| Les Grandes Baigneuses | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Pierre-Auguste Renoir |
| Year | 1884–1887 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 115 cm × 170 cm (3' 10" × 5' 5" ) |
| Location | Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia |
Les Grandes Baigneuses, or The Large Bathers, is a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir made between 1884 and 1887. The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia.[1][2]
The painting depicts a scene of nude women bathing. In the foreground, two women are seated beside the water, and a third is standing in the water near them. In the background, two others are bathing. The one standing in the water in the foreground appears to be about to splash one of the women seated on the shore with water. That woman leans back to avoid the expected splash of water.
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Transcription
(jazzy music) Female: A lot of people know about Impressionism but very few people know about the crisis of Impressionism and this painting is a great example of that crisis. Male: We're in the Philadelphia Art Museum looking at Auguste Renoir's The Large Bathers. This is a painting that is not Impressionism, you're absolutely right, that really in a sense rejects Impressionism. Here we have one of the leaders of the Impressionist movement just a decade later turning his back and saying, "No, I want to create Classical nudes." Female: Exactly, and part of the impetus for this was seeing Seurat's painting of The Bathers at Asnieres and La Grande Jatte. Both paintings which took Impressionist subject matter, leisure in the city, but made of that subject something really timeless and gave them a sense of permanence and a sense of being composed and thought out, which were things you couldn't say about Impressionist paintings. Impressionist paintings look like they were done quickly and on the spot. Male: In fact, Renoir made numerous studies for this painting, some large scale drawings, and spent three years preparing this canvas. The other influence that's so important to keep in mind is that the artist had finally gotten to Italy. He'd gone to Rome. He'd seen Raphael. He had seen Classical art. In fact, he went to Pompeii and had seen ancient fresco. Unlike Impressionism which is seeking the fleeting, here he's reversed himself. Now he's seeking to create a painting that is an expression of eternal beauty. Female: That's right. This is the crisis of Impressionism, this turning away from the fleeting moment that's caught rather quickly with sketchy brushstrokes and the desire to paint something that is more timeless and more permanent and more connected to the traditions of art. Male: But the result is a very curious painting. On the one hand, you've got this very tight handling of these figures. You can really see an emphasis now on contour. But it's been placed in this landscape that is absolutely Modern, very much a product of the 19th century. Female: Of Impressionism. It looks like an Impressionist landscape in the background. Male: It really does. So his painting is kind of a collage of styles and of intentions. Female: This is truly a crisis. First of all, you have the subject of the nude, which is an important subject in art history especially since the Renaissance, and the question of how do you create a modern nude is something that Baudelaire asked in his famous essay The Painter of Modern Life. These don't look like Classical figures. If you look at their faces, they look like Parisian women, so we know that we're not looking at a Renaissance painting, but it does end up being a clash of styles. Male: Renoir is rejecting not only his own impressionism, he's rejecting the pathway that had been offered by Manet 20 years earlier in paintings like Olympia or Le déjeuner sur l'herbe; the incongruity of the nude in the modern world. Female: So Manet, when he gives us Olympia, gives us an image of a nude where we feel the tension of that tradition coming into the modern world. We're aware of that problem, and that Renoir's trying to erase that problem. Male: I think he is. I think he's trying to reclaim young women flitting about in a park-like setting, which is an absurdity. Yet he's trying to suggest that within the veil of art, this is somehow a reasonable proposition. Female: What this highlights for me is the importance of form. If you think about Cezanne painting the subject matter at the end of his life in his Great Bathers series, or if you think about Degas and other artists of that generation picking up on this traditional subject of bathers, the way that they apply paint is radically modern. The problem with this painting, of course, is that Renoir's really retreating into the past. It's a profoundly conservative painting in the way that it's painted. Male: But it does speak to the tensions between tradition and modernity that were so present at the end of the 19th century. This painting is absolutely a product of its day. Female: There's a feeling that Impressionism went too far, leaving behind all of the seriousness of art history to embrace the fleeting and the momentary. Male: So if we look at this canvas, despite all of the weighty issues that we're discussing, these are figures that are meant to, in a sense, speak to a sensual frivolity, that recalls the 18th century, that recalls the late Rococo. You might think of Boucher, although this is much more tightly rendered. It's a sort of odd combination of the subject of the 18th century with references to the style of the 16th century and perhaps even of the Ancient world. It is really this kind of funny collage that speaks to the 19th century's ability to harvest ideas and styles from history and bring them into the modern world. (jazzy music)
Painting
Influences
It is inspired at least in part by a sculpture by François Girardon, The Bath of the Nymphs (1672), a low lead relief realized for a fountain park of Versailles.[3]: 120 The painting is also influenced by Veronese and Tiepolo, whose work Renoir greatly admired during his time in Venice.[citation needed] It also reflects the influence of the works of Ingres, and particularly the frescoes of Raphael, whose style he had absorbed during his trip to Italy in 1881-82.[3]: 120–121 The latter two artists influenced Renoir's entire way of painting and drawing: he began to paint in a more disciplined and more conventional manner, gave up painting outdoors, and made the female nude – until then only an occasional subject– his main focus.
