foreground.
Her smooth facial features and rosy cheeks suggest youth and even a subtle innocence, but Renoir’s construction of her figure betrays his rather epicurean intentions. He portrays a full-breasted woman with an exposed, exaggerated figure: She delicately tugs at her hair as though reassuring the viewer that her voluptuous physique ought to be admired.
Renoir once said that the artist makes the model, so he took great liberties when depicting the female form. Rather than combing the countryside for candid scenes to capture, he often chose to utilize a common practice of the time: hiring professional models, women who would hold whatever pose he ordered. Their features and forms became fantasized and exaggerated when he transferred them onto his canvas. The exhibition quoted him as once saying, “I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it.”
“Renoir in the Twentieth Century” not only sheds new light on an iconic painter but also provides a refreshing breath of tasteful sensuality paired with artistic genius. This unique exhibition is a crucial art history experience which must be seen firsthand.
LACMA will be hosting “Renoir in the Twentieth Century” until May 9. I recommend attending a slide talk before attempting to tackle the exhibition itself, as they provide invaluable background information about the artist and his progress as a painter. The next weekend presentation will be this Sunday at 3 p.m.
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