SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA.- A new exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art provides the first investigation of the American critical and popular response to Renoir between 1904 and 1940 and looks at Renoir’s relationship to the American artists who drew inspiration from his work. Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art and curated by Anne Dawson, professor of art history at Connecticut State University, and SDMA’s curator of European art, Steven Kern, Idol of the Moderns: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and American Painting presents approximately fifty paintings (fifteen by Renoir, thirty-five by American painters), demonstrating the legacy of French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the United States.
Idol of the Moderns acknowledges Renoir’s immense popularity with critics, collectors, and the public, particularly in the years between the two world wars, and explores Renoir’s impact on work by leading American artists including George Bellows, John Sloan, Marsden Hartley, Isabel Bishop, Guy Pène DuBois, and Richard Hayes Miller, whose admiration of Renoir comes through strongly in their own work.
While the name Monet is now synonymous with impressionism, Claude Monet was not always the most popular of the impressionists for Americans. In fact, during the early decades of the 20th century, when French impressionism was still building an audience on American shores, Renoir was the favored painter. American critics and painters were attracted to Renoir because of his ability to infuse traditional subjects—genre scenes, portraiture, still life, landscape, the female nude—with advanced formal virtuosity in the way of rich color, broken brushwork and freedom in the application of paint, and complex compositional structure. Guy Pène DuBois’s energetic canvases of contemporary life, for example, in figure style and composition, draw on Renoir’s depictions from the previous century. It was also believed that Renoir’s brightly colored, three-dimensional compositions laid the groundwork for the paintings of the synchromists, as seen in Morgan Russell’s Still-Life Synchromy with Nude in Yellow, included in the exhibition.
Forward-looking American artists, striving to develop their own painting tradition by attaching formalist expertise to American subject matter, also looked to Renoir as a precedent. These painters, hoping to build a wide audience for their advanced modernist painting, avoided the types of radical or pessimistic modernism that had provoked outrage and alienated many potential supporters of modernist American painting. For American painters working within a variety of approaches of the early 20th century—American impressionism, the Ashcan school, formalist realism, early modernism, regionalism, the Fourteenth Street School, and academic figure painting—Renoir’s art both affirmed their most important aesthetic goals and provided a model of how to achieve them.
Although interest in the works of Monet and Cézanne by American artists, writers, and collectors has been comprehensively studied, the broader topic of the American preoccupation with Renoir as a modernist, along with a common tendency to borrow from his work during the early decades of the 20th century, has yet to be examined in any systematic way. Idol of the Moderns: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and American Painting addresses this need by investigating critical response both to Renoir and to the American artists who drew inspiration from him and his work. This exhibition provides valuable new insight, not only into the careers of individual American painters, but also into the development of early 20th-century American painting as a whole. Above all, this exhibition offers an opportunity to reassess American cultural trends from a new perspective, and to examine the consequences of the American painters’ struggle to modernize their styles while retaining those aspects of the American art tradition that were associated with nationalism.
