Face to face they were, two 9-year-old girls in a gray exhibit hall of the Art Institute of Chicago. Leah Bressler of St. Charles stared across the ages at Mademoiselle Romaine Lacaux.
Romaine, who was Leah’s age when Renoir painted her in 1864, wore a billowy blouse in the portrait. Leah, studying the long-ago child’s face intently, wore corduroy overalls.
“We don’t want to forget this kind of stuff–even though we end up at hockey games most of the time,” said Leah’s mother, Deanna Bressler.
A dense fog Sunday erased the tops of skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue, making Chicago look like an unfinished painting. But on the last day of a special exhibition of his work, Renoir and his eternally bright summer scenes once again filled the museum and the bleak streetscape outside with people.
And by the time the Art Institute closed Sunday night, the Renoir exhibition had finished as one of the top-five attended shows in the museum’s history.
Though not as popular as the wildly successful 1995 Monet exhibition, which drew almost a million people during its 18-week run, the Renoir show eclipsed last year’s Degas exhibition. Though somewhat brief by art-show standards, the 81-day Renoir exhibit attracted 6,000 people a day.
Nearly 500,000 visitors saw the show, said museum spokeswoman Kathleen Henesey Cardoza.
That near-capacity pace ended strong over the weekend, as thousands of people clamored for a last chance to see the exhibition. Indeed, many of them were in Chicago Saturday and Sunday primarily to see Renoir.
“When you’re looking at the people standing in line to get tickets, it’s unbelievable,” said Riverside resident Dagnara Skoczek, 26. On Sunday, she stood in line for 30 minutes for tickets to the show, titled “Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age.”
“The last couple of days it’s just nuts,” said Gloria Groom, the museum’s associate curator for European painting. “I think Renoir in the end will be a larger figure simply because it’s Renoir.
“It’s the name recognition, it’s an exhibition people want to bring their children to because of his affinity for children. We see a lot of families.”
In an age of pop fads, short attention spans and fickle public tastes, the day belonged to the bearded artist with bags under his eyes. His legacy has endured and grown even into the MTV era.
“That’s why we brought the kids,” said Chicagoan Patty Batchos, 41, who attended with her husband, Dennis Batchos, 47, and their children, Lisa, 8, and Nicholas, 5. “They’re a little older now and can appreciate it. We want to make sure they’re exposed to this kind of thing.”
These days, Groom said, the success of any art show is reassuring. “Absolutely, when you think what we’re vying with both sports and theater, live performances and rock concerts and shopping at Christmastime,” she said.
Up the street and a half-block to the west, at the Esquire Theater, moviegoers waited in a short line for tickets to see the 11:30 a.m. showing of “Jackie Brown.” But in front of the Art Institute, the Batchos family waited in a longer line to see Renoir.
On Sunday, the last of those to attend the Renoir exhibition lingered spellbound beneath paintings of dancing men and women, angelic children and long-ago Junes.
“We missed the Monet and we missed the Degas,” Patty Batchos said. “That’s why we’re here. I didn’t want to miss another one.”
But Alexandra Rojeck, 25, of Geneva, Switzerland, bought a ticket to her first-ever art show in Chicago because she specifically wanted to see Renoir’s work. Art being art, Rojeck struggled to explain why, her hands moving helplessly in the chill air.
“It’s like, his painting,” she said, her breath coming out in a cloud. “I just like it. I can’t tell you why.
“I love Impressionists. But if you want to see them in Europe, you have to go to Paris. I prefer Paris, but I like Chicago.”
Sometimes, people from other parts of the world are surprised at how accessible the arts are in Chicago, said Michelle Clayton of Dallas, who took her 5-year-old son, Conor, to the Renoir show Sunday while in Chicago on vacation. Friends in Dallas were befuddled when she told them she would be spending leisure time in Chicago.
“You tell them you’re going to Chicago, and they say, `Why, what would you do there?’ ” she said. ” `Are you going there on business? Are you just going to be there for the weekend?’ You tell them you’re staying for a week, and they’re surprised.
“Chicago keeps that a secret, I think,” Clayton said of the city’s museums and art shows.
Exhibits such as Renoir’s show the world there is a gentler side to the city of hard edges, Patty Batchos said.
“You travel abroad,” she said, “and they always ask you if you know about Al Capone. They associate Chicago with gangsters and kind of a tough life.”
But those who attended the exhibition Sunday, walking past the gleaming suits of armor and the Marc Chagall stained-glass windows to the gray rooms of Renoir’s world, were greeted by a brightly colored painting of a man and woman dancing–“an untroubled image of love, courtship and social harmony,” reads an description on the wall–called “Dance at Bougival.”
“It’s very beautiful,” said Mary Ann Thompson of Lawrenceburg, Ky., who came to Chicago with her husband, Duayne Thompson, just to see the Renoir exhibit. As she beheld Renoir’s paintings, she thought about the days of her youth: “Good times on a Sunday afternoon.”
Inside the museum, it was much different from the bleak, gray world outside.
“That’s the first thing I get–it looks warm, like springtime,” Duayne Thompson said of the painting, smiling.
Nine-year-old Leah Bressler stood in front of “The Inn of Mere Antony,” in which a mop-like dog lying under a chair stares out from a scene of men gathered around a table. The little girl walked as close to the painting as she could, bending at the waist to stare into the dog’s eyes.
“We just think he looks very realistic,” said her mother, Deanna Bressler. “His eyes follow you. You can almost feel the fur on his head.”
Sunday, despite Leah’s doubts, she and her mother had made time for Renoir–instead of spending the day watching hockey. And the little girl was glad.
“I think the people look real,” Leah said, smiling. “And the food looks real, too.”
Nancy Gehweiler of Milwaukee, who wore a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt, gave up watching an NFL playoff game to see the exhibition. Her daughter, Annie, gave up shopping.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get to France, but this might be as close as I’ll ever come,” Nancy Gehweiler said.
In an adjoining gallery, a woman aching from Chicago’s winter stood inches from a blessed summer scene, transfixed by Renoir’s “Near the Lake.” She blew her nose loudly, coughed and moved on.
Some of these people would be going to the movies later. Some would be going to a music club or attending a play.
In a way, Renoir was not much different.
“For some people, it just kind of seems like the `in’ thing to do, to say you came here,” said Don Byrne, 24, as he wandered through the exhibit.
But there was something more, too: In a little girl named Romaine and in a mop-haired dog, a long-dead artist lived on.
Five-year-old Conor Clayton, dressed in a bright-red sweater Renoir might love, would be getting out his paints when he got home–“to see if he can do a better job,” said his mother, Michelle.
