Word: womens
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...influential wet dream of classical form. All the same, the Renoir of this period - three very productive decades before his death in 1919 at the age of 78 - fascinated some of the chief figures of modernism. Picasso was on board; his thick-limbed "neoclassical" women from the 1920s are indebted to Renoir. So was Matisse, who had one eye on Renoir's Orientalist dress-up fantasies like The Concert, with its flattened space and overall patterning, when he produced his odalisques. Given that so much of late Renoir seems saccharine and semicomical to us, is it still possible...
...faith in his flickering sunbeams. He returned to France determined to find his way to lucid, distinct forms in an art that reached for the eternal, not the momentary. By the later years of that decade, Renoir had lost his taste for the modern world anyway. As for modern women, in 1888 he could write, "I consider that women who are authors, lawyers and politicians are monsters." ("The woman who is an artist," he added graciously, "is merely ridiculous...
...woman who is a goddess - or at least harks back to one - that's a different matter. It would be Renoir's aim to reconfigure the female nude in a way that would convey the spirit of the classical world without classical trappings. Set in "timeless" outdoor settings, these women by their weight and scale and serenity alone - along with their often recognizably classical poses - would point back to antiquity...
...time, Renoir worked with figures so strongly outlined that they could have been put down by Ingres with a jackhammer. By 1892, the year with which the LACMA show starts, he had drifted back toward a fluctuating Impressionist brushstroke. Firmly contoured or flickering, his softly sculpted women are as full-bodied as Doric columns. This was one of the qualities that caught Picasso's eye, especially after his first trip to Italy, in 1917. He would assimilate Renoir alongside his own sources in Iberian sculpture and elsewhere to come up with a frankly more powerful, even haunting, amalgam...
...back to her art-world days. "I never thought of a particular artist or school of art in gender terms," she says. And yet she accepts the idea that she might be a role model and is sympathetic to the fact that, as she puts it, "the journey for women in many venues - be it politics, business, film - is a long and difficult struggle for equity." It's come up in her own career: before Oliver Stone agreed to produce her movie Blue Steel, she was having difficulty getting it made because it starred a woman (Jamie Lee Curtis) instead...