Many years have elapsed since the Art Institute of Chicago hosted a touring exhibition as unworthy of the museum as “Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age,” the show that will open here on Tuesday.
Few of the 65 paintings in the exhibition are as fine as those the institute owns. A 1973 Renoir exhibition organized by the institute presented a higher standard of visual excellence. And recent institute shows for Edgar Degas and Claude Monet afforded better opportunities for reassessing the artists’ achievements.
So make no mistake: Even with works added that will appear only in Chicago, “Renoir’s Portraits” is an insubstantial exhibition lacking the parade of eye-dazzlers that usually make us forgive the artist’s unending holiday from thought.
The principle of organization is the kind that invariably comes into play after a large retrospective — as the one for Renoir in 1985 — gives a career-long overview that scarcely could be bettered. Then an exhibition for the same artist is justified by the analysis of a particular genre, theme or period.
Curator Colin Bailey chose the genre of the portrait, to which Renoir contributed assiduously in the early and middle years of his work but returned to only intermittently in the final stages. Such an exhibition doubtless was encouraged by the fact that, in 1880, Renoir himself wanted one, predicting with an optimism like that of present-day museum officials: “I believe it will attract many people.”
The artist did receive a show entirely of portraits in Paris in 1912 but by then had lost interest, having become rich and famous. His fame was, however, little help to the exhibition, which even admirers received tepidly. It appears they saw the problem more clearly than will many who see “Renoir’s Portraits” today. Closer to his output than we are, contemporaries could sort it out more easily, without another century’s worth of fame affecting the status of works that are middling and dull.
Renoir is one of those artists whose most famous paintings, the sunny, flickering ones that long ago took hold in the public imagination, are also his greatest. But because the virtuosity of their brushwork serves a vision that at its best can still be cloying, Renoir’s finest paintings do not gain that much by comparison with the more vacant, flattering sweetness of his portrait commissions.
And, conversely, Renoir’s early portraits of family and friends, with their somber color and leaden touch, do not suddenly become winning by being shown next to his high-Impressionist masterpieces that may contain portraits of people historians have identified but who almost are incidental to the more brilliant painting of anecdotal, still life or landscape elements.
The virtue of a Renoir portrait show lies primarily in allowing us to see the development of a key figure in Impressionism through the one genre his colleagues ignored. Renoir did not keep French portrait painting alive — the academics of his time did that — but he had the strongest interest in portraiture among the late 19th Century French painters who were more daring than the academics and, hence, have remained the ones we admire.
Between portraits of family members, painted early and late in Renoir’s career, the show presents likenesses of artists, friends, dealers and middle-class patrons. The most formal portraits usually were done on commissions that sustained Renoir, making possible his better-known scenes from modern life, which incidentally may include casual portraits of intimates.
It’s almost a rule: When formal portraits by Renoir catch and hold attention, it is because of characteristics not identifiable from his greatest paintings. The portraits are usually blanker, cooler, more restrained in atmosphere and brushwork than Renoir’s scenes from modern life; he did not appear to put as much of himself in them, and with rare exceptions, they are not as good.
The exhibition, as seen in Ottawa, initially acknowledged that Renoir’s portraits and scenes from modern life were different categories of work but ultimately blurred the distinction by mixing them. The institute’s addition of the large, famous “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., takes viewers farther down that road. Officials at each venue thereby tacitly acknowledge that Renoir’s strict portraits are not enough to sustain a first-rate portrait show.
Students of 19th Century French art will find opportunities to make historical connections to the subjects of the portraits and how they related in a social milieu. But the excitement of, say, “Frederic Bazille Painting `The Heron’ ” comes from knowing the Impressionists’ hero Edouard Manet once owned the work and catching how it reflects Manet’s palette as it makes other pictorial references to Renoir’s comrades, Alfred Sisley and Monet. But that’s something different from receiving an optical thrill, something equally dependent on one’s own knowledge of the artist’s biography as on his gifts in painting.
Those who know the standard view of Renoir as a poor, good-natured country bumpkin may be surprised to have it upset by what the exhibition tells about his grasping after financial success. The commissions he did of the rising bourgeoisie are central to that story as well as to why he left the exhibitions held by the Impressionists and strove to be accepted by the institution they rebelled against, the vast annual academic exhibition known as the Salon.
When Renoir’s family portrait, “Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children,” was accepted by the Salon and hung in a prominent place in 1879, he was virtually assured a larger, higher-paying clientele. Other Impressionists could have taken this as a betrayal or, at the least, viewed it with envy. Still, Camille Pissarro said, “Renoir has been a great success at the Salon. I think he has made his mark. So much the better; poverty is so hard.”
Listen to Renoir a few years later: “To exhibit with Pissarro, Gauguin and Guillaumin is as if I were to exhibit with some sort of socialist group. A little farther and Pissarro will invite the Russian (anarchist Pierre) Lavrof or some other revolutionary. The public doesn’t like what smells of politics and I certainly don’t want, at my age, to become a revolutionary. To continue with the Israelite, Pissarro — that’s revolution. What’s more, these gentlemen know that I took a big step forward as a result of showing at the Salon. It is a matter of not losing what I have gained.”
Does that sound like a painter of natural tenderness and charm? Or is it an old pro fearful of diminishing what has come to him from having learned how to sugarcoat and flatter? The emptiness of some of the society commissions in “Renoir’s Portraits” suggests an ominous shadow had been cast on his work, exaggerating an already existing tendency toward over-sweetness. You see it in the candy colors and brushstrokes that become spun sugar. There would be no turning back, not even to the queasy but still coloristically searching “Self-portrait at Thirty-five.”
When Degas said, “Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order,” he referred only to specific commissions. But it is possible to see in all of the society portraits a continuing influence as telling as the study of Classical art was to Renoir’s late, firmed-up style. The doll-like vacancy of some of the commissions might have held a germ for the reduction of all his figures to unvaryingly plump, full-lipped and apple-cheeked creatures who are less people with distinct personalities than children and women represented as toys.
Now and again, one of Renoir’s late portraits of family members comes to life, not through any revelation of the person inside the toy but in an almost supernatural glow of the outside, which is to say, its clothing. “The White Pierrot (Jean Renoir),” from 1901-2, is among the most ravishing of these pictures, solely for the luminescence of the child’s costume, and such finesse in handling recurs in Renoir’s final portrait, the 1917 “Ambroise Vollard Dressed as a Toreador.”
Some of this comes through the finery depicted in the bizarre 1910 commission “Madame Thurneyssen and Her Daughter,” which apparently on request of the husband, bares the left breast of the pneumatic matron. But the revenge of Renoir’s bon-bon box sensibility is not far behind, as in the very next year he painted Thurneyssen’s son in the pose of the god Dionysus on a pediment of the Parthenon, and the resulting idyll — complete with the cutest birds fluttering about the boy’s outstretched finger — typifies a kind of preciousness that World War I would mercifully sweep away from painting.
In Ottawa, the exhibition included an excerpt from a 1915 film by Sacha Guitry in which the old Renoir, hands gnarled by rheumatoid arthritis, smokes incessantly and works at a canvas unseen by the camera. More feeling was communicated by that 2 1/2-minute clip than by the entire five rooms of canvases preceding it, and the fact that it disproves the long-standing myth of Renoir having to paint with brushes strapped to his arms constituted the show’s only memorable display of candor.
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Organized by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, “Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age” will continue at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., through Jan. 4, 1998; it then will appear at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas. (Feb. 8-April 26).
