Word: renoirs
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...people always look for ideas in painting?" asked the great French Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir. "When I look at a masterpiece, I am satisfied merely to enjoy it." Last week at Manhattan's Wildenstein gallery plenty of satisfied art lovers were thoroughly enjoying themselves. The reason: the first big U.S. show of Master Renoir's paintings in a decade...
Drawn mainly from private collections in the U.S., the exhibit offered many seldom-seen glimpses into Renoir's sunny, easygoing world. Unlike some of his contemporaries who were fascinated by life's seamy edges, Renoir doted on what was pretty, could see no reason for painting the drab and bizarre. Even Montmartre's famous dance hall, Le Moulin de la Galette, he peopled with gay, attractive couples instead of the garishly lit libertines and doxies of Toulouse-Lautrec. The landscapes and floral pieces which Renoir did for "mental relaxation" glowed with the pure bright colors which...
...show's brightest attractions were the French girls Renoir was "always anxious to paint as beautiful fruits." Three-fourths of the pictures were dominated by his sloe-eyed, apple-cheeked, melon-curved women who had a tree-ripened look about them that few other painters could match. Filled with preternatural healthiness, they always seemed to enjoy themselves-boating, strolling on the beach, playing at shuttlecock, buying a hat or peacefully dozing...
Nowhere was there any hint of Renoir's own hardships. Although he spent the last 25 years of his life fighting a losing battle with constant illness, no personal gloom ever disfigured or darkened the 4,000 canvases he completed before his death in 1919. When a stuffy teacher, annoyed by his high spirits, once said sardonically, "You seem to take painting as fun," Renoir quickly replied: "If painting were not fun to me, I should certainly...
Levine's newest interests: Byzantine-rich canvases of imaginary kings, handsome studies of generously fleshed women reminiscent of Rubens and Renoir, playful classical allegories. But he is still a city boy. His next big project, he announced, would be a "gigantic" canvas of a pawnshop. Said Levine: "A pawnshop has everything. A pawnshop means something...