Renoir: Impressionism as Bourgeois Pleasure
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
(This essay was written in 1998.)
At one end of the Impressionist spectrum stood more conservative artists, above all Renoir. In many ways, he was the Fragonard of Impressionism. Renoir started out as a painter of porcelain decorated with beautiful women. In many ways, his art remained tied to a slick, erotic, decorative manner: rich, bright, flat, visually enticing, and usually well painted. (Visitors to Washington should see his Picnic in the Philipps Collection, one of Renoir's best paintings in this country.)
Renoir combined modern Impressionist technique with two very traditional and highly popular subjects: titillating female nudes (many set into quasi-arcadian landscape settings) and sentimental genre scenes such as domestic interiors, children and pets (especially sweet little girls), nursing mothers, young women reading or playing the piano, rustic families, and a few happy peasants and urban workers (sexy laundresses). He also developed a more elegant Impressionist genre painting in scenes of ladies at the opera, elegant cafe scenes and swish picnics and in high society portraits where sumptuous Impressionist colors went well with silk dresses, jewelry, and box seats. Renoir even updated the ever-popular Orientalist Odalisque.
In many ways, Renoir offered an Impressionist painting which looked back to the traditions of Fragonard (erotic genre and pastoral) and Greuze (domestic genre) while embracing the modern world of high bourgeois leisure and pleasure. Carefully calculated to reach widespread audiences, this compromise Impressionism found real success as early as the mid-1870s. With Renoir's brand of Impressionism, respectable art collectors could take up a new, artistically "radical" Impressionist painting without buying into anything conceptually threatening. Here, a modernist surface of roughly brushed, bright color could give new legitimacy and life to what were in many ways hackneyed, overpainted nineteenth-century subjects. Here the sentimental and the cliché could be reborn as something true, modern, and fashionable.
Given the conservative, anti-modern imagery of Renoir's art, one might see his "modern" surface as more of a veneer than a reality. Nonetheless, this veneer, and Renoir's art as a whole, was extremely successful in so far as it breathed new life into traditional scenes of blissful family life, utopian nature, and "carefree" eroticism. These mythologies offered upper-class audiences a reassuring rhetoric of stability and traditional morality within modern life and art. From an audience perspective, Renoir's modern, Impressionist brushwork was less a veneer than a profoundly appealing expression of the continuing vitality and truth of traditional ideals, gender hierarchies, and bourgeois domesticity. It proved that "traditional" values could live on, reassuringly, as the "modern". By developing a hybrid Impressionism, Renoir erased the troubling, widespread sense of historical rupture between past and present, traditional and modern.
Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881
Renoir, La Moulin de la Galette, 1870s (not required)
The Moulin was a cafe frequented by Parisians of all classes. Here and in his Luncheon of the Boating Party was the perfect subject for Renoir's brand of Impressionism, an arena of leisure free from social, political, and economic divisions, as unreal for its bourgeois audiences as Boucher and Fragonard's world had been for aristocratic patrons. The aristocratic pleasure park was reborn as the modern, bourgeois park, restaurant garden, cafe, and suburban picnic devoted to the "innocent" pleasures of prosperous city dwellers, far from the recent Parisian horrors of civil war and urban massacre. Late in life, Renoir himself described the cafe leisure found in these works.
"In 1868 I painted a good deal at La Grenouillère. I remember an amusing restaurant called Fournaise's, where life was a perpetual holiday ... The world knew how to laugh in those days! Machinery had not yet absorbed all of life; you had leisure for enjoyment and no one was the worse for it"
In Renoir's peculiar, trouble-free, fantasy world of "perpetual holiday," all social classes were happy and content in their endless leisure. Nowhere do we see any of the widespread social divisions and anxieties of the day: the ugly urban sprawl and demolition of proletarian neighborhoods, deepening unemployment, and rampant prostitution. In Renoir's art, the squalor of urban love – the modern prostitution explored by Degas, Lautrec and Manet - was reborn as a "timeless" eroticism. It looked both back in time to a lofty artistic past of grand female nudes and forward to a peculiarly modern, bourgeois ideology of an equally "timeless," "natural" pleasure supposedly outside history and class, an "innocent" pleasure no less mystified than the "innocent" pastoral pleasure of Boucher and Fragonard was for eighteenth-century aristocrats.
If much Impressionism makes sense as the artistic expression of new notions of pleasure, Renoir's art gave modern, bourgeois pleasure its most clear formulation. For his art offered a relentlessly "natural" world of bodily pleasure, nudity, and simple delights. Here eating, drinking, sexuality, dancing, music, leisure, flowers, sunlight, sensual landscape, urban cafes, and suburban gardens all mingled in an imaginary pictorial space set outside and beyond all social boundaries and conditions. Indeed, Renoir's remarkable world of nature and the body effectively erased all history, politics, economics, and social reality and replaced it with a new kind of "universalized" pleasure, his "perpetual holiday". Here was the Rococo pleasure world of Boucher and Fragonard reconfigured for modern bourgeois viewers eager to look away from all things disturbing. Here, art itself offered what real life could never offer: a "perpetual holiday" from the problems of modern life. Here, the Renaissance villa ideal of a temporary retreat from nature first achieved what can be called a truly middle-class formulation (without the usual vestiges of court culture seen in earlier bourgeois villa culture). And in Renoir's later works, this pleasure grew increasingly unreal as all traces of temporary retreat frequently disappeared. Instead of picnicking in the suburbs, many of Renoir's late works depicted "timeless" naked women set into "timeless" landscapes, the "pure" color now lifted freely into equally pure settings.
