Great Art/Renoir

None of the great artists divide opinion as much as Renoir.

On one hand he is lauded as King of the Impressionists, others find him too sentimental, whilst his later works of female nudes have attracted the opprobrium of feminists for being sexual objectification.

One who did not find fault was the collector Alfred Barnes whose museum in Philadelphia houses the biggest number of late Renoirs in the world.

The  latest Great Art programme on ITV showcased the Barnes Collection.

Alfred Barnes was a wealthy pharmacist at the turn of the last century who collected in a big way Impressionists. His collection in Philadelphia is not to be lent in part but in 1993 I saw the whole collection in Washington.

For me it’s not so much disliking Renoir for whatever reason but preferring others more.

My favourite impressionist is Camille Pissarro and in seeing those later life Renoir nudes they seemed so similar: large fleshy posteriors painted with such regularity that Renoir did indeed seem obsessed.

The curator of the Barnes Museum argued that Henri Matisse produced as many in late life. Not so. He too was in a wheelchair but he created the Rosalie Chapel and the paper cuts showcased in the previous programme.

A better example might be Pierre Bonnard who was quite fixated by his muse Marthe.

The French tend to deify their artists.

Poussin Corot, known as Pere Corot, Delacroix and Cezanne all enjoy mythic status but it seems that Renoir will not make the pantheon.

Famous before the nudes for painting the children of the bourgeoisie Renoir fans cannot point to one picture that changed the course of art history.

Edouard Manet painted The Bar at the Folies Bergeres, Olympia, Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe – each could be accused of sexual objectification but curiously are not and Manet’s reputation remains intact.

And what of Degas’s young ballet dancers?

Besides reputation is such a strange transient thing. Rembrandt and Raphael were highly reputed in their own time and stayed so.  You could say the same of Durer, Titian and Rubens, three clever businessmen as well as considerable artists.

Vermeer had to wait another 300 hundred years to reach the fame he enjoys today, Gustav Klimt 50 years. Conversely will Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin or Gerhard Richter be as famous in 50 years as they are today?

The question of art as porn arose in the week when a good friend of mine asked my opinion of a bold nude he was tempted to buy.

It was of a woman spread naked on her stomach across a bed. There was a clear implication that sex had taken place. I liked the colours and pose but said it was the type of picture that might hang in the bedroom but nowhere else.

I explained that the nude has a noble art history and artists were/are businessmen so some are commissioned to paint for the lascivious  desires of patrons.

I have already mentioned in a previous post  that Courbet’s Origin of the World, which is the torso of a naked woman with her genitalia at its epicentre, may well have been commissioned by an Ottoman diplomat to paint the figure for his personal delectation.

This is sexual objectification but that does not bar it from being a great picture. There is an equally long tradition of painting in music halls and brothels as Henri Toulouse Lautrec did.

Walter Sickert painted music halls and many nudes.

Vermeer painted The Procuress and there is more than a suggestion of sexual play in his The Music Lesson.

I rather take Oscar Wilde’s line:

“There is no such thing as a pornographic book. It’s either good or bad“.