Renoir: Art Museum vs. Barnes (2nd review)

Renoir's landscapes:
The Art Museum vs. the Barnes

VICTORIA SKELLY

It is always interesting to view paintings with which one is intimately familiar in some other environmental backdrop. As a former student and frequent visitor of the Barnes Foundation, home of many luminous Renoir landscapes, approaching the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition of the same was an opportunity... a chance to see pictures in a new light, both literally and figuratively.

The Barnes's Renoirs are exhibited on a warm beige textured linen wall covering, imported specially from Thailand, as we students were told. Albert Barnes felt that it was important to exhibit his oil paintings on a backdrop that picked up the highlights of each work. The linen also served to refract light rays from its surface, a sort of dappling within the gallery that also contains many dappled works.

The Art Museum’s current exhibition, however, offers strength in artificial lighting appropriate in a windowless gallery, against a "toothpaste" white wall. Surely, if we must have white as a wall color, ivory white would have been a better choice, naturally enhancing Renoir's palette of spring greens, blues, violet, lavender, rose and gold. While many of the works in the exhibition thrive regardless, the Landscape at Wargemont is severely compromised by its white backdrop. Relocate that painting (interesting thought!) to the Barnes Foundation or show it against a wall covering similar to what they have there, and one would see that painting come to life.

What Jackson Pollock could have learned

All that aside, there is much to visually feast upon at this exhibition. One of the most personally transforming of paintings for me was The Wave. It’s an example of "pure” landscape: There are no figures or architecture in this picture. It portrays a mass of thickly painted rhythms and swirls of multihued frothy seawater backed up against a violet scumbled sky. Incredible! If Jackson Pollock needed photographs to document the passion in his action painting, Renoir needs no such proof here. The passion is all in the paint.

It was also a rare treat to view works made by the artist while he traveled. The Jardin d'Essai, Algiers shows a delightful light streaked allée lined with dazzling palms, sporting wispy, coppery tufts for leaves. In my imagination they are like the truffula tufts, whose fronds are harvested and knitted into fluffy sweaters, featured in The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss! The Piazza San Marco, Venice veers from the artist's blended soft pastel style to a sort of deftly painted "glittering," much like the golden tessere mosaics inside the cathedral there. All so glorious!

Insulting to children, and adults

In the spirit of approaching this exhibition in a new light, I opted this time to use the Acoustiguide while traveling from painting to painting. Some feel, as I do, that the guide can be a distraction to really seeing the artworks. As it happens, I found the audio material for adults to be rather scanty, telling the listener things that just about any individual of any art knowledge level can see in a particular work. The children's guide material bordered on insulting, featuring a person, purportedly Renoir himself, with a phony French accent, much like Pepé Le Pew, the cartoon skunk of my youth.

The public— yes, the average public, children included— is hungry for more information, presented in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with the viewing. It would have been beneficial, for instance, to learn a bit more about the artist, his philosophical view of life, how he differed from his compatriots, and why he holds a place in the history of art.

Renoir for grown-ups

Excerpts from artists’ writings often reveal so much, sometimes exploding popular myths that go stubbornly unchallenged, even by the experts. The following Renoir quote is something I rather quickly dug up from a little book, Renoir by Renoir, in the series "Artists by Themselves," edited by Rachel Barnes (page 58). It defies the attitude that Renoir was some sort of a dummy:

"Movement can be as eternal as immobility so long as it is in harmony with nature: if it expresses a natural human function. The flight of a swallow is as eternal as the tranquility of the Seated Scribe in the Louvre. The statues in the Luxembourg are overactive for intellectual reasons, for literary reasons. A swallow speeds through the air to catch a gnat and to satisfy its hunger: not to verify a principle."

Pithy indeed! While this particular quotation might not add up as material for children, it might be welcome enhancement for adults. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe rather effectively places quotations from the artist's writings on the same walls as her paintings (actually on the edge of the walls, away from the paintings), significantly enhancing the typical viewer's one-stop experience of her work.

After an appropriate digestion period, the visitor to the Art Museum’s glorious exhibition may wish to make a trip to the Barnes Foundation. Many Renoir paintings there would qualify as landscapes— some too small in size for a blockbuster-type exhibition, but very special in their own right. A particular favorite of mine can be found in the center of the wall ensemble to one's immediate right as one enters the gallery. It is near the Victrola, still there, that Dr. Barnes used to play Beethoven... musical rhythms that enhance the green swirling paint rhythms of this particularly lovely little Renoir.



To read a response, click here.
To read a review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.