Renoir Revisited

When I was a teen and then a very young adult, I was smitten with Renoir and his work. I loved Le Bal au Bougival and during that period of my life it was one of my favorite paintings, if not the favorite work. I would go and visit it at the MFA and easily could have stood there for hours dissecting the subject matter, the swirl of movement in the woman’s dress, the light, the colors (especially the red bonnet), the brush strokes. The only thing that would tear me away from it was a companion growing bored and begging me to please move on to something else. Anything else. I saw an enormous exhibition of Renoir’s work in the mid 80’s, a staggering collection of his life's work, and was thrilled to have been able to experience so many pieces in one place. But then my personal love affair with Renoir cooled. I’m not sure why I lost interest in him as I have always been into the French Impressionists, but I did. My tastes changed and my affections went elsewhere in art, I guess.

But I recently read a fantastic book about Renoir, and more specifically the summer he painted Les Dejeuners des Canotiers, and am suddenly finding myself rediscovering the artist I once was so taken with. I’m finding though that with age I have become far more discriminating in my tastes in regards to his work, with only very specific pieces holding my attention this time around, but I have also discovered some lesser known works of his that as a teen I never knew existed. And the book has also opened my eyes to other artists and other works that I had never given much thought to while in my youth, or that I knew but had no interest in, but now find I do.

I am completely in love with Gustave Caillebotte, an artist whose works were virtually unknown not only in his lifetime, but had gone unnoticed even as recently as the 1950’s. His work, while Impressionistic in many respects, is also very different from what the average person considers to be an Impressionist work. As an engineer at one point in his life, his architecture within his pieces is staggeringly beautiful: the buildings, bridges, ironwork on balconies. His light and his perspectives were radical for his day and are as stunning to behold now as they must have been when first painted. Except for what he accomplished in only a few short years, he gave up painting as a career for other pursuits (though he still painted occasionally for himself) and died far too young. He left a rather small collection of works in comparison with other artists of his day, which is unfortunate as he was simply brilliant. I guess the scarcity of his works makes them that much more special.

The Renoir book has reopened my eyes in a way they had never been opened before when I was a girl. I’m finding so many new and exciting things that came out of the mid to late 19th century French art world that either I had forgotten all about or never even knew to begin with. Old favorites and new thrills, all of them wonderful, and I find that in many ways I feel like I did as a teen, making art discoveries that stir my soul and make my art world exciting and really fresh again. If you think you know everything there is to know about a subject, you just might find that you have barely scratched the surface. And that’s such a rush. It really is.