Word: renoirs
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...Galerie Charpentier, a mediocre Monet brought more than $4,000; so did a Renoir portrait which was more oddity than masterpiece (it was painted on a ten-inch circular stone slab). A Rouault landscape was knocked down for $5,700, an early Montmartre view by Utrillo went for $5,300, a Still Life with Flowers by Pierre Bonnard was quickly bid up from $5,700 to $14,000. Even a small Chagall gouache went...
...most popular painter in the world today, judging by gallerygoers' reactions and reproduction sales, is the sensual impressionist, Pierre Auguste Renoir. Leonardo commands greater awe, but awe is a long way from affection: at the Louvre it is not the tourists but the Mona Lisa who smiles. Van Gogh had more passion, and for a time his popularity surpassed even Renoir's, but Van Gogh's best pictures are explosive compounds of joy and sorrow, more calculated to disturb than to please. Never a shadow of sorrow crosses Renoir's canvases; he painted simple, earthly pleasures...
Next week in Los Angeles, a modern mecca of breast and buttock fanciers, the County Museum is staging one of the biggest Renoir retrospectives ever held. On show will be top-flight canvases from Renoir's best working years, from 1865 until his death in 1919. Curator Richard Brown has also rounded up a nearly complete set of Renoir's prints, many of his finest drawings, and 18 sculptures...
...Bell. The sculptures and graphic works prove that Renoir's feeling for the human form was as careful as it was appreciative. He never stopped making strictly accurate figure studies, for study purposes, and never looked for shortcuts. At art school he was, in his own words, "very attentive, very docile." At 40, he called himself "still in the blotting stage." In old age, he described his working method in typically unassuming terms: "I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child. I want a red to be sonorous...
...reds in Renoir's portrait of Mme. Henriot (opposite) are sonorous indeed, make a rich foil for her pale flesh and paler costume. He used to say that all he asked of a model was "a skin that takes the light," but the portrait shows that Renoir could rise to and convey beauties of personality as well as those of flesh alone. His bronze study of Mme. Renoir nursing their son (right) goes beyond flesh and personality alike to celebrate an ever-recurring and ever-moving relationship...