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The life and times of Pierre Auguste Renior

In most all respects, the opposite of Edgar Degas is Auguste Renior (1841 - 1919), the best loved of the impressionists today.
     Renior is a joyous painter, so convinced of life's goodness, which seems apparent to him on every hand, that he feels no need to philosophize or moralize about it. If he does not comment, it is only because he does not find it necessary to ponder "the meaning of life." He finds life so wonderful that simply to participate in it gives meaning to existence. He never reports on life's specific fragments, as Degas does, because life in its wholeness is present for him in every woman he paints. Where Degas individualizes women Renior generalizes woman as a symbol. Even when he paints a portrait we are conscious of womanhood first, and only incidentally of the specific individual who is represented. And even when he is not painting a portrait he repeats over and over again a facial and physical type that he adopted early and was content to vary only slightly as his art matured, not because he needed a convenient formula but because women as a generic concept was lovelier to him than any individual set of features could be.
RENIOR: THE MYSTIQUE OF WOMAN
Woman is a principle so pervading Renior's universe that everything he paints is accessory to her. Children and flowers are corollaries to his concept of woman as a kind of earth - or life - symbol who blossoms and come to fruition. When Monet painted a woman out of doors she became identified with the sward, the bushes, with nature around her, because she shared with other natural objects the faculty of reflecting light.
But when Renior paints a woman out of doors the relationship with nature is reversed. Instead of absorbing her, the impressionist shimmer and vibration is like an emanation from her, an emanation of the life she represents, animating all nature.
     The mystique of woman is a constant in French art, and through Renior impressionism makes its contribution to this tradition. The near mystical veneration of woman in French art and life combines the simultaneous recognition's of her most direct attractions and her most profound significance. She is an object of sexual delight, a creature of unusual sensibilities in human relationships, and a reminder that no matter how complicated man may have made himself as a civilized being, he continues to exist only through the operation of a natural force he cannot explain but which woman embodies. This concept has given woman an extraordinary position in French life and thought.
     Woman was never more pervasive in French life than during the eighteenth century at a court dominated by women and given over to the pursuit of love-making. In spite of all the dimpled affectations of eighteenth-century court art, in spite of all the furbelows and ruffles and ribbons and fantasies of dress and manners, in spite of all the viciousness and indulgence of a sociologically indefensible way of life among the aristocracy -- in spite of all this, the mystique of woman was never altogether obscured by the cultivation of woman as an object of pleasure, and the art of the eighteenth-century painters was given over to her celebration. Renior's first contact with this art was early and quite direct.
     As a boy -- his father was a tailor from Limoges, poor and with a large family -- Renior was apprenticed to a decorator of fine porcelain. he copied onto cups and plates flowers and other motifs from the eighteenth-century court painter Boucher. Their fresh pinks and blues, their vivacity, their prettiness (a word of which Renior was never afraid) always remained a part of Renior's paintings. Of Boucher's Bath of Diana he once said that he kept going back to it again and again, "as one returns to one's first love."
     Boucher's painting was full of the stylish artificialities and the titillations demanded by his patrons at the court and in the demimonde. It has won for itself the unflattering designation of "boudoir painting". Renior revivified the tradition by leaving the boudoir for the out of doors, abandoning Boucher's artificial paraphernalia for natural banks of grass and flowers. Instead of Baths of Diana he paints healthy young women bathing in country streams. Above all, he abandoned coy suggestion for a straightforward, full-blossomed sexuality that would have reduced his buxom nudes to biological specimens if he had not been so completely and naturally within a tradition wholly French -- the tradition that combines the frankest delight in sexuality with the most unquestioning reverence for woman's fundamental significance as the source of all warmth and life in the world.
     Renior entered the studio of a painter named Gleyre in 1862. As a student and then as a young painter with no resources and no patrons he kept himself alive by doing occasional porcelain painting and some hack commercial work, including the decoration of window blinds. Monet was having the same struggle and the two men were good friends. For a few years Renior grouped about, imitating photographs briefly and working for a while in the manner of Delacroix. He later destroyed these pseudo romantic productions, and the earliest Reniors we have, from around the middle 1860's, show how much he learned from Courbet.
Bather with Griffon (not pictured) painted in 1870 and exhibited in the Salon that year, belongs to this early group, which seem like preparatory work if they are thought of in context with Renior's later career. But independently Bather with Griffon can hold its own in the company of great paintings of the nude at any time. If it lacks anything, it is the full individuality of style that marks a work of art as completely the artist's own.
RENIOR AND IMPRESSIONISM
 By 1870 Renior was beginning to explore, with Monet, effects of light and air, and ways of representing them with broken color. By the time of the first group exhibition his impressionist manner was fully developed, and he continued working impressionistically until 1882.
The Swing of 1876 (right) has the dappled light, the diffused forms, the young grace, the air of courtship, typical of his work in this period. As an ambitious showpiece he painted the Moulin de la Galette (left) for the third impressionist exhibition of 1877. Both these paintings have something of impressionism's momentary revelation of the subject and much of pure impressionism's haze of light fused with atmosphere. Yet Renior is yielding only reluctantly to this cultivation of transient effects and shortly he will become thoroughly dissatisfied with them.  Most of his figures are caught in repose. Like Degas in Foyer de la Danse, Renior continues to feel the need for classical stability in his compositions; it finds its way into pictures of the early period almost as if without his will. His figures never quite lose their formal identity within the quivering luminosity surrounding them.
