Renoir at The Frick: Go See “Dance at Bougival” (original) (raw)

The Frick Collection has given over its East Room—normally digs for Goya, Chardin, Lorrain, et al.—to nine tall paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. All but the home-team “La Promenade” (1875-76)—delicious mom, darling daughters—are loans from other museums. The swoonily colorful, brushy array, on walls covered in rosy velvet, is a must-see, perhaps especially if, like me, you are generally allergic to Renoir’s charms. The genre of full-length painting, infrequent for him, lends spine, if not stateliness, to a style that can put me in mind of a slobbery puppy: rather too confidently irresistible. Down, boy!

Renoir mostly couldn’t be bothered with impressing, so hell-bent was he to please. But he was obliged to smarten up by the vertical format, which had served since the Baroque, usually for portraits, as a vehicle of elegance in subject matter and decorative function. Renoir updated it with the Impressionist generation’s avidity for common amusements of modern life—on the street, in the cheerfully crowded “The Umbrellas” (circa 1881-85), or onstage, in energetic portraits of an actress and a ballet dancer. Though still presenting a high sugar content, the quaff is relatively fresh and cool.

Two much-reproduced touchstones pay New York welcome visits. One is great: from the Chicago Art Institute, “Two Little Circus Girls” (1879), gathering the reward of oranges tossed by spectators. Besides loveliness, it displays a rousing precision of physical attitude, abnormal for a flesh-besotted artist who, as a rule, was only vaguely cognizant of muscles and bones. The second is my favorite Renoir: “Dance at Bougival” (1883), a treasure of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts so familiar that you may think you know it well. But look long and hard. It towers above the rest of the show—by a fraction of an inch, in nearly six-foot height, and by a mile, in quality. What happens in the picture and what happens in the paint goad each other to transcendence.

Outdoors, an aggressively ardent chap in a straw hat and workman blue whirls a surrenderingly gratified young woman in a red bonnet and a pinkish ensemble with red piping and, below, a fume of white petticoat. The woman is Suzanne Valadon, the model and artist who mothered (by Renoir, a never proved rumor had it) Maurice Utrillo. Her delicate air of desire-suspended intelligence is even more exceptional than skeletal structure in Renoir’s perceptions of women. The background is, again unusually for him, strongly engaged and engaging: people making merry in blue-green boskiness. Necessarily hung high, to clear the East Room’s wainscoting, the painting presents its bottom to eye level: a floor littered with a cigarette butts, burnt matches, and a fallen posy, likely of violets. I couldn’t get enough of that slangy detritus, which makes a sexy picture sexier. It contributes smells to an easeful delirium of summer heat, in which unheard but palpable music suffuses the couple’s erotic trance.

“Bougival” is flanked with two other dancing pairs, painted in the same year: “Dance in the City” and “Dance in the Country,” both from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. They aren’t as good. Though also snugly body-to-body, the figures are upstaged, as amorous characters, by the chic of their surroundings and clothing (even as, in “Country,” Valadon’s bonnet has an encore along with her partner’s hat, which is now on the floor for some reason). The civil side of social dancing’s civil Eros prevails. The backgrounds feel arbitrary, as usual with Renoir. He started his career in crafts including the decoration of porcelains. He tended to ignore the formal problem of anchoring a composition in the corners of a canvas. (Compare Monet, who pulled his surfaces taut in all directions, and Degas, with his diagonally oriented spaces.) That slackness disappoints me in Renoir more than his art’s occasional, oft-disparaged suggestion of candy boxes. Who doesn’t like candy boxes? When good enough, this beamish artist affords even the sternest taste a holiday.