Renoir Quotes

The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.

He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting. –--Manet to Monet, on Renoir---

The pain passes, but the beauty remains.

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.

I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.

Love them all," said Renoir. "That is the secret, young man. Love them all." The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. "Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.

The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.

The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.

One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity.

'Paint only what you see,' his hero Millet had admonished. 'Imagination is a burden to a painter,' Auguste Renoir had told him. 'Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.' Ah, but what they hadn't said, hadn't warned him about, was how much you could see.

There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more.

We are in a period of searchers rather than of creators.

You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

I like a girl with a substantial bottom,' said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred.

A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.

-last words about painting, age 78... I think I'm beginning to learn something about it.

It's with my brush that I make love.

Everyone has his reasons." Octave (Jean Renoir) in "The Rules of the Game.

Discernment gives you the ability to both appreciate the subtle beauty of a Renoir and spot a fake.

If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.

حيٌ هو كل من يمكنه أن يختار الكفّ عن العيش

We must not make exaggerated demand on critics, and particularly we must not expect that criticism can function as an exact science. Art is not scientific; why should criticism be? The main complaint against some critics--and a certain type of criticism--is that too seldom do they speak about cinema as such. The scenario of a film is the film; all films are not psychological. Every critic should take to heart Jean Renoir's remark, "All great art is abstract." He should learn to be aware of form, and to understand that certain artists, for example Dreyer or Von Sternberg, never sought to make a picture that resembled reality.

You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.

She looks like a Renoir, pale and glowing and mysterious against the midnight-dark canvas of my clerical black.

I like big butts,” Renoir explained to Toulouse-Lautrec.

What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.

There is only now, today, this present moment, this point in time. Waiting for 'someday' is, like striving for perfection, really just an excuse. 'Someday' is a concept that, to quote my mentor, Jean Renoir 'exists only in the mind, not in reality.

(All those paintings of women, in art galleries, surprised at private moments. Nymph Sleeping. Susanna and the Elders. Woman bathing, one foot in a tin tub - Renoir, or was it Degas? both, both women plump. Diana and her maidens, a moment before they catch the hunter's prying eyes. Never any paintings called Man Washing Socks in Sink.)

The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.

The more they measure, the more they realize how much the Greeks departed from regular and banal lines in order to produce their effect.

We do not exist through ourselves alone but through the environment that shaped us.

Of course, compared to these two illustrious masters, Renoir and Ford, I am no more than a little chick.

يمكن للقراءة أن تصبح آفة أسوأ من الكحول والمورفين. لا ينبغي أن تتخم بالكتب، لكن لو فعلت هذا، عليك عندئذ أن تقرأ الأعمال العظيمة فقط. الكتّاب العظام يقربوننا من الطبيعة، أما الرومنتيكيون فيبعدوننا عنها. الأمر المثالي هو أن يقرأ المرء كتابا واحداً فقط طيلة حياته. اليهود فعلوا ذلك بإخلاصهم للكتاب المقدس، والعرب مع القرآن.

The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forst, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men's dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die.

He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.

The foundation of all civilization is loitering.

We'll be fine’, Pierre-Auguste Renoir said assertively. ‘We are good artist; we know that. Remember what Baudelaire said before he died: "Nothing can be done except little by little." That is what we are doing, it is not big, but it is something!

I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime; honours shower upon me from every side; artists pay me compliments on my work; there are many people to whom my position must seem enviable…. But I don’t seem to have a single real friend!

He said to me one day in the second week of July, “Asher Lev, there are two ways of painting the world. In the whole history of art, there are only these two ways. One is the way of Greece and Africa, which sees the world as a geometric design. The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower. Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso paint the world as geometry. Van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Chagall paint the world as a flower.

By the time she was their age, she’d seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmullers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the René Clairs, all the Wim Wenderses, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars.

All great art is abstract.

There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth.

The most skilled hand is never anything but the servant of the mind.

I like big butts," Renoir explained to Toulouse-Lautrec.

