Auguste Renoir's colorful and joyful paintings, along with his iconography of outdoor dance halls and public balls, earned him the title of 'painter of happiness.' This reputation has sometimes led to his marginalization among the great painters of modernity, on the grounds that modernity can only be melancholic or ironic, disillusioned or disenchanted. Yet his work offers an original reflection on modernity, placed under the sign of love, understood both as a force governing human relationships and as a sentiment guiding the artist's gaze toward his models, the world, and painting itself.
'I know well that it is difficult to make people admit that a painting can be great painting while remaining joyful' (Auguste Renoir). On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876), a masterpiece from the collections of the Musée d'Orsay, this exhibition brings together for the first time this major corpus of 'scenes from modern life'—multi-figure paintings depicting contemporary subjects (distinct from portraits and landscapes)—created by Renoir during the first twenty years of his career (1865–1885). During this period, he participated in the collective invention of a 'New Painting' alongside Manet, Monet, Morisot, Degas, and Caillebotte. He distinguished himself, however, through his singular sense of empathy and capacity for wonder, choosing only happy subjects and always highlighting his models. This 'loving' gaze is manifested by a pronounced taste for connections—in his motifs (conversations, meals, dancing, etc.) as well as in his manner of painting, attentive to everything that contributes to a sense of unity (characters' gestures, enveloping light, balance of colors, fluid and sketched strokes that blend objects into one another). The exhibition also highlights Renoir's predilection for representing young couples but aims to deconstruct the received idea that his painting is 'sentimental.' On the contrary, it avoids overly direct expressions of emotion, novelistic narration, 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 freedom of manners 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 artist's biography, which was then marked by a 'bohemian life' characterized by relationships considered 'illegitimate' at the time, and placed within the context of the 19th century, marked by marriage and bourgeois norms, religious morality, the significant presence of prostitution, and very strong inequalities between men and women. In this framework, Renoir's large-format works dedicated to the happy couple, 'camaraderie' (in the words of his friend Rivière), and conviviality appear as so many manifestos against the violence of gender relations, class antagonisms, and the growing solitude of urban life. Co-organized with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, this exhibition offers a renewed perspective on paintings so famous that it has become difficult today to perceive their full novelty. For the first time since 1985—the date of the last Renoir retrospective organized in Paris—an exhibition brings together a tight but significant set of works (about fifty paintings) from the first part of the artist's career, including his greatest masterpieces: from La Grenouillère (1869, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) to Les Parapluies (1881–1885, London, The National Gallery), passing through La Promenade (1870, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum), Danse à Bougival (1883, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), and Le Déjeuner des canotiers (1880–1881), exceptionally loaned by the Phillips Collection in Washington.
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Source: paris.fr — photo: Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum