Exhibitions off-site

Renoir and Women. From Modern Ideal to Classical Ideal

From September 16th, 2016 to January 08th, 2017 -
Barcelone, Fondation Mapfre
Map & itinerary
Pierre-Auguste Renoir-Gabrielle à la rose
Auguste Renoir
Gabrielle à la rose, en 1911
Musée d'Orsay
Don de Philippe Gangnat en mémoire de son père, 1925
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
See the notice of the artwork

Throughout his long career, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Limoges 1841, Cagnes-sur-Mer 1919) painted women, his mistresses, his wife, his friends, professional models and young girls he met in the street, actresses and society women. From his early career during the Second Empire at the height of Impressionism in the second half of the 1870s, from the return to tradition and to Ingres in the 1880s, to the Rubenesque blaze of colours of the later years, women were the artist’s main source of inspiration, the eternal object of seduction and the living embodiment of art and beauty.
The critics were right about it - they quickly saw Renoir as the great painter of women among his contemporaries. "He is the true painter of young women, the bloom of whose skin, velvet flesh, darting eye, and elegant finery, he renders with sunlit gaiety", wrote Huysmans when visiting the 1882 Impressionist exhibition. As the artist began to concentrate on the motif of bathers, he came to be regarded as "the master of them all, the great painter of the nude of our time" (Arsène Alexandre).
Although Renoir’s early large paintings, like the Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, , show the strategies of seduction of his contemporaries and bring Watteau’s fêtes galantes into the Paris of the Third Republic, gradually, the male figures began to disappear making way for an exclusively feminine world, that of the later Bathers, youthful and joyful. The passion for the ideal that Renoir had within him led him to create a unique female type, a synthesis of the girl from Montmartre with the laughing eyes, the sturdy peasant girl from Champagne and the models of Ingres, Fragonard and Titian. "He was a committed painter of women above all, and it is in his work that we will recognise tomorrow the truthful interpretation of the modern feminine ideal", appeared in the press on the day following his death in 1919. This ideal connected with the sensibility of a whole era and brought Renoir almost unanimous acclaim.
In his In Search of Lost Time (Le Côté de Guermantes, 1920-1921), Marcel Proust wrote the following: "Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women.” Renoir’s work was even used as a favoured support in the debate of what was feminine, a definition or reinvention of which was sought more than ever in this era of rapid social upheaval in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With his women, at once modern and primitive, animal and classical, voluptuous and chaste, Renoir makes his own response to the anguish of his time.

The exhibition is now over.

See the whole program