Tínhamos o teatro (Griffith), a poesia (Murnau), a pintura (Rossellini), a dança (Eisenstein), a música (Renoir). Mas doravante temos o cinema. E o cinema é Nicholas Ray.

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. —PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn’t starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn’t have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings.

There are two kinds of directors; those who have the public in mind when they conceive and make their films and those who don't consider the public at all. For the former, cinema is an art of spectacle; for the latter, it is an individual adventure. There is nothing intrinsically better about one or the other; it's simply a matter of different approaches. For Hitchcock as for Renoir, as for that matter almost all American directors, a film has not succeeded unless it is a success, that is, unless it touches the public that one has had in mind right from the moment of choosing the subject matter to the end of production. While Bresson, Tati, Rossellini, Ray make films their own way and then invite the public to join the "game," Renoir, Clouzot, Hitchcock and Hawks make movies for the public, and ask themselves all the questions they think will interest their audience. Alfred Hitchcock, who is a remarkably intelligent man, formed the habit early--right from the start of his career in England--of predicting each aspect of his films. All his life he has worked to make his own tastes coincide with the public', emphasizing humor in his English period and suspense in his American period. This dosage of humor and suspense has made Hitchcock one of the most commercial directors in the world (his films regularly bring in four times what they cost). It is the strict demands he makes on himself and on his art that have made him a great director.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

(All those paintings of women, in art galleries, surprised at private moments. Nymph Sleeping. Susanna and the Elders. Woman Bathing, one foot in a tin tub – Renoir, or was it Degas? Both, both women plump. Diana and her maidens, a moment before they catch the hunter’s prying eyes. Never any paintings called Man Washing Socks in Sink.)

His nudes and his roses declared to men of this century, already deep in their task of destruction, the stability of the eternal balance of nature.

Among seekers of truth, painters perhaps come closest to discovering the secret of the balance of forces of the universe, and hence of man's fulfillment.

I have been for forty years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.

The pain passes,but the beauty remains.

There’s nothing more absurd than a “connoisseur.

The truly terrible thing is, everyone has his reasons

Painters know that material needs are relative; and that the satisfactions of the mind are absolute.

Thought is sequential, successive, one-dimensional, while the real world presents itself as a multidimensional, non-successive, simultaneous pattern of infinite richness and variety; and trying to make the one grasp the other is like trying to appreciate a beautiful landscape by looking through a narrow slit in a fence or trying to take in a Renoir painting by microscope alone.

The spring evenings had grown long, and it was hard to darken the room. They sat in their separate chairs and waited for Fassbinder, their silence a respectful preparation. They had waited this way for their meetings with Truffaut, Bergman, Visconti, Renoir, Wilder, and all the other honored guests that Jonna had chosen and enthroned–the finest present she could give her friend.

Tot ce-i la modă mi-a repugnat întodeauna.Probabil că sufăr de ceea ce am numit egoism artistic,în privinţa artei vreau totul numai pt mine,vreau să-l am singur pe Schopenhauer al meu,pe Pascal al meu,pe Novalis al meu şi pe mult iubitul meu Gogol,vreau să posed numai eu singur aceste produse de artă,aceste agresiuni artistice geniale,vreau să-i am eu singur pe Michelangelo,Renoir,Goya.

Vijfentwintig jaar getrouwd zijn en elkaar nog in de armen vliegen op het perron van de Gare du Nord zoals in een film noir van Jean Renoir. Langs de zee wandelen tot de broekspijpen nat zijn, en dan toch nog in dat chique restaurant gaan eten, en daarom lachen. Elkaar een boek voorlezen. Is dat romantisch? Ja, maar dat is de liefde ook, romantisch. Niet elke dag, maar van tijd tot tijd wel.

I considered that the world, and especially the cinema, was burdened with false gods. My task was to overthrow them. Sword in hand, I was ready to consecrate my life to the task. But the false gods are still there. My perseverance during a half-century of cinema has perhaps helped to topple a few of them. It has likewise helped me to discover that some of the gods were real, and had no need to be toppled.

