Art history is a lot more fashionable and faddish than most people in the paintings business would like to admit. In 1956, the Museum of Modern Art acquired Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s spectacular 1902 Reclining Nude. In 1973, it went on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, which described it in a catalog as Read More
Another Impressionist show? That’s how most of us who take an interest in the art scene reacted to the news that the Metropolitan Museum of Art would present The Age of Impressionism: European Painting from the Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen . It’s a question laced with cynicism. Any show dedicated to Impressionist art equals boffo box Read More
Just about everyone knowledgeable seems to agree by now-nearly two decades since his death-that Frenchman Jean Renoir, youngest son of the great Impressionist Auguste Renoir, is the best film director the Western world has known (I’d vote for the Japanese Kenji Mizoguchi as the Eastern world’s finest), and so it’s a very Happy New Year Read More
Writing about the Impressionist master Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) nearly half a century ago, the Italian critic Lionello Venturi spoke of “the surprise continually caused by his huge number of pictures and the disappointment frequently experienced by persons looking at his pictures for the first time-a disappointment which always ends, however, in a victory for Read More
