Renoir Drawings Raises a Question: Did Even Renoir Think His Drawings Were Important? 

Plus, a great Caravaggio and Bellini as special guests

E nough of America’s 250th, for a while at least. I’m writing today about my visit to the Morgan Library, much loved and always worth visiting, since its Renoir Drawings exhibition closes on February 8. The weeks have gotten away from me, as time tends to do, and this exhibition, though a so-so show, has some stellar things to see.

I can’t call Renoir Drawings a dud. On the one hand, it’s the first exhibition dedicated to Renoir’s drawings since 1921. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) is a giant among the renegades, soon called the Impressionists, who convulsed the Paris art world in the 1870s with new ideas on color, subject, brushstroke, and selling art. At the Clark Art Institute, where I was a curator for years, all four of us curators had to know a lot about Renoir, though my field was American art. Renoir is central, specifically Renoir from the late 1870s to, say, 1884. I love his work. The introductory essay of the Morgan catalogue tells us that Renoir was said to have paid so little attention to his drawings that he used them to stoke the fire in his home. Whether his friends and servants attested to this or not, we’re assured it isn’t true. But looking at some of the drawings in the show, I wonder. Renoir Drawings is an overview rather than a deep dive. I left the exhibition and the book thinking that an opportunity might have been missed. There might be not much of a there, there.

It’s a workmanlike show. It looks beautiful and unfolds coherently, with sections on early drawings, drawings related to two paintings — Dance in the Country and The Great Bathers — and portraits, nudes, figure studies, and red chalk drawings. It’s a mix, too, of preparatory drawings, scribbles to keep his hands and mind busy, lithographs, finished pastel portraits, finished portrait drawings, watercolors, and paintings.

Renoir started his career as a porcelain painter, a launch I love since it anticipates his expertise in everyday bourgeois pleasures like pretty girls, flowers, food, sunny cityscapes, and fancy as well as casual parties. His specialty is pleasure. Eating and drinking from porcelain is one of life’s essential pleasures, like using silver utensils rather than stainless steel or plastic. We don’t know why exactly, but drawing doesn’t seem to have figured in his practice from his early days as an artist until the late 1870s. He started his paintings not with pencil or crayon but with oil paint. He composed spontaneously.

Renoir Drawings is in two big temporary exhibition galleries nicely divided into spaces with freestanding walls. Centering the two galleries is a commodious hall with comfy sofas and the introductory panel, all symmetrical and sensible. It’s telling that in both of these galleries, the central work of art, what I call the vista shot that pulls us into the space, isn’t a drawing but a painting. So much for the importance of drawing in Renoir’s work, but they’re blockbusters so I’ll live in the moment.

Renoir’s Dance in the Country, from 1883, is a life-size, full-length depiction of a bourgeois couple at a ball. It’s the zenith of the pleasure picture. We don’t see the man’s face fully, but he’s handsome enough and attentive. She’s not knockout gorgeous, but she’s pretty enough and loving her moment. It’s from the Musée d’Orsay, so Americans don’t see it often.

Next to the painting, and owned by the Yale University Art Gallery, are four works on paper associated with Dance in the Country. They’re nothing to write home about except for a brown, blue, and black wash drawing with some pencil. The couple’s clothes have a nice “swoosh” quality. It’s a work in progress, with Renoir adding a floating chorus of disembodied heads of the woman, experimenting with the irregularities of her face. Renoir and the model, Aline Charigot, later married. Clearly, he adored her.

The Great Bathers faces Dance in the Country in the opposite gallery, with the commodious hall between them, so the two paintings bookend the show. There’s a logic dilemma when two paintings bookend, or anchor, a drawings show, but I’m a logical thinker — so few among my art history cohorts are. The Great Bathers is from the Philadelphia Art Museum and has to be Renoir’s tribute to Rubens and Titian.