Renior had by now found some patrons. An influential one was the publisher Charpentier, in whose garden The Swing had been painted. Renior was beginning to find portrait commissions too, and in order to further these Madame Charpentier commissioned him to do a portrait of herself and her two little girls (below).
It was submitted to the Salon of 1879 and because of the social prominence of the sitter it received a good position and was a success. He set about deliberately in the portrait of Madame Charpentier to paint a picture that would please conventional taste without prostituting his talent. He did not regard it as a lowering of standards or a denial of principles to modify his impressionistic manner to accord more closely with Salon standards. The result was a fine portrait even if it is not Renior's most exciting work.
     With plenty of commissions coming his way by the end of the 1870's, when he was forty years old, Renior had reached the point where most painters would have industriously followed up their successes. But Renior was full of dissatisfactions with the kind of painting he was doing. Renior was ready to abandon the light touch of impressionism just when the first collectors were beginning to be attracted to it. A trip to Italy in 1882 verified his suspicions of impressionism and put an end to his impressionist period.
RETURN TO TRADITION
Restless, unsure of his direction, beginning to feel that in seeking effects of light he had forgotten "how either to paint or to draw," that in working directly from nature he had forgotten how to compose, that in impressionism a painter descended to monotony, Renior had refused to exhibit with the group in their shows of 1879, 1880, and 1881. The Italian pilgrimage of 1882 had a definite goal: the Vatican frescos of Raphael. They had been an academic shrine ever since Ingres had proclaimed Raphael's godhead. And they did not disappoint Renior.
     In their breadth and amplitude and definition, their "simplicity and grandeur," he said, they confirmed his dissatisfactions with impressionism. He saw too the Pompeiian Paintings that had given such impetus to the classical revival a hundred years before, that had "removed the cataracts" form the eyes of David when he went to Rome as a young painter trained in the eighteenth-century tradition. And by chance Renior also stumbled across a book now well known to painters but then obscure, a late fiurteenth-century handbook on the craft of painting by Cennino Cennini, a follower of Giotto, who described in great detail the technique of egg tempera painting, a technique demanding the clearest, the most concise definition of form, allowing for no suggestion, dictating implacably closed contours. Renior had always admired Ingres line, and now in the light of these Italian revelations he discovered new virtues in Ingres's meticulously controlled surfaces as well.
Renior determined to subject himself to a period of discipline, to learn again how to draw, paint, and compose. Dance at Bougival (left), painted on his return from Italy, has a new solidity and definition in the two dancing figures, although the seated ones in the background are similar to those in the Moulin de la Galette in their softer, airier, form. Renior was equally determined, as a matter of practical business, to make a success in the Salon instead of directing himself toward the handful of art lovers who were "capable" of liking a painting without Salon approval.
The disciplinary problems he set himself were to be solved in a painting of bathers in a landscape upon which he worked for three years, from 1884 to 1887. (right) It was exhibited at Petit's, a commercial gallery, with great success. Even most of the impressionist admired it, because Renior's suspicions of impressionism as a blind alley had come to be shared by others of them (not by Monet) who were hunting their own ways out of its mist.
RENIOR : FULFILLMENT
   For Renior, living and painting were indivisible. There is a steady correspondence between the changes in his way of painting and the progressive changes of his maturity and experience as a human being. His impressionist pictures with the lovely girls, their happiness, their subjects of courtship, identify his own young manhood. The shift to new disciplines in painting coincides with his acceptance of new personal responsibilities, marriage and fatherhood. But he soon relented from the severities of his reaction against the "responsibility" of impressionism. By the end of the 1880's he was working toward a new manner, coincident with the period in his own life when the business of settling down had been achieved, when he had established an adequate security for himself and his family, and was discovering the quiet and rewarding fulfillments of middle age.
With the lesson of the Bathers behind him, Renior returned to simple, intimate subjects, painting again his personal response to them without sacrificing what he had regained through formal discipline. There is no ambiguity to the forms; every volume is defined in space and in its exact relationship to other volumes. In Two Girls at the Piano (left) the figure relationship of the two girls formerly painted in Moulin de la Galette is restudied to give it the formality of the Bathers. The formality is disguised; it is animated by the vivacious charm of the early masterpiece, but the formality is there, and it makes of Two Girls at the Piano something more than a charming picture, just as it is something more than a formal exercise.
RENIOR : LAST PICTURES
  In Renior,s final period he returns to expressionism which surges into full undisguised statement. From the point of view of the usual painting of the female nude, his painting Bather (not shown) painted in 1917 or 1918, shortly before Renior's death at the age of seventy eight, is grotesque. The swollen belly, the massive thighs, the great heavy feet, the billowing construction of flesh drenched in the color of strawberries and oranges against the acid greens of the tumultuous background -- these are strong fare. By one standard of comparison Renior has exaggerated his former virtues beyond the point of tolerance and to the point of absurdity; by another, he has reached the only logical conclusion to the basic conception that he started nearly fifty years earlier.
     It is typical of most painters who work over a long period of time that their late work is painted most loosely, with greatest freedom. This was true of Renior, and the natural tendency was exaggerated by a physical malady that appeared as early as 1881 and had begun to cripple him by 1890. In his old age rheumatism had so paralyzed him that he had to paint in a wheelchair with his brush strapped to his hand. When a foolish visitor asked him how he managed to paint such beautiful pictures under such difficulties, Renior rebuked him with "One does not paint with one's hands."

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