Renoir and Love Hailed as Year's Happiest Exhibition — SkimNews
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- The "Renoir and Love" exhibition at the National Gallery showcases Pierre-Auguste Renoir's (1841-1919) paintings of leisure, lunches, and romance, with the reviewer declaring it "the happiest exhibition of the year" and arguing Renoir was "the most radical of the impressionists" — countering perceptions of him as soppy or kitsch
- Featured works include Dance at Bougival (1883), After the Luncheon, The Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise, and the Musée d'Orsay's lent masterpiece Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, alongside The Skiff, View of Bougival, Place Clichy, and The Promenade (1876)
- David Hockney previously told the reviewer about cigarette butts and broken clay-pipes littering the ground beneath the swirling skirts in Dance at Bougival, real-life debris the reviewer cites as evidence Renoir's dance floors were "real, messy, joyful places," not fantasies
- Curators cite a Maupassant story to suggest The Skiff, in which one woman rows another on glittering water, may depict a lesbian scene — part of a broader pattern in which Renoir, like Maupassant and Zola, portrays women as autonomous characters, including in cinematic-style close-ups like Place Clichy
- The National Gallery acknowledges Renoir's later career shift by including The Great Bathers, his anti-impressionist nude indulgence, though the reviewer judges it inferior to his early work, where "almost every lunch, rowing party and stroll in the park feels like a languid set-up for what will follow"
- Jean Renoir, the artist's film-director son, revisited his father's world with "the sadness of hindsight" in his screen recreation of an impressionist picnic, Partie de Campagne — a contrast the reviewer draws to the punishment-free happiness in Pierre-Auguste's own canvases
Why it matters: By placing early masterpieces alongside the late nude The Great Bathers, the National Gallery exhibition forces a reassessment of Renoir's full career arc — from revolutionary chronicler of modern Parisian pleasure to indulgent late stylist — and challenges the long-standing view of him as impressionism's soft touch. The reviewer frames the show as evidence that Renoir's embrace of enjoying life in the moment was itself a radical artistic philosophy, not decorative escapism.
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