Renoir's Compromises as Artistic Norm in Fin de Siècle Europe
Regardless of what one thinks of Renoir's art, it remains extremely important historically as one major pole of Impressionist painting with larger implications for the whole movement. And rather than deriding the obvious accommodations he made with traditional, middle-class mores and sensibilities, the compromises of Renoir's art were in many ways typical of artists working in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. All art between 1860 and 1915 had to strike a series of compromises between modern forms and traditional subjects in order to maintain some kind of legibility, appeal, and marketability among modern, art-collecting audiences and the larger viewing public. Even the most extravagant Symbolism, Fauvism, or German Expressionism used highly traditional subjects for nineteenth-century art: "unspoiled" nature and peasant life, Orientalist or "primitive" geographies, animals, and heroic nudes set into landscapes.
If we see artistic compromise and accommodation as fundamental to early modernist art (1860-1915), Renoir still remains one of the most compromised of all modern artists. No other Impressionist offered a mix of such traditional, safe, and sentimental subjects and modernist brushwork. For those Impressionists who made fewer compromises in their subject matter and who confronted some of the disturbing uncertainties of modern life head on, success was slower in coming. Here I refer to Manet, Degas, and Lautrec.
Even Monet, whose Impressionism also found great success, started out focused on a very non-traditional suburban landscape before turning toward a more popular "garden" Impressionism after 1890. And in the end, Monet found greater success even than Renoir because his brushwork was considerably more complex and varied and his color sense more subtle and brilliant. And unlike Renoir's strange "late style" of inflated female nudes in cotton-candy landscapes, Monet developed a deeply poetic, at times almost Symbolist, late style as seen in his large murals of water lilies. To visit the water lily room at the Museum of Modern Art on a quiet weekday is to understand why Monet was widely hailed as France's greatest painter as early as 1895.
The Sexual Politics of Renoir's Art
If traditional genre painting jumps out as a curiously old fashioned subject within Renoir's art, his lifelong interest in the female nude is equally striking. No other impressionist was so taken with the female nude. Some of the most important Impressionists like Monet, Pissaro, Sisley, Morisot, and Cassatt avoided it altogether. Only Manet, Degas and Lautrec took up the female nude to any degree and their interest was both very different from Renoir's and much less extensive within their total output.
Renoir's female nudes epitomized his ideal of a "natural," eroticized, bourgeois patriarchy and domestic order. Rooted in Rousseau's vision of the "natural woman" which appeared in eighteenth-century genre scenes of eroticized, happy mothers by artists as different as Fragonard and Greuze, Renoir's woman was a compliant, warm, simple, fleshy, fertile creature devoted to sex, reproduction, child raising, and household management. As Renoir himself wrote,
"Women don't question anything. With them the world becomes something quite simple. They know that their washing is just as important as the constitution of the German Empire".
For all its potential resonance with a larger sensual exuberance and delight transcending gender hierarchies, Renoir's "celebration" of the female nude also worked quite unambiguously as a seductive expression of mainstream gender hierarchies of his day. For any woman to be something other than a simple, doe-eyed, large breasted, erotic tidbit and dutiful mother-wife was, at least in Renoir's world, a violation of nature's order. Renoir was particularly incensed by educated women who presumed to write and publish.
"I consider that women are monsters who are authors, lawyers, and politicians, like George Sand, Madame Adam, and other bores who are nothing more than five legged cows".
Renoir's thinking about women was typical of middle and upper class men of his day. In France and elsewhere, male writers voiced numerous complaints about the moral, social, and political damage inflicted by the new female presumption to a place in higher education, the professions, literature and the arts and to a political life outside the home seen in public debate, voting, and political organizing. The assertive, educated, outspoken woman laying claim to financial, political, and intellectual autonomy was denounced as a major source of modern national weakness, degeneration, and "effeminacy" by writers across Europe. In an 1885 pamphlet entitled, The Awakening of France, one French art critic juxtaposed a modern France weakened by the "new woman" and by an equally modern man emasculated by technology and industrial progress.
We are guided only by our nerves. We wish we weren't alive. We are afraid. Woman has lost her beautiful female ways - her gracious, girlish naiveté, her beautiful womanly dignity, her beautiful wifely devotion, her inexhaustible mother love.
She's knitted herself out as a pedant; a philosophical bone-setter, a trifler in politics. Soon her linen will be stained only with ink.
Man wanders around aimlessly. He runs but fails to arrive. He moves, but doesn't act. He speaks, but says nothing. He looks for something he lacks, without knowing what it is. He doesn't think and doesn't see what he produced. He is the slave of his tool. By dint of admiring his machines, he has become a machine.
Like the pre-modern world implied by this text, Renoir's imagery of mindless, beautifully plump, sexualized young women placed in lush pastoral or garden settings outside history created a similar, pre-industrial Golden Age for modern men to admire, a traditional "natural" world where women recovered their "dignity" as devoted mothers and wives, beautiful goddesses, innocent and naive "girls," and objects of male desire and fantasy. In an offhand comment particularly revealing for his treatment of women (and the spiritual depth of his art as a whole), Renoir boasted, "I paint with my prick".
For all its technical competence, visual appeal, and sensual delight as painting, Renoir's art never went beyond a certain shallow, enticing, untroubled world of fleshy pleasure and childlike “innocence”. More importantly, the delights offered by his art were tied unmistakably to the privileges, power, and willful blindness of both class and gender. His art may have offered (or restored) a "perpetual holiday" for his viewers but it was primarily a holiday for the new, urban high bourgeois. And like earlier cultures of holiday, nature, and retreat, it offered a cornucopia of male sexual fantasy and delight with its purely "natural" women presented as the exemplar of all things bodily, all things simple and innocent.