Word: renoirs
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HARVARD-EPWORTH CHURCH. Nana by Jean Renoir (1926) with Catherine Hessling...
...Pierre Renoir became, of course, her painter laureate. From Feb. 3 to April 1, the Art Institute of Chicago has on view its most ambitious exhibition in some years: a loan show of 89 Renoirs, tracing his career from 1862 to 1919, when, crippled by arthritis but still painting with brushes strapped to his ruined claws, he died. At one end there are early works like The Clown, 1868, with the precociously firm, sharp structure of figure and field that the 27-year-old painter had learned from Manet. At the other, one finds the semiclassical and flowery kitsch...
...19th century painter, not even the great sensualist Delacroix, has affected our unconscious view of women as powerfully as Renoir. This is partly due to the popularity of his work and partly to the unwavering, passionate chauvinism of his feelings about his favorite subject, the nude. Compared with Renoir, even Picasso looks like a feminist. "Look," Renoir explained succinctly to his friend, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, "a painter who has the feeling for breasts and buttocks is a saved...
...Matisse's "armchair for tired businessmen," but more so - and in this he succeeded. He was the natural heir of the finest decorators of the 18th century, Fragonard and Boucher. "He who has not lived be fore the Revolution," said Metternich, "cannot know the sweetness of life," and Renoir's spiritual home was built before 1789. Almost from the start of his career, Renoir's technique and sense of construction were superb: witness the sober, Venetian expansiveness of his great tribute to Corot, Pont-des-Arts, circa 1868. Or the vigorous, limpid Still Life with Bouquet...
...call Renoir superficial is in some degree to miss the meaning of his art, for it is about surfaces. Smooth or fuzzy, rounded and fleshy or fruity, bathed in the crystalline light of Provencal sun or lapped by the amenable glow of gas light, his surfaces suggest a dense pro fusion of incident and reality that more modern eyes, intent only on structure, pass over and lose...