The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present “Renoir in the 20th Century,” an exhibition focusing on the last three decades of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s career, before his death in 1919. The exhibition includes approximately 80 paintings, sculptures and drawings, interspersed with select works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol and Pierre Bonnard, to illustrate the developing avant-garde’s debt to Renoir.
Co-organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the Musée d’Orsay and LACMA, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition will be on view from February 14 to May 9.
Organized by LACMA Curator Claudia Einecke and Chief Curator of European Art J. Patrice Marandel, the show offers an unprecedented look at Renoir through the lens of Modernism, bridging the perceived divide between the art of the late Nineteenth and the early Twentieth Centuries.
During the last 30 years of his career Renoir moved from Impressionism to an art aiming to be decorative, to continue the great tradition of European painting and to be Modern †all at the same time. The resulting paintings and sculptures became an enduring source of inspiration to a generation of younger artists who were feeling their way into Modernism in the same period.
Renoir was acclaimed as an emblematic figure of Impressionism, but he embarked on new paths of experimentation and innovation. He challenged the basic principles of Impressionism and returned to traditional drawing and studio work. This period of crisis and research ended in the early 1890s, a decade that brought Renoir public and institutional recognition, as well as commercial success.
Renoir invented a style he described as classical and decorative. He concentrated on the female nude with portraits and studies from the model, in the studio or outdoors, and experimented with new techniques. Like his contemporaries and friends Cézanne and Monet, Renoir became a point of reference for a new generation of artists.
Great champions of Modern art, such as Leo and Gertrude Stein, Albert Barnes, Louise and Walter Arensberg and Paul Guillaume, collected Renoir alongside Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse. As an artist who was forever exploring and keen to take up challenges, Renoir wanted to test himself against the great masters from the past, notably Titian and Rubens, but also Fragonard and Watteau, whom he admired.
In his last years, Renoir persistently returned to a narrow group of themes, which he explored even in unaccustomed media such as sculpture.
Appreciation of “the late Renoir” has changed since his death, and his paintings from this period are now little known. Although his landscapes and portraits have given rise to major exhibitions in recent years, there have been no studies or exhibitions focusing specifically on Renoir’s last years. “Renoir in the 20th Century” is designed to remedy this and explore this very fertile period of the master’s career.
A fully illustrated catalog for “Renoir in the 20th Century” will be published in French by Réunion des Musées Nationaux and in English by Hatje Cantz.
LACMA is at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard. For information, www.lacma.org or 323-857-6000.
