The Renoir Americans loved

Magazine Antiques, August, 2002 by Steve Kern, Anne E. Dawson

In 1909 Pierre Auguste Renoir wrote in a letter to his dealer Georges Durand-Ruel (1866-1933), "I am pleased that collectors are more forthcoming. Better late than never." (1) Indeed, by that time, Renoir's paintings were not only entering private collections but were held by the French national collections and provincial museums. In his personal life, too, Renoir had triumphed, having been awarded the red ribbon of the Legion d'honneur in 1900. Criticism of his work was largely positive; the Austro-German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935) wrote a book-length biography of the artist in 1911, the first for any of the impressionists. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), one of the most important French avant-garde writers, referred in 1912 to "aged Renoir, the greatest painter of our time and one of the greatest painters of all time." (2)

At the same time, on the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean, Renoir and his painting were also becoming famous. So popular was the artist, in fact, that American painters using a variety of artistic approaches, from impressionist to realist to early modernist, engaged in an idolization of him in the first half of the twentieth century. They were inspired both by reading European and American critical appraisals of Renoir and by seeing his paintings. American artists studied his works intently in both gallery and museum exhibitions and sought out reproductions in the press. While the relationship may not always be readily evident, many Americans turned to Renoir to help them develop their own painting techniques, drawing inspiration from elements of his work and the European tradition.

Above all else, American critics and painters admired Renoir's ability to infuse traditional subjects--genre scenes, portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and female nudes--with formal virtuosity. They responded to his audacious use of rich color to define form, his broken brushwork, his energetic application of paint, and his complex compositional structure. They simultaneously valued Renoir's bond with tradition and his relationship to modern masters and modernist developments. Also important in the United States were Renoir's successful expression of a national consciousness and his celebration of conservative social values, valued concepts in American culture, especially during the years of the Great Depression and World War II. Finally, Americans appreciated how Renoir's works generated an emotional or psychological response. Thus, for a wide variety of American painters, Renoir's art affirmed their most important aesthetic goals and provided a model of how to achieve them while building their own success ful reputations.

Many factors facilitated Renoir's widespread acceptance in the United States between 1904 and 1940. To begin with, artists and critics, from academics to modernists, believed that American art lagged behind that of Europe. (3) Just as Americans had turned to French models such as the Barbizon painters in the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century they again sought a European tradition out of which American art could evolve. Renoir became the new model of excellence for American artists. In 1903 discussions of impressionism by the French essayist Camille Mauclair (1872-1945) were translated into English and widely read. (4) He devoted an entire chapter to Renoir in The Great French Painters, writing:

He reflects the whole work of his friends and yet remains thoroughly original. He has more freshness, more youth, more frankly national spirit than his friends....Of his whole generation he is certainly the artist who best demonstrates the French origin of Impressionism and its descent from eighteenth-century art. (5)

In The French Impressionists, the first book-length study in English devoted to the movement, Mauclair introduced ideas about the analogies between color and music:

[Renoir] searches for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical dissonances.... He abandons realism and style and conceives symphonies... one refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty. It is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his generation. (6)

Americans embraced this concept of a relationship between art and music as an element of modernism, and the connections between Renoir's paintings and music had particular impact on the so-called synchromists. A group of artists who used color to create rhythms in painting similar to those in music, the synchromists, such as Morgan Russell (see Pl. IX) and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973), produced form and space solely through their use of color. Russell and Macdonald-Wright, asserted in 1913 that "[of modem painters] only Renoir and Cezanne were able to impart an enduring quality to their works." (7) Russell had studied Renoir along with other modem painters beginning in 1908, when he first arrived in Paris.