I think that a great painter is even rarer than a great film director,” Jean Renoir said. It was 1967, and the French filmmaker was sitting on the bank of the river Ource, chatting during the making of a documentary by Jacques Rivette, a New Wave director who idolised Renoir’s Grand Illusion, The Crime of Monsieur Lange and the masterpiece The Rules of the Game.
But unlike the New Wave’s auteurs, Renoir (1894-1979) had his doubts about cinema’s importance. Because of the medium’s limits, he told Rivette, a film could never fully express a single vision. Only a painter could “find the relationship between eternity and the instant, between the world and the soul.” Filmmakers were cursed to be technicians. Painters, Renoir concluded, “are the great philosophers of our time.”
He was exaggerating, but he knew what he was talking about, for he was the son of a painter: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the impressionist who depicted revellers at the Moulin de la Galette and, later, Rubenesque nudes that were loved less.
Father figure
Jean Renoir did not always treasure his father’s paintings; early on, he may have principally appreciated them for the money he
Renoir’s ‘Landscape with Woman and Dog’ | Photo Credit: The Barnes Foundation
made selling them to fund his films. Yet, eventually, after moving to Los Angeles, he spoke of Pierre-Auguste Renoir as the central influence of his life, which he elaborated on in the genial memoir Renoir, My Father.
The place of one Renoir in the career of the other is the subject of ‘Renoir: Father and Son/Painting and Cinema,’ a terrific, heartfelt exhibition on at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (opens Nov 6 at Musée d’Orsay in Paris). Although the show seriously considers the interplay of media, it’s largely an exhibition about Jean Renoir and cinema.
There are just 16 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; the museum’s own 181 Renoirs remain on their traditional yellow walls. The galleries are filled instead with projected clips from A Day in the Country, The Diary of a Chambermaid and more than a dozen other films by the younger Renoir, as well as stills, posters, correspondence and costumes.
As a boy, Jean Renoir did not have a close relationship with his father. As in many bourgeois households in fin-de-siècle France, Jean’s mother and the domestic staff looked after him and his two siblings, while his father was largely out of sight.
The boy’s most consistent contact with his father would have occurred while he was posing for him, and there are half a dozen paintings of young Jean in this exhibition. In a portrait from 1903, the 9-year-old son appears with a jaunty red foulard tied about his neck; as is so often true of Renoirs, the oil paint looks like pastel, and Jean’s hair has the delicacy of spun silk.
The younger Renoir also had ambitions in visual art and started out as a ceramist in the early 1920s. One of his only buyers was Barnes, and this show includes more than a dozen unremarkable vases and bowls, painted with a Cézannesque palette of greens, yellows and blues.
Borrowing, transcending
He soon accepted that his life lay in cinema and made two intriguing silent films with his first wife, Andrée Heuschling.
Yet it was in early sound cinema that Jean Renoir would make his deepest mark. In La Chienne (The Bitch), from 1931, he sent up the Paris art world by having a pimp offer an amateur’s portraits at one of the best galleries in town. A Day in the Country (1936), by contrast, is soaked in impressionist light effects, especially in the lyrical sequence of a woman standing on a swing as it climbs ever higher, the camera swaying with her.
This rare example of Renoir’s filming en plein air, as his father painted, is projected just before you encounter the latter’s ‘The Swing’ (1876), one of the finest of the artist’s impressionist paintings.
Search for rhyme
Jean Renoir held onto just one of his father’s works his whole life: ‘Jean as a Huntsman’ (1910), which travelled with him to California, and which he left to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In it, the 16-year-old Jean appears in a belted shooting jacket, a beagle at his feet; his father has painted the blue of his son’s outfit with shifting red and purple undertones that recall the work of Edvard Munch. It hangs now, in one of the show’s most cunning moves, across from a still from The Rules of the Game (1939), whose hunting sequence is both a landmark of technical acuity and a devastating portrayal of the French aristocracy.
The search for the rhyming of the father’s painting and the son’s cinematography reveals the power of later, less celebrated films in colour — among them Picnic on the Grass, which was shot on the grounds of the elder Renoir’s home on the Riviera. French Cancan, an accomplished, if syrupy, musical of the Moulin Rouge, brings the exhibition back to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Montmartre, although Toulouse-Lautrec was a greater influence on its sequences of high-kicking dancers and absinthe-swilling patrons.
The River, filmed on location in India, is projected in the final gallery here (again, with iffy sound); two lovelorn women sitting on a swing harken not only to A Day in the Country but also to his father’s original impressionist vision. This is cinema that takes inspiration from painting but transcends it, too.
Although this is Jean Renoir’s show, it also serves as a reassessment of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose later works faced disparaging reviews as early as the 1920s. It can be easy to tire of his soft, honey-hued paintings of undressed women. Yet his interweaving of classical motifs with the flat representations of Modern painting were more than a direct influence on Picasso and Matisse; this show insists that they were decisive, too, for the maturing of French cinema.
— The New York Times News Service