National Gallery’s Renoir and Love leaves Times critic unmoved

The latest:

The National Gallery’s Renoir and Love exhibition has drawn a scathing verdict from The Times, whose chief art critic Laura Freeman wrote that she tried to warm to the show and left more convinced than ever that Pierre-Auguste Renoir was formulaic and given to potboiling. Across six rooms, she wrote, the total effect is stupefying.

Details:

• The verdict: Freeman wrote that six rooms of Renoir confirmed her worst suspicions and added more: scenes drowned in crème de cassis, puddingy nudes, a sense of surfeit and irresolution. She asked why the men must smirk and why the women are so vague.
• The title: Freeman argued the National Gallery undercut any attempt to shed Renoir’s treacly, sentimental image by naming the show Renoir and Love, then installing a sound system playing tweeting birds, splashing oars and crickets in the grass.
• The comparisons: She ranked Renoir below his contemporaries on their own ground: James Tissot the better storyteller, Monet the greater painter of light and nature, Degas the man for cafes and operas. The overall experience, she wrote, resembled course after course of French custard flan.
• The exception: Freeman singled out one figure for praise, the girl reading a book on the sofa in Children’s Afternoon at Wargemont, dated 1884, describing her as a convincing clever-clogs daughter of around seven. Most of Renoir’s children, she wrote, are inert and stripped of mischief.
• The Umbrellas: The National Gallery’s own Renoir, The Umbrellas, dated around 1881 to 1886, fared worse in company than Freeman expected. Striking from a distance, she wrote, it runs like pavement chalk in a downpour up close: clumsy hands, vacant expressions, confusion of outline.
• A revised judgement: Freeman withdrew part of an earlier review. Having called the Royal Academy’s Bathers Playing with a Crab “particularly revolting” in its Riviera show, she now rates it a model of restraint next to The Great Bathers, dated around 1887, in the National Gallery display.
• The heist: Freeman opened by citing this month’s theft of two Renoir paintings from the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer, with two more dropped during the getaway. Her puzzle was not the culprit or the method but the motive, given Cézannes at Aix-en-Provence.
• Not hard-hearted: Pre-empting the charge of coldness, Freeman noted she had been soppy over Berthe Morisot’s painting of her daughter on the beach at Nice in the Royal Academy’s Riviera show. The exhibition’s interpretation, she wrote, is valiant in trawling the paintings for interest.

Background:

Renoir, who died in 1919, is among the most reproduced impressionists, and the National Gallery owns The Umbrellas through the Sir Hugh Lane bequest. The Musée Renoir sits in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where the artist spent his final years.

Between the lines:

The review’s sharpest line is technical rather than tonal: Freeman’s claim that Renoir often looks better in reproduction than in the flesh. It reframes his popularity as a function of the poster and the postcard, and explains why a painting she thought she liked, The Umbrellas, lost ground once hung among dozens of others. That argument, if accepted, is harder for a gallery to answer than a complaint about sentimentality.

What’s next

Whether other London critics break with The Times verdict as reviews of Renoir and Love accumulate, and whether the National Gallery keeps the birdsong-and-oars soundtrack in place. The Cagnes-sur-Mer theft investigation remains open.