Additionally, Renoir greatly admired and was deeply influenced by the decorative Rococo style of the French painter François Boucher.[3]: 120 Disillusioned by the rational and mechanized aesthetics of industrialization, Renoir became fascinated by the Rococo spirit of frivolous sensuality.[3]: 120 The influence of Boucher’s paintings can be observed in the posing of Renoir’s foreground bathers with their legs crossing, mirroring Boucher’s Diana Bathing 1742. This Rococo spirit of eroticism also manifests itself in Renoir’s depiction of his voluptuous bathers. Rococo art inspired him to experiment with what he regarded as a decorative mode of painting in The Great bathers. The painting was exhibited under the title, Les grandes baigneuses; Essai de peinture décorative, indicating his ornamental conception of the work's style.[citation needed]
Composition and technique
Renoir worked on The Bathers for three years until he was content with its composition. During that time, he made over 20 studies and sketches, including at least two full-sized figure drawings of the theme.[4][3] The painting was composed using contradictory artistic styles and techniques.[3] The left side of the painting is more indebted to the Classical tradition whereas the right portion is more consistent with Impressionism.
The two large bathers dominating the left side of the painting have a highly real, sculpture-like quality. The artist uses precise lines and edges to clearly delineate between these two figures and the background.[3] Renoir also uses lines to define the features of these two nudes, capturing fine details such as the ears, hair, and lips, giving these bathers a lifelike, tactile quality.[5] Prior to this painting, Renoir worked in the Impressionist style, painting directly onto the canvas, capturing his impressions of fleeting moments with quick, spontaneous brushstrokes.[3] In contrast, the style of this painting, at least in its left half, has been described as "anti-Impressionist," as Renoir utilized a very different technique, carefully tracing the two large bathers onto the canvas from exact drawings of the figures.[3]: 107
The right side of the painting and the surroundings of these two large bathers show features of Renoir’s typical Impressionist style. The smaller bathers in the right background and the surrounding landscape were painted directly onto the canvas, with small, loose brush strokes.[3] The features of the smaller nudes and the surrounding landscape are more blurred, less detailed, and less precise.[3][6] The figures in the foreground have a sculptural quality, while the landscape behind them shimmers with impressionistic light. The combination of these two conflicting styles within the painting has a strange visual effect, making the two large bathers in the foreground appear like cut outs, pasted onto the painting.[3]
With this new style, Renoir's intention was to reconcile the modern forms of painting with the painting traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly those of Ingres and Raphael. Renoir also admired the works of Rubens and Titian, and he tried to find a compromise between the styles of these old masters and the new Impressionist style.The Bathers may also be regarded as Renoir's pictorial testament. The models for the three bathers included two of his favorites: Aline Charigot, the seated blonde woman, whom Renoir married in 1890, and Suzanne Valadon, herself a painter and the mother of Maurice Utrillo.[7]
Reception
The painting was exhibited at the Petit Gallery in May 1887.[8] Renoir considered this work to be his grand masterpiece and he reportedly expected viewers to be "dumbfounded" by the painting.[8] The painting was controversial, but it did not generate the success or critical acclaim that Renoir had hoped to achieve. In particular, many critics strongly condemned Renoir’s combination of Rococo and Impressionist styles, indicating that the painting lacked aesthetic harmony. Some artists and critics, however, praised the new style of Renoir’s work. In particular, the Impressionist artists Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet greatly admired the painting.[3] Monet stated, "Renoir made a superb painting of his bathers. Not understood by all, but by many."[8][3] Renoir's painting had a strong influence on Paul Cézanne, who would also go on to complete a series of paintings depicting nude bathers in nature.[3]
See also
References
- ^ "The Large Bathers - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French, 1841 - 1919 - Google Cultural Institute".
- ^ Philadelphia Museum of Art. "Philadelphia Museum of Art - Collections Object : The Large Bathers".
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o White, Barbara Ehrlich (March 1973). "The Bathers of 1887 and Renoir's Anti-Impressionism". The Art Bulletin. 55 (1): 106–126. doi:10.1080/00043079.1973.10789711. ISSN 0004-3079.
- ^ "Splashing Figure (Study for "The Large Bathers") - The Art Institute of Chicago". The Art Institute of Chicago.
- ^ Lucy, Martha (2021-12-13). "Renoir, Impressionism, and the Value of Touch". Wiley Blackwell Companion to Impressionism: 357–374. doi:10.1002/9781119373919.ch21. ISBN 978-1-119-37389-6. S2CID 245314104.
- ^ Nochlin, Linda (2006), "Renoir's Great Bathers: Bathing as Practice, Bathing as Representation", Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye, Harvard University Press, pp. 1–54, doi:10.2307/j.ctv23dxd7j.3, S2CID 244293990, retrieved 2023-11-21
- ^ "Maurice Utrillo, Famous Artist, Taken by Death". The Desert Sun. No. 33 (02 ed.). Dax, France. 5 November 1955. p. 1. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
- ^ a b c Thompson, Jennifer; Rishel, Joseph (2019). Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art . Yale University Press. ISBN 9780876332894.
This page was last edited on 23 January 2024, at 03:26