Volume 44, Number 18 · November 20, 1997
Renoir the Radical
By Robert L. Herbert
Renoir's Portraits: Impressions of an Age 27-September 14, 1997; the Art Institute of Chicago, October 17, 1997-January 4, 1998; and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, February 8-April 26, 1998.
exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, June, Catalog of the exhibition by Colin B. Bailey, with the assistance of John B. Collins, and with essays by Linda Nochlin, by Anne Distel
National Gallery of Canada/Yale University Press, 384 pp., $29.95 (paper)
There are no thorns among Renoir's roses and, for many, that is the problem. His figures have none of Degas's troubling psychology, none of Manet's puzzling abbreviations of traditional three-dimensional modeling, none of Cézanne's crumpled geometry, none of Monet's emotive brushwork, and hardly any of Pissarro's appeal to rural nostalgia. His apparent placidity and feeling for floral beauty don't fit well with the tensions of the late twentieth century. Many of his critics want some evidence of the anxieties that we associate with his fellow Impressionists.
Review, 3324 words
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