These gals never stop at two pork chops. Painted between 1884 and 1887, it’s part of a big shift for Renoir. In 1881 and 1882, Renoir traveled to Italy, where he learned to love Raphael especially at the Farnesina villa, the Chigi family’s hot pillow pad for romance. His subsequent work became more rigorous and sculptural, his figures less gauzy and more solid and contoured. He found he needed to draw to get from concept to canvas. Sterling and Francine Clark, whose core collection sets the taste at the Clark Museum, liked gauzy, evoking as it did soft, malleable flesh and food and scenes that dissolved in warm, sunny weather. Nearly all the Clark Renoirs come from before his Italian trip. To us of the Clark ilk, late Renoir was something to be deplored, but I’ve grown to like his late nudes, massive women I collectively call Big Bertha. Many of the drawings in the show are from Renoir’s Big Bertha years.

The drawings in this section are in red chalk, which Renoir liked for its soft, easily blended quality, good for warm flesh tones and for its powerful linear quality. Nothing conveys contours better than red chalk. The red chalk Great Bathers drawings pack a startling punch. No one expects something so big and raw from Renoir. Nearby is Renoir’s red-and-white chalk drawing of Auguste Rodin from 1914. It’s another reason to see Renoir Drawings, which, overall, doesn’t have much of a compelling theme. Renoir was commissioned to do the Rodin drawing to illustrate the frontispiece of a monograph on the sculptor. It’s fine and visceral, and it tells me that Renoir had an alternative career in him as an illustrator. Renoir — quoted in the label — said he thought he’d captured “a face in which there is both something of Jupiter and a managing director!” That’s quite a comment that could use some elaboration. I’ve puzzled over it and can see what he means, I think, but I know a bit about Rodin. Most visitors would, I suspect, be totally stumped. In any event, it’s a great drawing. From the early 1900s into the 1920s, Sargent did hundreds of charcoal portrait drawings revealing a niche talent that Renoir had as well and ought to have been developed. Did he do more? Neither the show nor the catalogue tells us. The catalogue is too clinical to excite us about Renoir. Sucking the juice out of him, of all artists, takes special talent.

There are other highlights. Renoir’s pastel portraits are very good. Portrait of a Girl (Elisabeth Maître), from 1879, from the Albertina Museum in Vienna, is sweet. His 1880 pastel of Cézanne is arresting. What a head. Madeleine Adam, from 1887, belongs to Diane “Dede” Wilsey, the San Francisco socialite, philanthropist, and museum impresario I admire. Both Adam and Wilsey have sass. Mary Cassatt’s pastels, alas, would blow Renoir’s out of the water. Renoir’s watercolors are pretty, too, iridescent and petits riens — little nothings — that stay with us. Overall, Renoir Drawings is a little of this, a little of that, with a modest catalogue and without conviction that drawing meant very much to the artist. Preparatory drawings, lithographs — a medium that emulates drawing — pastel portraits, field-study watercolors, and illustrations are all drawing categories, but I don’t get the feeling that Renoir was more than a dabbler in any of them. Now, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Degas were masters in drawing.

The Morgan Library had two other art events: a small, one-gallery but proper show called Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” in Focus, and the other a one-off display of Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà, from around 1470, also called Dead Christ Supported by Angels. Owned by the Museo Della Citta in Rimini in Italy, the Pietà is a lovely painting that’s making a special guest appearance at the Morgan.

Rimini is in Emilia Romagna in northeastern Italy, just south of Ravenna, and visited for its Adriatic beaches. It’s an ancient city. The via Flaminia, one of imperial Rome’s main roads, ended there. Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, doomed lovers, inspired Dante, among others, and lived there. Federico Fellini was born in Rimini. During World War II, the Brits and Canadians bombed the fettuccini out of it.

The painting looks fantastic. It’s in an awkward place — tucked in what was once J. P. Morgan’s office — and ought to be seen near seating so visitors can contemplate. It’s there, though, and Bellinis aren’t a dime a dozen. With Carpaccio, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, Bellini (c. 1430–1516) occupies the tippity top in Venetian Renaissance painting. His Virgins and Jesuses are serene and surreal, his forms a balancing act between solids and voids. Living in Venice, with its unique shimmer of sky, water, and mosaics, Bellini understood atmosphere as diaphanous. In New York, the Frick owns Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert, and the Met owns two or three Virgin pictures and one of a row of saints, but the Rimini Pietà is different. The dead Jesus is carnal and very present. He’s got an expansive swimmer’s build — think Michael Phelps — and needs four putti to prop him up.

