Comment by dofm
3 days ago
I mean, I am perpetuating a running joke.
But also yes. When he was not doing paintings with lots of faces or naked ladies he was on slightly more solid ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Pierre-Au...
https://lastmuseum.com/artist/auguste-renoir
e.g. I like the Alfred Sisley painting and the more realist painting of his father, and Madame Clementine Valensi Stora which he apparently repudiated.
But I don't think he ever painted a truly good female nude, and some are just utterly reductive (as a photography nerd I find Torso Effect of Sunlight to be the most interesting but the face oh the face)
Loads of it is really rather Monkey Christ, on reflection, and after about 1905 nothing is great.
So I do sympathise with the joke.
Round faces and opulent bodies were hot stuff in Renoir's times, not so much today. Older people simply had different concepts of feminine beauty than us.
Also those were artists deliberately breaking the rigid rules of realist classicism and finding inspiration on Asian art. Renoir was criticized by its figures "with skin and clothes obscenely stained with what seems dirty greasy oil spots" but the big point was to trigger controversy and to flip the bird to the classicism of the "real" professional artists.
Whaaat? Renoir was born in 1840 and died in 1919. Women were about as slim as they are now (or slimmer) in the 1870s and generally slimmer by the early 1900s. Have a look at photographs, including artistic nudes, from this era and you will see. Anne Brigman, Alice Boughton, etc., but also any amount of late 19th century art nude and erotica; you will see that Renoir was likely deliberately choosing to paint chubbier, more cherubic, unthreatening nudes, especially after the late 1880s.
But it’s not the shapes of the bodies that I have an issue with, in general. (Apart from the whole cherubic, gravity free aspect.)
It’s the fact that the faces are terrible, featureless, ugly, often scarily unsettling and clownish, the heads are poorly proportioned, the eyes often dead or doll-like.
He painted out the realism of women just as they were demanding equality, IMO. In the real world, women were demanding better pay, better work protection and votes; in Renoir’s world they were often overgrown insipid cherubs, no evidence of angst or really any kind of inner life. His paintings of male faces, largely, are grounded in more realism even into his late era.
> Women were about as slim as they are now (or slimmer) in the 1870s and generally slimmer by the early 1900s
Not exactly. Women depicted other women as ideal models. Men had a different idea on mind.
There were two types of male painters in that years. Some had enough money to receive a full classical training in Art Academy. Other, like Renoir, came from poverty and blue collar families and had to self-train themselves. They didn't have any access to the elites, and were ignored and mocked by the classically trained ones.
They fought back rebelling against the rigid academy rules, and using shock and scandal so their real experience about the real world couldn't be ignored anymore.
Where Elites embraced paintings of women suggesting opulence (I'm a rich person, I can buy this clothes), mythology (I'm an educated person), elegance or beauty (I'm successful and popular). Blue collared people show proudly their favorite feminine attributes: fecundity and sex.
Renoir could paint a smooth perfect realist face, if he painted a bunch of spots instead, it was a way to declare "I don't want this model to be identified. She received an anonymous face, because is anonymous. Realism and a polished look is not the important thing here". Or maybe he was just drunk and didn't cared. Who knows. Their fellows deliberately rejected the classic glass skins and polished strokes as a way to depict human nature, and founded the modern painting deconstructing the body in all the possible ways on Cubism, Fauvism, Pointillism or Impressionism.
Blue collared painters often painted prostitutes, like a way to shout "this is the real world", "this is what really matters". Some delivered the message in a pretty savage way, even for today standards (See L'Origin Du Monde from Courbet). If you think that all the models were slimmer in 1870, see The Baigneuses also from the same painter.
They proudly show a more free, rebelious underworld (Manet, Dejeuner sur L'Herbe). And many of the big names that came later learned the lesson and became famous selling a fantasy of freedom and underworld to their rich clients.
The real valuable part was not the art (in my opinion). What clients were eager to pay for, was the connections
Dali assured to be filmed always surrounded by beautiful young people. Warhol had their own collection of rare and beautiful animals around to show. Bacon and Hockney played the same role creating safe spaces or became models for Transvestite or LGTB people.
This is the lesson to all future artists. Stick a banana to a wall, it does not matter. Is just an excuse to people came and laugh. What matters is the value of your social net. What you can do to entertain your rich clients, to help them to launder their money, to connect them with famous people, drug dealers, or "trustable" sexual workers.
But this is just my personal opinion, and is fine if other differ.
> But, but... women demanding equality!
This was never about women demanding equality. Art was a war of classes
1 reply →