On a 102 degree day, with gray smog blurring William Penn, and the Philadelphia streets baking in the sun, I made my way to the Late Renoir exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

On the way, I saw graffiti, litter, and swathes of grass burned brown. Perhaps it was the heat, because very few people were there. “A good day to see the exhibit,” the cheerful ticket taker told me.

I asked for the head phones.

For the first painting, Young Girls at the Piano, I was told it was a “celebration of domestic art.” Gabrielle and Jean was said to be a “celebration of all that is well in the world.”

Dancing Girl with Tambourine and Dancing Girl with Castanets were described as “voluptuous women painted beautifully by a man who adored them.” The Large Bather became the study of “a man looking at a woman celebrating wonderful, earthy, fruitful, fabulous beauty.” Finally, The Concert, was described as the “most opulent, splendid painting ever painted.”

Later, in the bathroom, I listened to two women discussing how impressed they were that Renoir continued to paint when he was so crippled by arthritis.

I purchased the catalog.

In it, Guy Cogeval says that “Renoir likes his women fat,” that his late period seems to “tear up the rulebook of good taste,” that he “dares to be vulgar.” He quotes Mary Cassatt, the quote subsequently picked up by all the newspaper reviews: “He is painting pictures or rather studies of huge red women with very small heads which are the most awful imaginable.” (Renoir in the 20th Century, p.18)

For an objective aesthetic analysis practitioner, all of this piqued my interest. I did some more research.

Holland Cotter, writing in the New York Times, said Cassatt “had the clearer eye” than Matisse. She said of the same pictures that they were “the loveliest nudes ever painted.” (“Avant-Gardist in Retreat,” June 17, 2010). Of Young Girls at the Piano, from the Musée d’Orsay, Cotter wrote: “it’s designed for the sweet tooth, as much of his later art would be.” He further declared that “in a sense these aren’t even really paintings of figures, they’re paintings of skin. Expanses of it fill the center of canvases, swelling and folding, minutely and specifically textured and tinted: creamy rose, poached-salmon pink, toasty brown.”

Edward Sozanski, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, declared a challenge: Philadelphians, you and I, will be able to decide the question for ourselves. The question: whether Renoir’s work “is a wellspring of modern art, on a par in his influence on younger artists with his friend Cezanne.” (“Art: Late (great?) Renoir at Art Museum,” June 13, 2010)

Let’s try.

First of all, we have to move past the subject. Renoir’s paintings are not pictures of “skin” any more than they are pictures of Cagnes, or of Ambroise Vollard in the Costume of a Toreador. As Dr. Barnes says: “His nudes are symbols, not naked women; and a group of them, seen as an ensemble, resembles a bouquet of variegated flowers; commonplace scenes and persons lose their vulgarity in his work.” (The Art in Painting, p. 318) Nor did Dr. Barnes see Renoir’s late work as the wellspring of modern art. He says, quite clearly: “It is because of the subtlety and power of Renoir’s effects, and the practical impossibility of reproducing or expanding them, that he has so few disciples even among the intelligent and talented generation of young painters.” (p. 318)

If we are to appreciate this work, we must experience it aesthetically. Only then will his subjects transform into visual ideas teaching us new ways of seeing. What, at first glance, seems like a world far removed from our smog-filled, sun-blasted steaming streets then can become one rich with new possibilities of adventures in perception.

Let me be honest. When I entered the exhibit in my overheated grumpy mood, and I saw Young Girls at the Piano, I thought: “Good God, what has that got to do with me and my world? So pretty. So dated. So not here and now.”

Then I started looking at it.  That’s all you need to do.

If you wish to debate if Renoir’s work “is a wellspring of modern art,” compare Beaulieu Landscape (1893, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco) with Bonnard’s Sunlight (1923, Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid). Examine Bonnard’s “juxtaposed color-spots,” as Dr. Barnes calls them, with Renoir’s color chords. Notice the difference in the spatial recession (shallow in the Bonnard), and the volumes (flat in the Bonnard). Bonnard’s color has neither the depth nor the richness of Renoir’s.

Or compare Renoir’s Seated Bather (1914, The Art Institute of Chicago) with Picasso’s Large Nude with Drapery (1923, Musée National de l’Orangerie). Yes, Picasso uses a female nude rendered large and filling the picture plane, as does Renoir. Yes, he models the flesh with stripes of variegated beige, gray, rose. However, the origins of the angularity, massiveness, and solidity of the volume, the arid fresco quality of the color, the rough, chiseled quality of the paint, the absence of deep space, the mask-like facial features, and the block-like pattern of planes is found in African sculpture and Cezanne, not Renoir.

Scrutinize the other artists’ work represented in the exhibit and describe what you discover.  You may be surprised by the reward.

For example, in the past few days, trapped in my house because of the heat, I happened to look out of the large sliding glass door in my basement into my backyard. Yes, the air was steaming with heat. Yes, the grass looked burned brown and thin. Yes, the trees’ foliage seemed enervated, sagging, as if exhausted.

Then, as though I sharpened the lens of a camera, something shifted: I saw the round pot of red New Guinea impatiens; I saw the birdbath and three finches drinking from it; I saw the bank of woods. The trees’ foliage separated into volumes of deep greens and blues reaching forward, creating pockets of lavender space that echoed the round birdbath and the circularity of the flower pot. The coasters of red flowers led me to the path which pushed back into the deeper woods. Islands of luminous light hovered in the heat, pulsing forward and separating from the tree trunks and the foliage.

Renoir taught me how to see this. That is why I go to exhibits. That is why I do the work of looking.

I have composed a brief guide as encouragement for you to see the exhibit without aides of any kind.  All you need are the tools you have learned, your own eyes, your own mind and courage.

To download the Late Renoir Guide, please click here.