Venice Heritage paid for the restoration, which was done in the United States. It’s an American nonprofit that raises money for art conservation in Venice. The interior designer Peter Marino chairs its board and was given the chance to send the Pietà to an American museum on its way back to Italy. To the Morgan it went. After the Republic of Venice fell in 1797, the French and Austrians pillaged its churches, guilds, palaces, and other repositories of art, but they left a lot, too, which today needs upkeep and restoration. Rainerio di Lodovico Migliorati, one of the Malatesta family lawyers, probably commissioned the Pietà. It’s displayed with some of Morgan’s other Italian things, but too much nonchalance is a bad thing. Once it goes back to Rimini, few will see it. Art tourists don’t get there, and summer tourists tend to be Austrians and Germans looking for sand, sun, and surf.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about an exhibition in St. Petersburg, Fla., of the collection of Roberto Longhi, the dead Italian art historian. Boy Bitten by a Lizard, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was in the show. Getting a Caravaggio to Florida was a coup, as is the loan of Boy with a Basket of Fruit, painted around 1595 and now owned by the Galeria Borghese in Rome. The Morgan Library worked with the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture, an American nonprofit that facilitates collaborations between Italian and American museums. The Caravaggio is displayed in a small gallery on the beaten track between the café, elevator, ticket booth, and entrance to Morgan’s library. Having gotten the promise of the Borghese loan, the Morgan added things from its own collection and borrowed a few objects to create an in-focus show with the Caravaggio as a uniting theme.

Caravaggio is a Lombard painter by birth and early training, and still lifes had a place of honor in the Lombardy of his youth. The boy’s basket of fruit is a lovely still life, but the peaches and pears have brown spots, bugs have gotten to the grape leaves, and pomegranates and figs spill their seeds from splits. Caravaggio’s model is a still life, too. He’s fresh and young, but isn’t the way of all flesh in his crystal valley, too? He’s neither saint nor sinner nor prince but a model, or Caravaggio’s latest sweet young thing. Leonardo da Vinci spent much of his career in Milan in Lombardy poking holes in the walls between genres. So, too, did Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose Four Seasons in One Head is fabulous and fun.

The gallery is very well done. Soon the Caravaggio will be back in Rome. Visitors here will have gotten a taste of the artist’s bad-boy James Dean phase but will also have learned that Milan figures in Italian art as does Rome, Florence, and Venice.

New York got a foot of snow on Sunday, touted as the snowpocalypse of the century, and the museum closed before the first flakes fell. Most every museum in Manhattan stayed open. The Winter Show at the Armory, my topic for this past Saturday and for this coming Saturday, was open. New York has had a dozen worse snowstorms, and the storm was on a Sunday, when traffic is at its lightest. Snow happens. Home in Vermont, I went to church, though, for me, it’s a two-minute drive. I would have kept the Morgan open. Walking around Manhattan in the snow is a beguiling experience. Adding a museum visit only makes for more delight.

I never noticed the Morgan Library’s “Living Land Acknowledgment,” but it’s there, front and center, and a parody of the library’s collection, staff, programs, and history, and also of the Lenape, the Natives who lived in Manhattan, New Jersey, and the Hudson River Valley and sold what became New York City to the Dutch for $24 in tools, beads, and textiles. Borrowing Hamas-speak, the library recognizes “the violent history of settler colonialism.” Who, what, where, and how are left a mystery, a hallucination. The Morgan commits to “confronting this legacy.” I see that it did one little show in 2023, planting corn, squash, and beans in the library garden in memory of Nora Thompson Dean, a Lenape herbalist. Other than this, its land acknowledgment seems performative — an empty, feel-good gesture. Knowing many staffers at the library, I suspect they think about the Lenape for zero seconds a day. It’s so fake.