"The most beautiful Renoir exhibition I've ever seen opens in the Fine Arts"

The Museum of Fine Arts' Renoir - The Painter and His Models exhibition, which can be visited from Friday, presents the life of one of the most famous masters of French Impressionism through about seventy works.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was an artist of the joy of life, his palette did not darken even in the most difficult periods, said the director general of the Museum of Fine Arts at the press launch of the exhibition. László Baán emphasized: for the first time, a large-scale exhibition covering the entire oeuvre of Pierre-Auguste Renoir is opening in Hungary, but a similar exhibition is rare anywhere in the world.

As he recalled, with the support of the government, in 2019, Renoir's painting entitled Reclining Female Nude (Gabrielle) was purchased as the museum's most valuable acquisition of the last hundred years. The work, painted in 1903, is part of a series of three pieces, so the idea was raised that it should be presented together with its two other pieces - for the first time in the world - he noted.

In cooperation with the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Musée de l'Orangerie, not only these two paintings were loaned to the Budapest exhibition:

a total of around 70 Renoir works from more than 20 public collections will be on display at the Szépművészeti, he announced.

Cécile Girardeau and Paul Perrin, the French curators of the exhibition, highlighted:

Fine Arts has collected the best works of Renoir's long career. The selection focuses on the depiction of the master's figure, showing how Renoir was the most original among the Impressionists.

In addition, the exhibition also clearly shows Renoir's relationship with tradition: although he was an innovative painter, he looked up to his great predecessors and considered himself the last link in a long tradition. During his six-decade career, he experimented with many techniques, they recalled.

"The most beautiful Renoir exhibition I've ever seen is opening at the Fine Arts", Paul Perrin praised the exhibition on view from Friday until January 7, 2024.

Anna Zsófia Kovács, the Hungarian curator of the exhibition, drew attention to the fact that Renoir is rightly considered one of the greatest figures of Impressionism,

the Fine Arts Exhibition presents the painter's early, pre-Impressionist works as well as his later, more classicizing works.

The first unit examines Renoir's portraits, starting with one of the master's few self-portraits. Renoir's portraits feature fellow artists and their relatives, such as Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet, Madame Monet and William Sisley, as well as many well-known figures of Parisian and European social life of the time, from the actress Jeanne Samary to Richard Wagner.

The landscape and still life section traces the development of Impressionism on Renoir's canvases.

Masterpieces such as La Grenouillere or The Swing, the landscapes and the sketch evoking the whirlwind of the Moulin de la Galette all prove that Renoir's focus was on capturing the beauty of modern life, social situations and flirting on the one hand, and capturing the effects of light in a new way on the other hand - said Zsófia Anna Kovács.

As he added, the more graphic painting style of Country Dance, which is also considered one of his main works, already points to the later, more classical era, which really developed after Renoir's tour of Italy and the founding of his family.

With the birth of her children, motherhood, family scenes and children's portraits, the tranquility of the home and intimate interiors became the painter's favorite subjects. He offered a composition with an intimate atmosphere for his first state order. He painted the scene capturing the girls playing the piano in several versions, two of which can be seen side by side in Szépművészeti.

A separate unit presents Renoir's nudes, recalling through a porcelain candlestick from 1857 that the later master began his career as a vase painter at a young age.

Visitors can meet high-quality examples of Renoir's rare men as well as rare impressionist nudes, but the main attraction of the room is the reclining nude purchased by Szépművészeti four years ago and its two pairs.

It is little known that the elderly Renoir partially turned to sculpture in the 1910s, although he already needed help to cast his designs in bronze. Two of his twenty completed sculptures (the Victorious Venus and the Washerwoman) can be seen in the exhibition.

The Bathers, completed in 1919, is Renoir's last masterpiece, which can also be considered the summation of his life's work, and the master worked for a long time even in his last months, said Anna Zsófia Kovács.

The final room of the exhibition recalls Renoir's works previously kept in Hungarian private collections and presented at exhibitions in Budapest, but visitors can also watch a film about the old master. The exhibition The Painter and His Models will be on display at the Museum of Fine Arts from Friday until January 7, 2024.

MTI

Cover image: A visitor looks at Renoir's painting After Lunch at the press launch of an exhibition of the French Impressionist master's many masterpieces at the Museum of Fine Arts on September 21, 2023. For the first time in Hungary, a comprehensive exhibition presenting the life of Pierre-Auguste Renoir titled Renoir - The Painter and his Models, which can be viewed until January 7, opens. MTI/Robert Hegedüs