LONDON. TRINITY TERM one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise longue, staring past her stockinged feet toward the end of the room, toward a partial view of recessed bookshelves by the fireplace and, to one side, by a tall window, a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for fifty pounds. Probably a fake. Below it, centered on a round walnut table, a blue vase. No memory of how she came by it. Nor when she last put flowers in it. The fireplace not lit in a year. Blackened raindrops falling irregularly into the grate with a ticking sound against balled-up yellowing newsprint. A Bokhara rug spread on wide polished floorboards. Looming at the edge of vision, a baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black shine. On the floor by the chaise longue, within her reach, the draft of a judgment.

During his time at VGIK, Tarkovsky and his fellow students studied all aspects of filmmaking, watching the classics of Soviet cinema and taking part in workshops in which they would demonstrate their technical ability. This even included acting; Tarkovsky’s fellow student and friend, Alexander Gordon, remembers him giving a superb performance as the aging Prince Bolkonsky when Romm got the students to perform scenes from War and Peace during their third year at VGIK. Tarkovsky saw many classics from outside the Soviet Union, including Citizen Kane, the films of John Ford and William Wyler, and the works of the fathers of the French New Wave, Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. Tarkovsky developed a personal pantheon that included Bergman, Bunuel, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, Fellini and Antonioni. The only Soviet director who made it into his pantheon was Dovzhenko, although he was good friends with the Georgian director Sergei Parajanov, whom he regarded as ‘a genius in everything’. He also spoke highly of Iosseliani, and, on occasion, of Boris Barnet. But above them all was the towering figure of Robert Bresson, whom Tarkovsky regarded as the ultimate film artist.

Curiously enough, Sanson's assistant disapproved of Dr Guillotin's invention. it had ruined the profession by making it too easy. facility always opens the doors to amateurs. In olden times, in order to cut off a head with the axe, one needed some training in the profession, not to mention a few natural gifts such as a sharp eye and a steady hand. But what merit is there in manipulating a machine which does the whole job for you?

What could be more subtle, for instance, than the instinct which had prompted her to hang on the walls of her drawing-room three paintings, all by Douanier Rousseau? Her guests, on coming into this room, were put at ease by the presence of pictures, and ‘modern’ pictures at that, which they could recognize at first sight. Faced by the work of Seurat, of Matisse, even of Renoir, who knows but that they might hesitate, the name of the artist not rising immediately to their lips? But at the sight of those fantastic foliages, those mouthing monkeys, there could arise no doubt; even the most uncultured could murmur: ‘What gorgeous Rousseaus you have here. I always think it is so wonderful that they were painted by a common customs official – abroad, of course.’ And buoyed up by a feeling of intellectual adequacy, they would thereafter really enjoy themselves.

Absinthe, or wormwood, the liquorice-flavoured, plant-based liqueur, had been popular in France throughout the 19th century. Though the drink was of Swiss origin, heavy tax on import had encouraged H.L. Pernod to start producing it commercially in France at the end of the 18th century.12 It was a tremendous success, and as the 19th century unfolded, its popularity soared. Exceedingly potent, it was closer to a soft drug than a drink. ‘The drunkenness it gives does not resemble any known drunkenness,’ bemoaned Alfred Delvau. ‘It makes you lose your footing right away […] You think you are headed towards infinity, like all great dreamers, and you are only headed towards incoherence.’13 In excess, absinthe could have a fatal effect on the nervous system, and by the time Maria started attending the bars and cafés where it was served, it had become a national curse. A favourite drink among the working classes precisely because of its relative cheapness for the effect produced, absinthe became the scapegoat for a host of social ills, not least the Commune. (...) Absinthe found a dedicated following among artists, writers and poets (including Charles Baudelaire), for whom the liquor became the entrancing ‘green fairy’. Its popularity in these circles was due primarily to its intoxicating effect, but also because its consumption was accompanied by a curious ritual which appealed to quirky individuals with a taste for the extraordinary. To counteract the drink’s inherent bitterness, a sugar lump was placed on a special spoon with a hole in it, which was held above the glass while water was poured over it, with the effect of sweetening the absinthe. Not surprisingly, absinthe flowed freely through the bars and cafés of Montmartre.

