Arcadia Reconstituted

By Robert Hughes

"I ran into a mistress I had during my last year at school," wrote the Parisian diarist Edmond de Goncourt in 1855, the year in which an unknown 14-year-old apprentice named Pierre Auguste Renoir sat painting flowers on teacups, 60 the dozen, in a china shop in Rue du Temple. "There were still girls like her in those days, girls with a little of the grisette left under their cashmere shawls...She was still the same girl, with the eyes I had loved, her little nose, the lips flat as if crushed by kisses, the supple figure."

No doubt Goncourt would have been pleased to find how durable this class of sexual object turned out to be. Pink and proletarian, tousled, complaisant and rather nitwitted, she persisted as the Ideal Mistress (counterpart to the Fatal Woman) well into the 20th century. Her ancestors are the nymphs of Boucher. Her descendant--spoiled by independence, but still embodying the fantasy of the naughty French chambermaid--is Brigitte Bardot.

Pierre Renoir became, of course, her painter laureate. From Feb. 3 to April 1, the Art Institute of Chicago has on view its most ambitious exhibition in some years: a loan show of 89 Renoirs, tracing his career from 1862 to 1919, when, crippled by arthritis but still painting with brushes strapped to his ruined claws, he died. At one end there are early works like The Clown, 1868, with the precociously firm, sharp structure of figure and field that the 27-year-old painter had learned from Manet. At the other, one finds the semiclassical and flowery kitsch of Alexander Thurneyssen as a Shepherd, 1911. In between there are girls, girls, girls.

No 19th century painter, not even the great sensualist Delacroix, has affected our unconscious view of women as powerfully as Renoir. This is partly due to the popularity of his work and partly to the unwavering, passionate chauvinism of his feelings about his favorite subject, the nude. Compared with Renoir, even Picasso looks like a feminist. "Look," Renoir explained succinctly to his friend, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, "a painter who has the feeling for breasts and buttocks is a saved man."

His view of women was that of a perplexed patriarch looking back on an

Arcadia that seemed to be slipping away --as indeed it was. "I consider," he wrote in 1888, "that women who are authors, lawyers and politicians are monsters...The woman who is an artist is merely ridiculous...Gracefulness is a woman's domain and even her duty... In former times, women freely sang and danced in order to be winsome and pleasing to men. Today they must be paid off; the charm has gone."

In paintings like Two Girls at the Piano, 1889, Renoir strove to reconstitute the charm. There could hardly be a more perfect expression of woman as domestic pet than these two blondes in their glowing red dresses, survivors from the pearly world of Fragonard that Renoir had so loved as a young man, prettily absorbed in their music making. Grace, suavity, an undemanding sweetness achieved, in his better works, through a very demanding but concealed pictorial rigor: these are the essential ingredients of Renoir's art. Though he only achieved it episodically, Renoir's ambition was to render back to painting the firm, architectural design he felt had been lost by Impressionism. Even when the gloss becomes oppressive, as in the famous portrait of a young mother and daughter called On the Terrace, 1881, one has to reflect whether the work acquires its saccharine quality by hindsight, through his countless imitators.

It may be that the sunny, optimistic expansiveness of Renoir's paintings had its defensive side; he had been a nervous youth, defiantly conscious of his role as a journeyman painter (almost, but not quite, a manual worker), and in maturity he was intensely conservative on many issues. He lived like a good bourgeois, marrying his model Aline Charigot in 1881, getting his inspiration from the modest cafes and dance halls of Paris, and later moving to Provence, where he spent his last years in a house on the Cote d'Azur, surrounded by devoted children, adoring women and faithful servants. There was never a more domesticated artist: only Renoir, perhaps, could have liked a Venus by Raphael because "you feel a good, fat, gossipy woman who is going to return to the kitchen." He detested the industrialization of France, while his contemporaries, like Monet, were finding poetry in factory smoke and railway bridges.

Anything that disturbed Arcadia was rejected, even bad weather. "Why paint snow, that leprosy of nature?" he asked.

Renoir's limits are self-evident. His portraits have no psychological depth.

His vision of "femininity" was a sentimental falsehood, for all its wide reso nance. His powers of social observation were trivial, compared to Degas or Courbet. Unlike Cezanne, he bequeathed nothing useful to later generations of painters. Even his powers of historical assimilation often failed, as in the late years, with their sluggish, phosphorescent nudes disporting themselves like antique statuary made of dough.

Softness. But to look inside these limits is to rediscover a considerable painter. That his world was insulated, or his sexual politics Neanderthal, is not so important; an artist must be judged, to some degree, in terms of his aims. He wished to construct a universe of plea sure and relaxation -- like Matisse's "armchair for tired businessmen," but more so -- and in this he succeeded. He was the natural heir of the finest decorators of the 18th century, Fragonard and Boucher. "He who has not lived be fore the Revolution," said Metternich, "cannot know the sweetness of life," and Renoir's spiritual home was built before 1789. Almost from the start of his career, Renoir's technique and sense of construction were superb: witness the sober, Venetian expansiveness of his great tribute to Corot, Pont-des-Arts, circa 1868. Or the vigorous, limpid Still Life with Bouquet, 1871 , whose tones of gold, amber and black sum up his affinities with Impressionism -- light caress ing every surface, revealing each nu ance of substance from the crackly parchment of the Japanese fan to the humid softness of the bouquet.

To call Renoir superficial is in some degree to miss the meaning of his art, for it is about surfaces. Smooth or fuzzy, rounded and fleshy or fruity, bathed in the crystalline light of Provencal sun or lapped by the amenable glow of gas light, his surfaces suggest a dense pro fusion of incident and reality that more modern eyes, intent only on structure, pass over and lose.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.