Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) asserted themselves as two great masters of French painting during the last quarter of the 19th century and the very beginning of the 20th. Indeed, the two men forged a lasting friendship mixed with great mutual admiration. During the 1880s and 1890s they made several trips together in the South of France: landscapes, still lifes, portraits of their entourage or even nudes constituted common fields of experimentation for the two painters. The observation of the model and nature, combined with the aspiration to release a timeless essence of their subject, allows them to embody a form of classic modernity. Cézanne/Renoir presents 50 masterpieces by the two painters from the collections of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Musée d’Orsay, tracing their life and work.

More than any other Impressionist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir defined the treatment of the human figure for his generation, while also portraying the emergent Parisian bourgeois way of life. In this volume, Renoir’s painting After the Luncheon, which depicts three bourgeois figures enjoying tea, liquor and cigarettes after a meal in a restaurant, serves as the jumping-off point for a far-reaching examination of an important source of inspiration for the painter throughout his life: the Rococo. Considered trivial after the French Revolution, this style of painting, developed over the course of the 18th century, was typified by frivolous gatherings of beautiful, upper-class subjects in pastoral settings and lascivious boudoir scenes. The Rococo style experienced a renaissance in the 19th century and was widely celebrated during Renoir’s lifetime.
Published on the occasion of the Städel Museum’s major exhibition, this beautiful clothbound volume, containing over 300 color images, explores Renoir’s multifaceted connection to a once reviled tradition through illuminating juxtapositions of his art with the 18th-century works of such renowned masters as Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and others.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was a founder of the style that became known as Impressionism, and one of the movement's most prolific members. Described by Herbert Read as “the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau,” Renoir was a connoisseur and champion of feminine beauty. Surviving most of his contemporaries, Renoir lived to see his paintings hung at the Louvre alongside the Old Masters he so revered.

The filmmaker Jean Renoir, son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, described how his father “looked at flowers, women and clouds in the sky as other men touch and caress.” Impressionism is generally conceived of as purely visual, an optical exploration of light-dappled surfaces and shifting colors. Renoir: Intimacy instead focuses on the central role of tactile sensations in Renoir’s canvases.

In all the different phases of his long career, working in a variety of genres (including group scenes, portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes), Renoir powerfully evoked the sense of touch. Renoir: Intimacy reveals the ways Renoir made use of the tactile qualities of volume, material and texture as a vehicle to depict intimacy in its different forms—from social intimacy among family and friends, to the erotic—and how that imagery is viscerally connected to the sensuality of the artist’s brushstroke and the physical surfaces of his paintings. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, this gorgeous volume includes more than 75 works by the artist, loaned from museums and private collections worldwide.