Renoir's world of harmony and light

The healthy skepticism towards anything at all resembling progress or revolution in art proves that Renoir, who all his life made a point of learning things for himself, never had any illusions about the distance he had covered. Not that he steeped himself in false modesty; few artists have ever been more completely themselves. If he adopted techniques closely akin to those that had been the stand-bys of former masters, he did so not out of a reactionary bias, but simply because, after trying many, he found these more congenial than others. "When I was a beginner," he said, "I put on my green and yellow very thickly, in the belief that I was getting stronger values. Then one day I noticed that, with a light scumble, Rubens outdid all my impasto."

The only time he unwittingly went into opposition against his own nature was during the Harsh Period, when he took to binding forms in outlines. But he soon realized that this procedure--which born draftsmen like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec found ideal--did him more harm than good. As soon as he broke with the practice, his art moved towards its maturity.

Beside his spontaneity, how cool and rational seem the attitudes of Monet, obstinately pushing Impressionism to its ultimate limits, or Degas, straining after goals that, once attained, failed to satisfy him, or Gauguin, with his deliberate emphasis on the mind as against the senses.

Renoir's great lesson lies in the utter integrity, warm-heartedness and simplicity of the man. Hardly a lesson anyone can learn, however, as it demands superb peace of mind existing above and beyond inner conflicts and cross-purposes. His psychic constitution was a godsend to Renoir; his good humor and love of life never flagged, even through the trials of his final illness.

Keen-witted, open-minded, overflowing with affability and good will, Renoir moved easily with people and enjoyed the things around him. And just as in art an equal success attended all his efforts--whether painting on porcelain, painting fans or even blinds, and every possible genre of easel painting--, in the same way he took equal pleasure in mixing with people from all levels of society. He liked simplicity in those around him, but he could single out and appreciate the most refined minds, and was equally at home with both. An innocent where class distinctions were concerned, he recognized only one class: the human family. Fame and wealth, for Renoir, were words at which he smiled. The only wealth he knew was that of his own nature, which he put unstintingly into his painting--the warm, human expression of all the joy he took in simply being alive.

From the Park of Saint-Cloud of 1866 up to the Nymphs of 1918, by way of La Grenouillère, Le Moulin de la Galette, The Luncheon of the Boating Party and all the bathers, pearlyskinned and iridescent, his painting is a song of delight in the beauty of the world and the sweetness of life. Whether he painted children, women, flowers, fruit or landscapes, the song was the same, and its triumphant note resounds in the harmony he achieved between the human being and the atmosphere and surroundings in which it moved. "I struggle with my figures until they are one with the landscape in which they stand," he said, always intent on fusing tones in light, on harmonizing the different elements of his picture. Thus he was led to mingle tones with one another, either by means of separate touches or smoothly blended brushwork.

An ambition already realized in one sense in the Moulin de la Galette, as it was in another in the Two Bathers at Stockholm, this fusion of figures and things in light attains its paroxysm in many of the Cagnes landscapes, where it wells up and throbs with a cosmic vibration.

His world of harmony and light is a world in which original sin has yet to occur. Renoir was as free as a man can be of the guilt complex that has clouded the modern spirit. Having never set foot in Hell or seen an ogre, he let such things be. He was neither possessed of dark passions to work off or anguished obsessions to unburden on others. He was, in a word, a free man--free to exult in a landscape, a flower, a fruit, a face, a body golden in the sun, free to express their beauty and communicate it joyfully in terms of his art. For him, painting itself was a joy above all others, a mystery of creation whose delights and surprises he never wearied of.

La volupté depeindre--so he described it at the far end of his life. Fifty years earlier, in his student days at the Ecole des BeauxArts, he had replied in the same spirit, with all the ingenuous freshness and spontaneity of his nature, when the professor, with a disapproving glance at his work, observed sarcastically: "You no doubt paint merely to amuse yourself." -- "I certainly do. If painting didn't amuse me, I can assure you I wouldn't be here doing it."

This anecdote was recorded by Albert André, who added: "All Renoir is in this reply to Gleyre. He painted because it gave him intense pleasure to do so. He was never one to believe that by spreading his colors over the canvas he thereby performed a sacred rite, or, as he laughingly put it himself, that he was saving the Republic."

His healthy outlook on things is like a breath of fresh air in an age like ours, when so many are out to divorce art from any pleasure-giving sensation. Renoir never made a secret of what he thought: "To my mind, a picture should be something agreeable, cheerful and--yes !--nice to look at. There are too many nasty things in the world as it is, without our adding to them. I know that few people are prepared to admit that a painting can really be first-class and cheerful at the same time. Because Fragonard knew how to laugh, he was dismissed as a second-rate painter. People who laugh are never taken seriously."

And he concluded, with a smile: "Art in a stuffed shirt, whether painting, music or literature, will always go over."