He distorted the body to make works of art that expressed his more traditional way of seeing the female as the personification and representation of fecundity. “Reminiscent of Rubens, the body is fuller and more rounded, and it isn’t that his models looked like that. He wanted to carry on that tradition by creating a new art that combined the spirit of that tradition with painting that responded to modern life.”Ĭonsider his paintings of female nudes, Einecke says on an early walk-through of the exhibition. He was interested in artists of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, including Titian and Rubens, his special favorites, but he didn’t want to copy them. He also wanted the painting to be about something else - the history of art and classic, traditional themes. He didn’t want only to record what the eye sees.
“He was not so comfortable with Impressionism any more,” observes Claudia Einecke, LACMA associate curator of European painting and sculpture. Organized with Paris’ Musée d’Orsay and Réunion des Musées Nationaux, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the show looks not at the better-known Impressionist works that made Renoir famous but rather at the very different work he produced over his last 30 years.īut in the 1880s, Renoir’s concerns began to change. Matisse called “The Bathers” Renoir’s masterpiece, and Los Angeles museum goers can make their own decisions when an exhibition of that painting and dozens more opens at LACMA on Sunday. “The Bathers,” his last monumental work, was completed in 1919, the year he died. He would be brought into his studio and seated in front of a canvas, where a paintbrush would be placed into his fist, a piece of cloth protecting his immobilized fingers from the brush’s wooden handle. Renoir never did walk again, filmmaker Jean Renoir recalled in his book, “Renoir, My Father,” but he did paint successfully for many more years. If I have to choose between walking and painting, I’d much rather paint.” But when the doctor lifted him from his wheelchair, Renoir managed to go just a few steps before he told the doctor that to walk would take “all my willpower, and I would have none left for painting. Severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, 71-year-old painter Pierre- Auguste Renoir agreed in 1912 to one last attempt at walking.
0 kommentar(er)
