PARIS.- In 1979, Orson Welles paid tribute to Jean Renoir on his death as the greatest of all directors. Alongside other figures such as Stroheim and Chaplin, to name only the generation born in the late 19th century at the time of cinema's invention, Jean Renoir helped make this new mode of expression a major art form, giving the director the role of an author.

As he liked to recall, Jean Renoir (1841-1919) was also the “son of”. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was a major Impressionist artist hailed as one of the masters of French art in the early 20th century. Jean was 26 when his father passed away. Jean inherited a number of paintings and became a player in the Impressionist art market in his own right in the early 1920s, at a time when his father’s work was in high demand. From the late 1910s to 1922, Jean Renoir worked with ceramics, producing and selling pieces in Fauvist colours whose simplicity and craftsmanship passed on the teachings of his father, a porcelain painter during his early career and an ardent defender of the decorative arts. In 1924, Jean shot his first film, Catherine, and discovered his calling, kindled in his own words by the goal of making his wife, Catherine Hessling, a movie star. Catherine, nicknamed Dédée, was one of the painter’s latest models, who inspired numerous sensual and lyrical nudes. Despite his failures, Jean pursued a career that truly took off in the 1930s with La Chienne [The Bitch] and Boudu.

La Grande Illusion [Grand Illusion] brought him international fame in 1937. Three years later he moved to Los Angeles where he took up permanent residence, producing several films with Hollywood studios as well as works in Europe, such as French Cancan (1954), Elena et les Hommes [Elena and Her Men] (1955) - evoking the Montmartre of his childhood, and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe [Picnic on the Grass] (1959), filmed in his parents’ home in Cagnes, not far from Nice. The release of one of his most revered films, Partie de campagne [A Day in the Country], in 1946 made Jean into a symbolic figurehead of the French New Wave of the 1960s. The film, through its freedom of interpretation, filmed outdoors, its subject, based on a short story by Maupassant produced around the same time as Renoir’s Boating Party, is often seen as an Impressionist work and the culmination of constant exchanges. Did Jean not confide in 1974 that he had spent his life “trying to determine the extent of the influence of [his] father upon [him]”? Indeed, he constantly portrayed this connection in his films and narratives.

The exhibition aims to explore this rich and often paradoxical dialogue between a father and son, between two artists, between painting and cinema, where writing also played a vital role. The points of contact, the “common sensibility”, to quote the great critic André Bazin, between the painter's work and that of the film director and the painter go beyond influence and transposition.

It is as if Jean forged his artistic personality and established his independence as a film director by questioning distance and proximity in Renoir’s paintings and those of his contemporaries, and more generally the late 19th century. Beyond film, the exhibition also takes a new look at his role in the dissemination of his father’s works, his relations with the artistic world and his work as a ceramist which he compared to that of cinema, because potters and film directors both have to work with the hand they are dealt.

The relationship between Pierre-Auguste and Jean Renoir was interspersed with interwoven portraits, between a son who posed for his father without ever filming him, and who spent almost twenty years drafting his biography. Published in 1962, this biography is still widely read today. Through these paintings, film extracts, photographs, costumes, posters, drawings and documents, some of which are on display for the first time, this multidisciplinary exhibition explores the themes (the role of the female model, for example) and locations (the River Seine, Montmartre, Southern France) common to two bodies of work that assuredly combine a concern for the world, a taste for freedom and a deep sense of humanity.