THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 91
a purge, and it’s hard to contest their
point by sticking up for Renoir’s only
too confident, even embarrassing, pa-
nache. But there’s no gainsaying his his-
toric significance.
C
lass is key to understanding Renoir.
He was born in Limoges in 1841,
the sixth of seven children of a tailor
and a seamstress. The family moved to
Paris four years later. He left school at
the age of twelve or thirteen to appren-
tice as a decorator of porcelain, quickly
advancing to a mastery of rococo forms
and images; that training persists in all
his painting, in which he centers the
subjects in space that goes vague toward
the corners of the canvas. Meanwhile,
he haunted the Louvre. Committed to
fine art, he entered the École des Beaux-
Arts in 1862. His schoolmates included
Monet, Sisley, and Bazille. He produced
strong works from the start, under the
spell of Courbet’s audacious realism and
Manet’s celebration of urbane moder-
nity. (His earliest nude in the show, “Boy
with Cat,” from 1868, isn’t only rare for
him, with its male subject, but startlingly
homoerotic.) This was the era when art-
ists started to forsake aristocratic and
institutional patronage—bucking the
bias of the annual Salon while hunger-
ing for inclusion in it—in favor of sup-
port from a burgeoning middle class.
In contrast to his better-off peers,
who chafed against their starchy up-
bringing, Renoir was bourgeois by as-
piration, not by birth. Unconflicted, he
swooned for the fashions and the pas-
times of the new order in such touch-
stone masterpieces as “Dance at the
Moulin de la Galette” (1876), which is
outside the purview of the Clark show;
the swirling crowd of chic merrymak-
ers in dappled summer light has enticed
innumerable youths, including me, long
ago, into a passion for modern paint-
ing. (There’s an anticipation here of
Andy Warhol, who jumped from lower-
class depths to upper-class heights, elid-
ing the middle altogether.) That social
infatuation, plus the artisan roots of a
style that bore traces, to the last, of ce-
ramic embellishment, made Renoir an
unprecedented artistic type, no more
but also no less vulgar than the society
that gave him a life and paid him a liv-
ing. He was a parvenu’s parvenu.
It feels wrong to term Renoir a mi-
sogynist, though he was certainly pa-
triarchal. “Misogyny” implies active an-
imus. By all accounts that I’m aware of,
including that of his adoring son Jean,
the great film director, he got on pleas-
antly enough with the woman he mar-
ried, in 1890—Aline Victorine Charigot,
a dressmaker, almost twenty years youn-
ger, with whom he had already had one
child and would have two more—and
with models, a mistress, and an illegit-
imate daughter, born in 1870, whom he
secretly supported for the rest of his life
and, with a bequest, beyond it. He could
be collegial with female artists, notably
Berthe Morisot, but he gave no sign of
regarding women as other than a spe-
cies subservient to men. He deemed
women who performed professionally
“completely ridiculous”; in a letter to a
critic, he explained, “In ancient times,
women sang and danced for free for the
pleasures of being charming and gra-
cious. Today, it’s all for money which
takes away the charm.” The airy as-
sumption in that may be worse than
misogyny, which at least credits women
with power as antagonists. It marks no
mere flaw in Renoir’s personality but
an essence of it that dovetails with his
attitude toward painting. Sex and art
figured for him as practically inter-
changeable rewards for living. An ar-
gument is often made that we shouldn’t
judge the past by the values of the pres-
ent, but that’s a hard sell in a case as
primordial as Renoir’s.
At the show, part of me felt as though
I were writhing on a pin: again and again
the carnal tapioca, the vacant gazes, the
fatuous frolic. Arriving at a cool Corot
nude in a darkling landscape or a crisp
Picasso nude combing her hair was like
gulping fresh air in a miasma. The pre-
hensile touch with which Renoir molds
female masses with color—instead of
modelling them with tonal shading—
awes the eye, defeating a self-protective
impulse to perceive the figures as if they
were cels from animated cartoons. The
work tends toward silliness but never
topples into it. He can really move paint
around, and his colors attain complex
harmonies even as you may crave sun-
glasses to mitigate their screeching chro-
mas. He’s like a house guest so annoy-
ing that you might consider burning
down the house to be rid of him. Let’s
not do that.
PRESENTED BY
October 11-13, 2019
New York City
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