The great French diarist Jules Renard (1864-1910) had small interest in non-literary art forms. When Ravel approached him wanting to set five of his Histoires naturelles, Renard couldn’t see the point; he didn’t forbid it, but declined to go to the premiere. He sat through Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and found it a ‘sombre bore’, its plot ‘puerile’. His attitude to painting was a little more responsive: he admired (and knew) Lautrec, and approved of Renoir; but he found Cézanne barbarous and Monet’s waterlilies ‘girly’. This was less philistinism than a robust admission of his own areas of non-response. And he did write one wonderful thing about painting, on 8 January 1908: ‘When I am in front of a picture, it speaks better than I do.’ It is a chastening remark, because most of us, when in front of a picture, do not give the picture time enough to speak. We talk at it, about it, of it, to it; we want to forcibly understand it, get its measure, colonise it, ‘friend’ it. We compare it to other pictures it reminds us of; we read the label on the wall, confirm that it is, say, pastel on monotype, and check which gallery or plutocrat owns it. But unless we are highly trained, we don’t know enough to recognise more than roughly how the picture relates to the history of painting (because it always does, even if negatively). Instead, we hose it with words and move on.

In a form of homage to the Impressionist painters, Proust inserted one into his novel, the fictional Elstir, who shares traits with Renoir, Degas and Manet. In the seaside resort of Balbec, Proust's narrator visits Elstir's studio, where he finds canvasses that, like Monet's Le Havre, challenge the orthodox understanding of what things look like. In Elstir's seascapes, there is no demarcation between the sea and the sky, the sky looks like the sea, the sea like the sky. In a painting of a harbour at Carquehuit, a ship that is out at sea seems to be sailing through the middle of the town, women gathering shrimps among the rocks look as if they were in a marine grotto overhung by ships and waves, a group of holidaymakers in a boat look like they were in a cariole riding up through sunlit fields and down through shady patches. Elstir is not trying his hand at surrealism. If his work seems unusual, it is because he is attempting to paint something of what we actually see when we look around, rather than what we know we see.

Marie-Clémentine’s brushstrokes and charcoal lines were already bolder, more defiant – far less feminine.

If a girl from a poor family like Marie-Clémentine truly wanted to make a living in the art world, there was only one way she could be sure of doing so. She needed to approach the business from the other side of the canvas: she would have to become a model.

So ingrained in the Parisian psyche was the connection between posing and prostitution that artist’s models were frequently referred to as grisettes, the name also used to designate working-class girls who supplemented their income through prostitution

In Paris, a female model could make ten and sometimes up to twenty francs per day, more than a peasant – or a charwoman like Madeleine – could ever dream of earning.

when Marie-Clémentine was spotted, she landed one of the most enviable commissions imaginable. For the artist who first noticed her was none other than the eminent Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Models posed either for parts (the head, a clothed torso, for example), or, more controversially, for l’ensemble – the full (often nude) figure.

Modelling thereby handed her the key to unlock a door which remained firmly bolted to the likes of Morisot, Cassatt and even many lower-class women.

she could take a seat for the evening in the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes. Conveniently located on the Place Pigalle, it was to this café that Édouard Manet and his Impressionist companions had switched allegiance from the Café Guerbois in the 1870s.16 It was also the café whose unremarkable interior Edgar Degas used as the setting for his In the Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–1876).

But in the middle of 1882, when Maria was sixteen, she was offered a modelling assignment with an artist who far overshadowed Zandomeneghi. It was then that Maria was recommended to Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

American painter Elizabeth Nourse had actually been invited to join the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and by the mid-1890s had become a regular participant at the group’s annual salons, where she had earned herself a prodigious reputation.6 But Nourse had been born into a highly respectable Catholic family from Cincinnati.

Suzanne was resolutely working-class and had never set foot in an art school or atelier in any other capacity than as a model. Degas and Bartholomé could feel rightly proud.

Suzanne had perfected drawings which were characterised by sharp, almost crude contours. Her profiles were executed with a pure, single line. To achieve such a crisp silhouette in what appeared to be a single stroke demanded confidence, courage and hours of practice.

