Night of the Renoirssance

I'm a realist.  Who like surrealism and fantasy art.  But prefers the style of realism.  Yes, it is a dichotomy.

I've always be ambiguous about Renoir.  I like his themes but dislike the blowsy, over-blown, simpering overtones of his work.  The softness of his strokes appealed to and yet repelled me.  I like the richness of his pieces yet the tenuousness of his lines irritates me.

Yet, there is something in his work that always gives me thought, whatever my feelings (which waver from day to day) on them are.

I liked this article by Richard Dorment in The Telegraph.  It was thoughtful, thought-provoking and looks beyond the singularity of an individual piece to address the impact of the whole on others.

Renoir: A glorious night of intrigue Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 11/03/2008

She is lost in a daydream; he may be searching for a new paramour. Renoir's study of a couple on a night out in Paris is full of tantalising mystery, says Richard Dorment Why do people go to opening nights at the theatre, opera, and art galleries? The answer is: to see and to be seen. That, in a nutshell, is what is happening in Pierre-Auguste Renoir's magical painting La Loge ("The Box at the Theatre"), the subject of a small, old-fashioned "art-in-context" exhibition, focusing on this Impressionist masterpiece from the permanent collection at the Courtauld Gallery.   La Loge depicts a fashionable couple seated in the best seats at the theatre or opera Painted in 1874 and shown in the first Impressionist exhibition of that year, it depicts a fashionable couple seated in the best seats at the theatre or opera. We can't know whether the curtain has already gone up because at this date house lights were not dimmed. We viewers see the anonymous man and woman from the same level across the amphitheatre and in close up, implying that we are seated opposite and watching them through opera glasses. Two things are happening simultaneously: one active, the other passive. The man raises his binoculars to look to the upper balconies, presumably to get a closer look at a beautiful woman. But his wife (or more probably mistress) sits perfectly still, her opera glasses in one gloved hand and her fan and handkerchief the other, with a slight smile playing on her lips. Her gaze is unfocused, as though she is lost in thought, unaware of being observed. This last detail is important because it reinforces the idea that we are watching her from a distance through binoculars. Since she isn't conscious of our interest, we can feast our eyes on her slightly blowsy beauty, which is set off to perfection by her ravishing dress, jewels and flowers. Parisian cartoonists had long been having fun with the subject of romantic and social carryings-on in boxes at the theatre, but Renoir was among the first artists to treat the theme, which he saw as part of the spectacle of modern life in the big city. When we look at the picture, he wants us to be intrigued by this pair and to ask ourselves who they are and what is happening between them. Though Renoir leaves the woman's precise social status unclear, her heavy use of cosmetics and deep décolletage suggests that she is une demi-mondaine. That he was acutely sensitive to social nuances of this sort is suggested by another painting in this show in which a lady who is plainly from the highest level of society is shown in a box at the opera wearing a demure black evening gown without jewels or face paint. The woman in La Loge is not in her first youth. Her lover or protector has begun to look at other women, and she may not have much time left to find his successor. If (as I believe) she is meant to be seen as a courtesan, then her passive demeanour has a purpose - she is signalling her availability by displaying her charms for all to see, well aware that the eyes of every man in the theatre are on her. And how could you not look at such a dazzling creature? As Aileen Ribeiro explains in her informative catalogue essay, the woman in the picture is dressed in the height of fashion in a silk gown of 18th-century inspiration called a polonaise. On the back of her chair we catch a glimpse of her ermine wrap, and she wears flowers in her hair and a corsage inserted into a tiny vial of water at her bosom. It is difficult to tell whether those are diamonds in her ears and pearls around her neck because Renoir handles paint so freely that they could just as easily be glass. La Loge is candy floss, confectionery in paint. Renoir uses rivers of flowing black paint to create the bold stripes running down the silk dress, and the white of that dress isn't really white but white mixed with light blue, so that the overall effect is not, as it technically should be, a black and white painting, but a blur of blues and pinks with little zings of yellow-gold. For all his virtuosity here, from a technical point of view Renoir is the most uneven of all the Impressionists. He painted too much and too quickly and didn't destroy works that really should never have seen the light of day. Even in this small exhibition, the quality of his painting lurches wildly between pictures that Renoir expended time and thought on, and those he didn't. Compare La Loge, for example, with a small scale replica hanging next to it. It is so slapdash in its execution that the surface looks like a bar of soap that's melted in the bath. Mary Cassatt is a much more consistent painter, who was also attracted to the subject of the theatre. Indeed, her At the Français, a Sketch looks to me like a direct response to Renoir's La Loge. For here a woman (who may be a widow because she is dressed entirely in black) is seen in a theatre box on her own, assertively using her opera glasses to see what's happening on the stage, unaware that she is the object of intense scrutiny by a man in a distant box, who is so frantic to get a good look at her that he leans out over the ledge of the box with his binoculars glued to his eyes. Cassatt contrasts her intelligence and dignity with behaviour that is not just boorish but subtly threatening because, unlike the woman in La Loge, she is genuinely unconscious of what is happening. I love exhibitions that put a single picture in context. This one, with a catalogue and essays by Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, Barnaby Wright, John House, Nancy Ireson and Aileen Ribeiro gave me new respect for a painter I often think of as all eye and no brain. 'Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at La Loge' is at the Courtauld Gallery (020 7848 2526) until May 25