90 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
“Bather with Blonde Hair,” circa 1903. Renoir’s women are occasions, not subjects.
THEA RT WORLD
SKIN DEEP
Renoir’s nudes.BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
© ÖSTERREICHISCHE GALERIE BELVEDERE, VIENNA
W
ho doesn’t have a problem with
Pierre-Auguste Renoir? A tre-
mendously engaging show that centers
on the painter’s prodigious output of
female nudes, “Renoir: The Body, the
Senses,” at the Clark Art Institute, in
Williamstown, Massachusetts, sparks a
sense of crisis. The reputation of the
once exalted, still unshakably canonical,
Impressionist has fallen on difficult days.
Never mind the affront to latter-day ed-
ucated tastes of a painting style so sug-
ary that it imperils your mind’s incisors;
there’s a more burning issue. The art
historian Martha Lucy, writing in the
show’s gorgeous catalogue, notes that,
“in contemporary discourse,” the name
Renoir has “come to stand for ‘sexist
male artist.’” Renoir took such presump-
tuous, slavering joy in looking at naked
women—who in his paintings were al-
ways creamy or biscuit white, often with
strawberry accents, and ideally blond—
that, Lucy goes on to argue, the tactil-
ity of the later nudes, with brushstrokes
like roving fingers, unsettles any kind
of gaze, including the male. I’ll endorse
that, for what it’s worth.
Renoir’s women strum no erotic nerves
in me. There’s no beholding distance
from their monotonously compact,
rounded breasts and thunderous thighs,
smushed into depthless landscapes and
interiors, and thus no imaginable ap-proach to intimacy. Their faces nearly
always look, not to put too fine a point
on it, dumb—bearing out Renoir’s in-
difference to the women as individuals
with inner lives. They aren’t subjects, only
occasions. (His models were often amazed
at how little they recognized themselves
in pictures that they had posed for.) Pe-
culiarly, Renoir did grant the women
wonderfully articulated hands, the body
part hardest to render convincingly—
good for doing things, perhaps around
the house. In his later work, his most
prominent models were his servants or
other lower-middle-class women.
He’s great, though, according to the
standard of art history that values the
refreshment of traditions by way of rad-
ical departures from them. The bril-
liant curators of the Clark show, Es-
ther Bell and George T. M. Shackelford,
demonstrate Renoir’s pivotal place in
French painting of the nude by inter-
polating apposite works by such pre-
decessors as Boucher, Corot, and, es-
pecially, Courbet, whose nudes are like
libidinous four-alarm fires; by Renoir’s
contemporaries, the sardonic Degas and
the conscientious Cézanne; and by mem-
bers of the next generation, notably Pi-
casso, Matisse, Valadon, and Bonnard.
(The show is a romp for connoisseur-
ship, illumining, by abrupt contrasts,
the core qualities of the respective art-
ists.) Picasso adored and collected Renoir
nudes, the more outrageous the better.
I think that he responded to something
about Renoir that he also found in the
consummate religiosity of El Greco
and in the hieratic integrity of African
sculpture: downright, forthright art,
uncompromised by social niceties and
free of apologetic irony—a bit akin to
what Kierkegaard wanted from God,
the capacity “to will one thing.”
Everything in Renoir that is hard to
take and almost impossible to think
about, because it makes no concessions
to intelligence, affirms his stature as a
revolutionary artist. He stood firmly
against the past in art and issued a stark
challenge to its future. You can’t de-
throne him without throwing overboard
the fundamental logic of modernism as
a sequence of jolting aesthetic break-
throughs, entitled to special rank on the
grounds of originality and influence.
The more politicized precincts of the
present art world are bent on just such