By Victor Greto
Billie Gillespie has a cool job. At least for the next three months.
She’s a guard at one of the nine galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s color-drenched “Renoir Landscapes” exhibit of 61 works by the 19th-century French Impressionist master, which began Thursday and runs though Jan. 6.
For chunks of time, she gets to lean against one of the exhibit’s white walls, and study Pierre Auguste Renoir’s 1881 painting, “The Jardin d’Esasi, Algiers,” that hangs directly across from her.
“It’s an explosion of color, energy and enthusiasm,” said art museum curator John Zarobell of the canvas, which depicts a straight, sun-dappled dirt lane framed by a profusion of red, brown and green date trees, palm trees and assorted fronds and vegetation.
For Gillespie, it’s an invitation to a state of mind.
“A picture is like a window,” she said. “It’s what I would want to see from my bedroom every morning.”
It just so happens that the picture — like several others in the exhibition — has never been in a Renoir show before.
The exhibit, brought together from public and private collections throughout the world by curators from Philadelphia (Zarobell), England (Christopher Riopelle) and Canada (Colin Bailey) — the latter two have worked in Philadelphia — has shown previously at the National Gallery in London, and, this summer, at the National Gallery in Ottawa, Canada.
“We’re the only U.S. venue to discover a new aspect of Renoir,” Zarobell said.
Which is a kind of nyah-nyah way of saying that Philadelphia will be the only American city holding this exhibition.
Before I even got to the galleries, anyone to whom I mentioned a major exhibit of Renoir landscapes was surprised.
“I thought he just did figures,” one said.
“Lots of nude women, right?” said another.
Most know Renoir, who lived from 1840-1919, for his charming portraits of ladies and girls and crowded boating parties. And for his depictions of naked women, robustly cherubic, and lovingly veiled by a sensual shimmer that ultimately makes his art sweetly chaste at heart.
But it was nearly impossible to have been on the 19th-century French cutting edge without depicting landscapes, city parks and Nature — with a capital N.
During that century’s soot-soaked flowering of the Industrial Revolution, many middle-class Europeans escaped from the proliferating factories, smog and daily drudgery that corroded their cities to outlying parks and days at the beach along the Seine or Thames, the Rhine or the sparkling Mediterranean.
For modern artists, it proved irresistible to paint en plein air, in the open air, going against the grain of established neo-classical painters of the time who insisted on order, as well as subject matter that tended to linger on key Greek and Roman political events and mythology.
These new painters, which included Renoir’s friends Claude Monet and, later, Paul Cezanne, challenged traditional, representational painting, creating a new language in paint that incorporated a mélange of both cool and bright colors and indeterminate lines.
One of the best paintings in the exhibition is the first one seen, all by itself and never before shown in a previous museum exhibit.
“In the Rose Garden” is an 1881 masterpiece of both portraiture and landscape, partaking in both of Renoir’s mature strengths.
A melodious riot of reds and pinks and greens and blues, it shows a certain Madame Clapisson sitting in her garden. Her old man, Monsieur Clapisson, who commissioned the portrait after having purchased three previous Renoirs, rejected the painting as “too audacious.” Renoir painted a more conventional portrait afterward.
Clapisson was half right: the painting is brave because one realizes that, in the picture, Madame Clapisson’s garden is just as important as the lady herself. They share equal time as the colors of the garden and the lady’s clothes and hat gorgeously mix.
It’s neither a wanna-be landscape nor a wanna-be portrait: it’s both, and with it Renoir proves himself as an artist with a delightful sensuality that cannot help but find harmony in what lies nearly undifferentiated in front of his eyes.
Zarobell called the painting a depiction of a woman “who is both beautiful and cultivated in an environment that is both beautiful and cultivated.”
Right.
After an introduction that includes a Renoir chronology and maps of the places where he painted — from France to Italy to North Africa — the show is separated into galleries that represent particular themes in the artist’s painting life, including rudimentary “beginnings,” gardens, cityscapes, sea views, and a touching 3-painting “coda.”
These excellent, later paintings were executed by Renoir while he was crippled with arthritis, when his brushes had to be tied to the backs of his hands.
Instead of one gallery leading directly into another, the viewer turns a darkened corner before each phase of the artist’s career, “cleansing the palate.” It works.
Philadelphia’s presentation of Renoir’s art is different than the way it had been presented in Canada’s National Gallery, said Gordon Filewych, head of exhibit designs there, who attended the opening.
Instead of the stark white walls of the Philadelphia galleries, Canada’s galleries were more expansive and “colored, to give more of a landscape feel,” he said.
I’m not sure how colored walls or plants might have improved the Philadelphia exhibit. In fact, I’m guessing it wouldn’t. The Philadelphia presentation works.
Renoir’s work is all that matters here. His colors, his people, his ideas.
The only clunkers I saw were a couple of “By the Sea” pictures. Their only “problem,” however, is that they’re just not as aesthetically gorgeous as — take your pick — 1872’s “The Gust of Wind,” 1875’s “Springtime (in Chatou),” the “Duck Pond” from 1873, or 1881’s “The Seine at Chatou.”
These particular paintings take possession of the viewer. Like anything beautiful, it’s difficult to take your eyes off of them.
But Impressionism is not necessarily best viewed from a distance.
Up close lies perhaps the greatest revelation.
Renoir proves his mettle and artistry repeatedly, showing how a master may suggest a human being as part of a landscape by a mere half-dozen strokes of his brush.
In doing so, by making people integral to the landscape, no matter how large or small, no matter how important or indifferent, Renoir objectified an understanding of nature that assumes you and me in a frame no bigger than a bedroom window.
That’s art.