Renoir et l'amour

The colorful, joyful paintings of Auguste Renoir, his iconography of guinguettes and public balls, have made him a “painter of happiness.” This reputation has sometimes led to his marginalization among the great painters of modernity, on the assumption that modernity can only be melancholic or ironic, disillusioned or disenchanting. Yet his work proposes an original reflection on modernity, conceived under the sign of love—understood both as a force governing human relations and as a feeling guiding the artist’s gaze toward his models, the world, and painting itself.

“I know full well how difficult it is to make people accept that a painting can be truly great while remaining joyful.” (Auguste Renoir.)

On the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876), a masterpiece of the Impressionist collections of the Musée d’Orsay, this exhibition brings together for the first time this major corpus of “scenes of modern life”—multi-figure paintings depicting contemporary subjects (distinct from portraits and landscapes)—produced by Renoir during the first twenty years of his career (1865–1885). During this period he took part in the collective invention of a “New Painting” alongside Manet, Monet, Morisot, Degas, and Caillebotte. He nonetheless distinguished himself from his Impressionist friends by a singular sense of empathy and a capacity for wonder: he chose only happy subjects and consistently presented his models in a flattering light. This “loving” gaze is evident in a pronounced taste for relationships—in his motifs (conversations, meals, dancing…) as well as in his manner of painting, attentive to everything that can contribute to a feeling of unity (the figures’ gestures, enveloping light, balanced colors, and fluid, sketchy brushstrokes that meld objects together).

The exhibition also highlights Renoir’s preference for depicting the young couple but seeks to dismantle the received idea that his painting is merely “sentimental.” On the contrary, it avoids the direct expression of emotions, romanticized narrative, and erotic staging. An admirer of 18th-century French painters (Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard), Renoir revives an atmosphere of fêtes galantes and promotes a form of moral freedom and equality between the sexes in Paris at the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic. This choice must be understood in light of the biography of the Impressionist artist, who at the time led a bohemian life marked by relationships then considered “illegitimate,” and situated within a 19th-century context defined by marriage and bourgeois norms, religious morality, the significant presence of prostitution, and stark inequalities between men and women. In this framework, Renoir’s large-scale works dedicated to the happy couple, to “camaraderie” (in the words of his friend Rivière), and to conviviality appear as manifestos against the violence of gender relations, class antagonisms, and the growing loneliness of urban life.

Co-organized with the National Gallery, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this exhibition offers a renewed perspective on paintings so famous that it has become difficult today to perceive their original novelty. For the first time since 1985—the date of the last Renoir retrospective held in Paris—an exhibition gathers a compact but significant group of works (about fifty paintings) from the first part of the artist’s career, among which are his greatest masterpieces: from La Grenouillère (1869, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) to The Umbrellas (1881–1885, London, The National Gallery), including The Promenade (1870, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum), Dance at Bougival (1883, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), and Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881), very exceptionally lent by the Phillips Collection, Washington.

Cover: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), The Promenade, 1870, © Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum