Strokes of chalk

Though sanguines occupy an important place among Renoir's late drawings -- he actually revived this almost forgotten medium dear to Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard -- the artist did not have to rely upon red chalks for color effects. Even in his black and white drawings, executed with charcoal or with greasy pencils, he knew how to obtain a wide range of modulations and particularly a velvety quality of intense black. With these he achieved pictorial effects which put his late drawings in a category by themselves. Not only his red, but also his black is rich, powerful and subtle; both are used for color as well as for line.

With his soft chalks Renoir crushed lines, blurred contours and modeled forms. Occasionally he wiped a number of strokes into large areas. Often several lines, repeating themselves in parallel, generate a vibrating form. Thus the human bodies, which he conceived as sensuous and generous, overflow their outlines and radiate into space. Line is no longer a limit which separates an object from its surroundings, it is, on the contrary, the medium that unites them. If it sets off a voluminous form against its background, it also creates between background and form that suggestion of space which gives the body its expansive roundness, its plenitude.

It was no accident that the aging Renoir went even further in his longing for plasticity, that he turned to sculpture, though his crippled hands were almost incapable of modeling. Just as sculpture projects itself into space, absorbs it, participates in it, so his drawings approach the model not as a pretext for arabesques but as an object that turns around, that quivers with life and movement. And he obtained this quivering, less by careful imitation of the plays of light and shadow, than through the spontaneity with which he threw onto paper those colorful lines full of suggestive power, of subtle values, of warm feeling and of radiant joy.

Baudelaire would not have failed to recognize that Renoir's sanguines and black and white sketches answered his definition that a drawing ought to be like nature, living and restless, rich with curved, fleeting, broken lines, with parallels undefined and meandering, with concaves and convexes that correspond to and pursue each other. Yet, though Renoir's late drawings conform to Baudelaire's conception, they are not primarily linear expressions. Renoir the draftsman was not, like Ingres, a "colorist who has missed his calling." He created a new kind of drawing in which a passionate harmony of mass, volume and color emerges from strokes of chalk.