The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present the first exhibition to survey the achievements of the great Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841‱919) during the last three decades before his death. From June 17 through September 6, some 80 of the artist’s paintings, sculpture and drawings will be on view, accompanied by a selection of works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard and others who were inspired by the master.
A landmark exhibition, “Late Renoir” examines new directions that the artist explored several decades after he and others such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro created the new style of painting known as Impressionism. This new and widely admired phase in Renoir’s career propelled him into the modern age and enabled him to recapture a classical past with expressive brushwork and a palette of sensuous colors that were both lyrical and decorative. “Late Renoir” includes major works on loan from public and private collections in Europe, the United States and Japan.
The exhibition is co-organized by the Reunion des Musées nationaux, the Musée d’Orsay and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It drew some 420,000 visitors in Paris before traveling to Los Angeles. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will be the only East Coast venue.
Timothy Rub, the Philadelphia Museum’s George D. Widener director and chief executive officer, said, “In 1933, Philadelphia presented the first museum exhibition ever to be devoted to Renoir in the United States, and it is now the largest lender to ‘Late Renoir.’ The museum’s collection is rich in his works as well as those of his contemporaries, and nearby in Lower Merion, the Barnes Foundation also contains the world’s largest private collection of Renoir’s late paintings.”
The exhibition is organized chronologically, enabling the visitor to appreciate the evolution of Renoir’s late style, beginning with portraits and genre scenes and examining his full embrace of the nude and mythological subjects. Several of the works will be in Philadelphia only, including: “The Guitar Player,” 1897 (private collection), which has not been on public view in 90 years or more; “Woman Combing Her Hair,” 1908 (private collection); “Woman Tying Her Shoe,” circa 1918 (Courtauld Gallery, London); an exquisite drawing lent by the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and additional drawings and pastels from the museum’s collection.
A major work not seen at the Paris venue, “The Judgment of Paris,” 1913‱4 (Hiroshima Museum of Art), was recently added in Los Angeles and will also be seen in Philadelphia. Renoir said of this and related works: “The earth was the paradise of the gods &†that is what I want to paint.”
Renoir died on December 3, 1919, having worked on a still life of anemones earlier in the day and declaring, “I think I am beginning to understand something about painting.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a 440-page scholarly catalog, published in separate English and French editions. With 319 illustrations, 213 in full color, it presents a comprehensive overview of Renoir’s late career. Edited by Sylvie Patry (Musée d’Orsay) and Claudia Einecke (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the catalog includes 13 essays by established and younger scholars and curators.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For information, www.philamuseum.org or 215-763-8100.
