Our class took a field trip to the Detroit Institute of the Arts last month so we could select an object or painting for the subject of a five-page paper.
I usually wait until I get my grade before I post these, but because I think Linda will find this moderately irritating, and that's always fun, I decided to go for it:
After glimpsing her out of the corner of my eye, I was smitten and hurriedly pushed past my classmates to get closer. She did not disappoint; easily trouncing the competing reclining nude in the opposite corner of the room, as well as “Chair from the Argyle Street Tea Room” by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to become my Art Appreciation class paper subject. Considering my appreciation of nudes, woodworking background and long love affair with all things Art Nouveau, makes their defeat by Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Woman in an Armchair”, 1874, all the more remarkable.
There is always a certain something about a woman that attracts a man. Thirty-two years ago, it was my wife-to-be’s captivating smile that compelled my securing an introduction and her telephone number, despite the presence of her date at the bar at the time. While “Woman” isn’t smiling, she has an intriguing look of pensive wistfulness that remains timelessly captivating. Every man has seen this look on the face of a woman he loves; grandmother, mother, sister, lover, wife or girlfriend. How a man comes to terms with this look reveals aspects of his character. Perhaps some will find this museum-induced introspection uncomfortable; I find it an emotional delight and a call for compassion.
I’ll check my emotions long enough to examine her more closely. Her demure eyes do not meet mine because she’s angled her head into the “you-don’t-understand-leave-me-alone-but-not-really” position, so common of women her age. The layers of jadedness built to protect emotions from the speed bumps of life hasn’t begun its dulling prophylactic effect, it’s much too early. Moderated anger from hurt is leaving her eyes and resurfacing as blush in her cheeks. No one has informed her eyebrows that their lack of furrowing is betraying the efforts of rest of the face; their lift conveys a glimmer of hope. A scowl would send me away; she doesn’t want that.
Her lips are nearly a straight line; melancholia is smothering the potential pout of an extended lower lip. Her folded arms across her waist concur and attempt to substantiate the façade her face portends. She wants commiseration and consolation; I have plenty of both and a hunger to apply them.
Her hair is pulled back and held up away from her face and shoulders, allowing a lovely ear to play peek-a-boo. Those shoulders, angled incongruently to her head, are doing the pouting disallowed by the unbending lips. Renoir makes the light dance delicately across her neck, collarbones, breasts and upper arms, perfectly illuminating their gentle undulations. The difference in lighting from above her delicate bodice compared to below is noticeable and a deliberate and successful effort by Renoir to concentrate the viewer’s attention upward. He may have been too successful in drawing the viewer away from the face.
That wispy bodice seems nearly an afterthought by Renoir, as though the Renaissance propriety police from several centuries earlier had somehow possessed his brush from their graves, ordering over-painting modesty as they did in their own time. Renoir resisted as much as he could; another quarter-inch in any direction and her nipples would be indelicately exposed. With her shoulders uncovered, should she rise quickly from her chair, gravity would place an appreciative smile upon the face of mankind.
This flirtation with nudity is acceptable for entrance into the French Impressionist salon shows at the time, but is a precursor of Renoir’s greater fame to come, when he abandons Impressionism, becoming a painter of nudes nearer the end of his career.
Renoir has not seated his lovely beauty in an armchair by chance. A painting titled “Woman on a Bench” or “Woman on a Stool” would not have had the embracing arms and back of a chair to comfort her in this time of reflection and rest. The back of the chair rises to cradle the middle of her head, allowing and embracing the languid repose of the upper body. Despite its critical role in the painting, Renoir keeps the details of the chair and background muted and almost fuzzy, directing our attention to the meditative subject.
The varying shades of blue in the upper right corner seem to amplify the mood of the painting, the streak of white between and the yellow behind the blue respectively, suggest sunlight and happier times struggling to peek through the gloom. A trace of this embattled light surmounts the top of the chair to grace her left temple and brow.
Billowing blackness unfurls in the opposite diagonal corner, her folded arms keeping its rise in check. This anchoring darkness may have been an influence of the Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix, a contemporary of Renoir’s, but definitely not an Impressionist himself.
To place this painting in context, it is important to know what was happening in the life of Renoir at the time of its creation. Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, Cexanne, Sisley, Bethe Morisot, Degas and other Salon-successful artists formed a joint stock company for the purpose of exhibiting outside the rigidity of the Salon system. Their exhibition opened on April 15, 1874, the same year this painting was completed.
The ensuing reviews in the press were critical of the works as well as the monopoly of the Salons, with many writers derisively describing the artist’s work as “impressionist”. The artists embraced the term and “Impressionism” was born.
The exhibition was not financially successful, despite good attendance and Renoir was given the responsibility to liquidate the company to pay debts. He accomplished this through a public auction of their works. The public auction gained enough publicity to help Renoir land several good commissions, one that was to copy Delacroix’s Jewish Wedding in the Louvre for industrialist Jean Dolifuss. The second Impressionist exhibition was held in April, 1876.
The local color of an object affecting another is clearly exemplified throughout “Woman in an Armchair” and is one of the main tenants of Impressionism as is the effects of color and light reflections on objects. Renoir’s later works, such as The Skiff with its deep and bright tones, takes Impressionism to its logical conclusion.
Through his work, Renoir tributes the masters of the Rococo period throughout his career. In the 1880’s, his reassessment of his art included giving nude women a more prominent position. “Woman in an Armchair” is perhaps an omen of things to come, for nearing the end of his life, including a brief fling with sculpture, Renoir’s subjects are predominantly women. All of Renoir’s biographers agree his best work came when surrounded by women. Many suggest Renoir was attempting to ‘civilize’ these women by turning them into art.
“Woman in an Armchair” perfectly demonstrates the beginning of the Impressionist movement, drawing from the universality of the classics yet capturing the incidental moment central to the tenants of Impressionism. This genius is measured by the test of time. A Mozart symphony is as fresh and relevant today as the day the notes were laid to paper a hundred years before Renoir’s era. Renoir has captured emotions in a spectacular yet understated style with oil and canvass that Mozart captured and released with music. Mozart and Renoir were both fortunate in earning public recognition and fortune from their work. Other great painters, such as Post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh, spent a brief life unrecognized and unrewarded financially. Historically, time and fate have a way of superceding contemporary tastes and giving genius, like that of Renoir, its due.
Joe
P.S.:
I better take a class on how this is going to make me more money in the countertop business.