RENOIR. ROCOCO REVIVAL

Pictures full of atmosphere, movement, and brilliant color: Impressionist paintings still enjoy great popularity today. In the mid-19th century, artists like Claude Monet (1840–1926), Édouard Manet (1832–1883), Edgar Degas (1834–1917), and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) developed a new style of painting. The Impressionists’ characteristic brushwork is also immediately striking in Renoir’s The Promenade.

Couples in nature, erotically charged scenes. The Louvre version of Antoine Watteau’s (1648–1721) painting The Embarkation for Cythera was the inspiration behind Renoir’s The Promenade. Renoir’s 1870 painting is like a close-up of the Rococo work.

A tactile closeness between men and women, making an appearance and stepping out in style – Renoir transposes these elements from Rococo art into the vocabulary of Impressionism. Renoir knew Watteau’s 1717 painting, a work in the genre known as the “fête galante” (courtship party), from his visits to the Louvre. Fêtes galantes afforded glimpses into the world of the nobility.

A festive group of courtiers – Watteau’s painting shows the sort of scene that could easily have been observed in the 18th century in the pleasure palaces and landscaped parks of Europe’s nobility. Yet the painting conveys more than actuality: the idyllic landscape represents a place of desire. In the background is the legendary Island of Cythera.

According to ancient mythology, Venus, the goddess of love, was born from the waves and came ashore on the island. In the Rococo era, too, Cythera was linked with the idea of a blissful arcadian existence. Obliged to live according to the strict ceremonial and social expectations of the royal court, the nobility often liked to dream of free love, without the constraints of rank and in harmony with nature.

An abundance of gold, curvaceous lines, a feeling of luxury and elegance: from the mid-19th century, Rococo forms resurfaced in French furniture, fashion, and the decorative arts. The “Rococo Revival” took contemporary drawing rooms by storm.

Fashion trends don’t come out of nowhere. The “Rococo Revival” was prompted by influential writers and thinkers like Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (1822–1896; 1830–1870). They revered Antoine Watteau, François Boucher (1703–1770), and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), the three Rococo artists still most famous today, describing their works as particularly “feminine” and poignant – but above all, as absolutely French! From then on, in the 19th-century consciousness, the forms and colors of the Rococo were seen as representing the glory and splendor of France’s past, the “gloire française”.

Fervent nationalism – from the mid-1800s onwards a wave of nationalism gripped the European states. In France, this meant an increasing focus on the Ancien Regime, the period of absolute monarchy which had preceded the French Revolution (1789). In those days, France had represented the pinnacle of culture – or so the thinking went – setting the standard for Europe and the so-called “New World”. During Renoir’s lifetime, the Rococo was elevated almost to the status of a national style. People thought its forms and colors were the perfect expression of the “French soul”. And the boom in all things Rococo or rococoesque received another boost when French self-confidence was dealt a humiliating blow by defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (1870/71).

Renoir found himself right at the heart of this Rococo fever. Coming from humble beginnings – the son of a tailor and a seamstress – he began his professional career, while still a teenager, with a close study of 18th-century motifs. In 1854, at the age of just thirteen, he became an apprentice porcelain painter with the Parisian manufactory Lévy-Frères et Compagnie. Vases, plates, candlesticks – Renoir painted many porcelain designs in the Rococo style.

Cramped conditions, dirt, noise, and social tensions, the speed of the machine age and the upheavals caused by technical developments – these were all familiar to Renoir from his own experience. Symbolizing the forces at work, the modern French capital was radically redesigned by the town planner Baron Haussmann. Renoir’s family was one of those forced to leave the old city center as whole districts were torn down.

Industrialization had many ugly faces. In Renoir’s depictions of the modern metropolis, they are almost nowhere to be seen. The so-called “painter of happiness” focused on scenes of enjoyment – young people in cafés and parks, moments of leisure and relaxation.

Leaving the city far behind – this is where the young people of Paris go in search of space and ease of living. Rowing, swimming, going for walks: Renoir captures the activities of their new-found leisure time.

Water, waves, fresh air: an outing with friends, a perfect spot unblemished by modern life. Only the cargo barge in the background reminds us of the other reality of the industrial age. Renoir portrays an afternoon torn from the pages of his own life. We see his brother Edmond, his future wife Aline Charigot, and the painter Gustave Caillebotte on the banks of the Seine at Chatou – a favorite destination, not far from the bustle of Paris. The lively Impressionist brushstrokes give the painting its airy gaiety.

At ease, pleasure-seeking, and yet always tinged with an air of nostalgia – young people enjoying one another’s company outdoors. Many of Renoir’s paintings echo a central theme of Rococo art.

Hardly any painting had a more lasting influence on Renoir than Diana Bathing by the Rococo painter François Boucher. Renoir was able to admire this image of the nude goddess of the hunt and her attendant on his visits to the Louvre. Its influence is particularly reflected in his own painting The Great Bathers, painted between 1884 and 1887.

An eye on Boucher: Renoir’s motif of a seated nude with legs casually crossed is quite similar to Boucher’s. He also adopted the studied confusion of women’s legs from his Rococo predecessor.

From Pablo Picasso to Henri Matisse: in the early 20th century, Renoir’s paintings of nude female bodies became models for emerging artists. But over the course of the century, attitudes to his nude paintings changed. Feminist critics labelled Renoir a sexist artist who had reduced women to mere objects of desire.

Whether he was painting a nude or a portrait, Renoir projected his longing for a profound sensuality onto his portraits of women. We see this not only from their soft, ample bodies but also from the impression he creates that we are secretly witnessing a private moment, when the subject is lost in thought. Renoir wanted to create art that was as full of feeling as possible: his female figures radiate a passive charm. Female figures with strong, complex characters seldom appear in his canvases.

Voluptuous images! Renoir created them as a riposte to a world of industry and technology, which he increasingly felt to be monotonous and inhuman. Renoir’s paintings of women exemplify his desire to rebel against the cool efficiency of the machine age.

No longer enamored with the modern age, in the last years of his life Renoir developed a skeptical stance toward the changing world. Around the turn of the century, the pace of technological progress sped up and machines entered all walks of life. Renoir looked to the past for models for a better future.

Renoir was convinced that the machine was to some extent responsible for the decline of art. Modernist paintings and sculptures were no longer “genuine” works of craftsmanship. Renoir turned increasingly to decorative painting styles and forms of expression.

Decorative art – for Renoir this was synonymous with holistic and craftsmanlike artistic production, qualities he felt that Modernism had lost. He wanted the artist to be seen as an “ouvrier de la peinture”, someone who worked at painting. Decorative art, he felt, should lie at the heart of human life!

In his search for a holistic art, Renoir looked back to the Rococo. In his day, the French Revolution was already seen as the crucial turning point that had ushered in the modern world. The pre-revolutionary flourishing of the Rococo style was increasingly idealized as a last, brilliant chapter of a vanished age. Renoir believed that the playful, sensual interpenetration of architecture, sculpture, and painting had brought about the final blossoming of a particular epoch: the Rococo.