Albertina
18 October 2016 to 22 January 2017
Bilbao
Fine Arts Museum from 7 February to 15 May 2017
Writing
about his father, the filmmaker Jean Renoir said: “He looked at flowers, women
and clouds in the sky as other men touch and caress.” Renoir. Intimacy, the
first retrospective in Spain to focus on the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste
Renoir (1841-1919), will challenge the traditional concept that reduces
Impressionism to the “purely visual”. Rather, it will emphasise the central
role played by tactile sensations in Renoir’s paintings, which are present in
all the different phases of his career and are expressed through a wide range
of genres including group scenes, portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes.
Curated
by Guillermo Solana, Artistic Director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibition
will present a survey of more than 75 works by the artist loaned from museums
and collections worldwide, including the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the
Art Institute of Chicago, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the J. Paul Getty
Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.
Renoir.
Intimacy will show how the artist made use of the tactile qualities of volume,
paint and textures as a vehicle to evoke intimacy in its various forms
(friendship, the family or erotic ties) and how that imagery connects the work
to the viewer through the sensuality of the brushstroke and the pictorial
surface.
Touch
and intimacy
While
the figures in the group portraits of artists such as Manet and Degas tend to
maintain their distance with the viewer, Renoir imbued his figures with a
palpable closeness. In scenes with two or more, these figures habitually
participate in a process of alternation between visual and physical contact:
pairs of siblings or mothers and children in which one looks at the other,
while the second responds by touching them.
Pierre-Auguste
Renoir. After the Luncheon, 1879. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. / Bathing
on the Seine. La Grenouillère, 1869. The State Pushkin Museum, Moscú.
On
occasions these exchanges are constructed around a shared activity such as
reading a book. In the case of his individual portraits, Renoir aimed to offer
an experience comparable to physical contact by bringing the viewer as close as
possible. While Degas surrounded his models with a setting and attributes that
represent them, Renoir tended to tighten up the composition, omitting the
setting in order to concentrate our gaze on the figure’s face. Other details
that refer to palpable sensations in Renoir’s paintings include the figures’
hair, which they play with and twist around their hands; the dogs and cats held
by women in these works; the pieces of cloth or towels that cover their breast
or are wrapped round their thighs; the task of sewing; skeins of wool; or the dense
texture of a garden.
Intimate
Renoir is structured into five thematic sections: Impressionism, Portraits, Landscapes,
Family and domestic Scenes and Bathers.
The Impressionist phase, from 1869 to 1880, occupies three rooms in the exhibition and features some of Renoir’s most iconic works, including
The Impressionist phase, from 1869 to 1880, occupies three rooms in the exhibition and features some of Renoir’s most iconic works, including
Bathing
in the Seine (La Grenouillère)of 1869, one of the works that Renoir executed in
La Grenouillère, a popular area for leisure activities on the outskirts of Paris
where he worked with Monet.
portraits
of couples such as La Promenade(1870),
in
addition to an Impressionist landscape,
Woman with a Parasol in a Garden(1875), complete this section.
Woman with a Parasol in a Garden(1875), complete this section.
By
1881 the Impressionist approach seemed to be exhausted and the group’s members
moved apart. Renoir turned his gaze to the classical tradition, from Raphael to
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. While maintaining the use of an Impressionist
pictorial language, his works now reveal a greater emphasis on drawing.
From
the late 1870s and during the rest of the following decade Renoir gained a
growing reputation as a portraitist, becoming one of the most solicited by Parisian
high society. His depictions of
Portrait
of the Poet Alice Vallières-Merzbach(1913),
the
portrait of his dealer Paul Durand (1910)
and
of his sons Joseph Durand-Ruel(1882)
and
Charles and Georges Durand-Ruel(1882) are among the examples of this facet of
his output on display.
The
room devoted to landscapes includes views of the Normandy coast and the Channel
Islands, such as
Hills
around the Bay of Moulin Huet, Guernsey(1883), Provence,
where
he shared pictorial motifs with his friend Cézanne, among them
Mont
Sainte-Victoire(ca.1888-1889)
and
various locations in southern Italy, including The Bay of Salerno (Landscape of
the South) of 1881.
The
exhibition continues with family and domestic scenes featuring the artist’s
children, such as
and
Jean dressed as a Hunter (1910);
the
artist’s wife Aline, depicted in Motherhood(1885), painted to mark the birth of
their first son Pierre,
and
in Aline Renoir Nursing her Baby(1915);
and
other members of his closest circle. The latter included Gabrielle Renard, the
family’s nanny and a distant relative of Aline, who became one of Renoir’s
favourite models, seen here in
Boy
with an Apple or Gabrielle, Jean Renoir and a Girl(ca.1895-1896), and Andrée
Heuschling, who would marry Renoir’s son Jean after the artist’s death, seen here
in
The
Concert (1918-1919).
The
nude was among Renoir’s preferred subjects, although with the exception of
Degas the Impressionists tended to avoid it as they considered it an academic theme.
Engaged in his own stylistic evolution, Renoir achieved one of the high points of his career with his scenes of bathers: a series of nudes set outdoors in which the artist celebrated a type of timeless nature devoid of any reference to the modern world. The result is an idyllic vision characterised by the sensuality of the models, richness of colouring and plenitude of the forms.