Renoir landscapes at Art Museum (3rd review)

Last thoughts: What Renoir
lacked as a landscape artist

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

The mega-exhibit “Renoir Landscapes” has now left Philadelphia, and many people seem to have greatly enjoyed it. Renoir has always been a popular favorite, perhaps because he strikes us as being such a happy, well-adjusted fellow. Even his working stiffs hanging out on a Sunday afternoon seem to burst with rosy-cheeked good health.

Yes, indeed, Renoir was a very happy fellow—and that’s what made him a not-so-spectacular landscape painter. To paint a landscape is to ape God in the process of creation. The landscape is your universe. Certain artists can rise to this challenge; others act like any good tourist trying out their new digital camera. To me, Renoir is a tourist, albeit a happy one.

Consider what some of the other Impressionists and Post-Impressionists did with landscape art. Monet, like Turner before him, dissolved the world in sunlight. Cézanne analyzed his world in terms of volume and shape. Van Gogh and Edvard Munch used the landscape as a mirror into their own inner lives.

Each of these artists took what was placed before his eyes and altered it in ways that the mere act of seeing could never do. Renoir, on the other hand, took what he saw and set it down verbatim, using a light, feathery brushstroke that sometimes caused his work to resemble paintings on antique dinner china.

Now, Renoir wasn’t alone in taking this “closed” approach to landscape painting. Sisley and Pissarro did likewise, and I’m not saying that any one of them was a bad painter. I am saying that other painters surpassed them and did more with the same materials. A Sisley Wheatfield with Crows would never be a Van Gogh Wheatfield with Crows, and who could possible imagine Munch's The Scream or even Evening on Karl Johan by Pissarro? When an artist renders an “open” landscape, it becomes a portal, a passage into an entirely different way of experiencing the world. Renoir was content to reproduce what he saw.

There were some fine paintings in the Art Museum exhibit, and some not-so-fine ones. (I’m sorry, but both Bay of Naples and Gondola, Venice are embarrassingly bad paintings to have come from the hands of someone considered one of the great painters of his time. The former work looks like a competent rendering by a talented amateur, while the latter resembles a plate torn from a deluxe illustrated edition of some classic novel.)

Of course there are some very nice paintings in the show as well. The Pont Neuf is a standard of Impressionism texts, but Landscape at Wargemont and Woman at the Seaside: Seascape, both previously unfamiliar to me, were on their own worth braving the lines to see. The latter work even put me in mind of Whistler with its delicate harmonies.



To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Victoria Skelly, click here.