Madrid. The French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of the great founders of impressionism alongside Claude Monet, the senses she was more interested in the intellect: with his brush, went beyond the purely visual and empatizó with their models to create a unique intimacy that communicates to the viewer.
Under that premise, and with the title the Renoir. Intimacy, the Thyssen Museum in Madrid opened its doors to the public to the first retrospective of the artist in Spain, makes an tour of her work through 78 paintings, ranging from their stage impressionistic until their naked, more influenced by the classical tradition.
“Renoir had the desire to be in tune with what I was painting through a relationship of closeness. This is what we call ‘privacy’”, explained today the artistic director of the museo del prado in madrid and curator of the exhibition, Guillermo Solana.
With his brush strokes, the painter made a “tangible” his figures, he alluded to feelings palpable, and played with the contact between the protagonists of his canvases.
Even in some of the works of its period, impressionist, between 1869 and 1880, the artist sought this closeness with the viewer, as in his famous Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (1875), in which the table seems to invite to sit down.
“Renoir felt that the enjoyment of a box had to be in continuity with the enjoyment of life,” stressed Solana.
And that “pedagogy of pleasure” is in the centre of the work of the French painter, even when he had financial problems, or when, as in maturity, was struck by arthritis that threatened to away from the easel until his death, in 1919.
Renoir, the father of famed filmmaker Jean Renoir, was one of the few impressionist from a half-humble. Born in 1941 in the French city of Limoges, although when he was three years old his family moved to Paris. There he played with his friends in the spacious courtyard of the Louvre, in which later, he would find inspiration.
His first major recognition was achieved with the first exhibition of the new impressionist school in Paris, in 1874, followed by others. At that time, the painter had already moved to the parisian neighborhood of Montmartre, an icon of the bohemian.
With some of the works of this first period painting of Renoir now starts the exhibition of the Thyssen, which advances, from 1881, up to another stage in which the artist becomes the eye towards the tradition and the distance of the impressionists.
The portrait was thereafter instrumental in his career, as it not only enabled him to live in the paint, but also led him to commercial success and social, with works such as madame Thurneyssen and her daughter (1910) or Portrait of the poetess Alice Vallières-Merzbach (1913)”, displayed now in the museum of madrid.
The exhibition, which will remain open until January 22 and then move to the Fine Arts Museum of Bilbao, dedicated a space to his landscapes of the coast of Normandy, and of Provence, where he shared the pictures with his friend Paul Cézanne.
But, without doubt, one of the most interesting rooms, and perhaps one of the that best reflects that “intimacy” of the painting by Renoir, is the one that collects a series of family scenes played out by their children, his wife and their immediate environment, which becomes a sort of “journal of domestic harmony”.
The retrospective closes with one of the painter’s favourite themes: the nude, a genéro that was just addressed by the impressionists -for being too academic – and with the Renoir triumphed thanks to his series of bathers, which made him to be reconciled with the classical tradition after his time impressionist.
“Renoir is one of the great painters of one of the greatest pictorial movements, but it is still an unknown and a misunderstood”, said today the curator of the exhibition.
With it, and with the works loaned by museums such as the Marmottan Monet in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of London or the Metropolitan in New York, aims to know a bit more about one of the geniuses of the late NINETEENTH century and early TWENTIETH century.
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