Starting at the end of the 18th century, the family began to be characterised – or idealised – by more intimate relationships, while the child was increasingly treated not dispassionately as simply a means of securing property and continuing the family name (as in the past) but as an individual worthy of affection. Now, children should be cosseted, nurtured and adored by their parents, who were encouraged to take a more hands-on role in their care. In short, paternity and maternity had become deeply fashionable among the bourgeoisie, that same class who were, coincidentally, the main consumers of art.9 The Salon walls were obligingly filled with genre paintings in which, in a convenient recasting of the traditional Madonna and child theme, happy mothers cuddled contented, rosy-cheeked infants.

Suzanne’s pictures of children flew in the face of those idealised images of social harmony. Her youngsters were not nude, but unashamedly naked. They were not posed, but awkward, their scrawny limbs contracted into clumsy postures, ungainly, unaesthetic, but utterly natural. Self-aware but not self-conscious, Suzanne Valadon, Nude Girl Sitting, 1894, black

Suzanne’s children looked introspective, isolated – and lonely, so incredibly lonely. The only carer to be found was the grandmother. The mother was nowhere to be seen.11

Other artists showed what viewers wanted to see. Suzanne showed them what was true.

in the catalogue to the exhibition, she was listed not as ‘Mme’ or ‘Mlle’ like other women exhibitors, but simply: ‘Valadon, S.’. When viewers looked from the catalogue in their hands to the drawings in front of them, they had no way of knowing that the artist they were contemplating was a woman.

Paul Mousis had rented his lover a studio, next door to Erik Satie’s apartment. One such

Mousis did not boast the sparkling good humour of Lautrec, the multitalented, Mediterranean charm of Miguel, nor the thrilling eccentricity of Satie. But he was undeniably good-looking, manly – and secure.

With Suzanne’s command of line, soft ground etching was a fitting progression. It was the first formal art teaching she had ever received. Suzanne produced a series of nudes on Degas’s press, several of her maid, Catherine, drying herself by the side

Meanwhile, Renoir was hard at work on his vast painting, The Large Bathers (1884–1887), painstakingly sketching, reworking and perfecting a voluptuous Maria as she reclined naked to treat viewers to the sight of her radiant skin, firm breasts and sun-kissed hair. But of all Maria’s dramatic incarnations, one of the most talked about at that year’s Salon was undoubtedly Puvis de Chavannes’s The Sacred Grove of the Arts and Muses (1884).

Degas was astounded by the pieces Suzanne brought to show him. How a linen maid’s daughter with not a day’s training could take a pencil and handle it with such assurance, maintain such confident control of a line as to bring a form to life on a flat page, left him speechless.

That year, she produced her first female nude. She also faced her trepidation about painting in oils, producing Young Girl Crocheting and Portrait of a Young Girl.

was difficult to ignore the resemblance between Maria and many of the major figure subjects Renoir tackled between 1884 and 1887. There was The Large Bathers (1884–1887), but also Woman with a Fan (1886) and Young Woman with a Swan (1886).23 And then in 1887, Renoir painted Maria in one of his most suggestive interpretations yet: The Plait.

With his negative self-image, Maurice resigned himself to the conclusion that his character was fundamentally flawed.

Maurice’s eccentric, antisocial behaviour became a feature of Pierrefitte. In town, residents whispered about the Mousis-Valadon family and their half-crazed son, while behind the closed doors of Villa Hochard, fiery scenes became a fixed part of the weekly ritual.

And it just so happened that one of the founders of the young Picasso’s favourite haunt was a man Suzanne knew well: Miguel Utrillo.

Suzanne’s life seemed to have taken an altogether different course. With matters at home so chaotic, she had all but stopped producing the bold figure studies with confident lines that Degas so admired.

She had always painted people as a way of understanding them, using her figure studies as a form of dialogue. Now, she felt compelled to choose subjects that demanded nothing of her in return. The composition was simple, naive even, the forms crudely drawn, the palette limited.

The other piece she produced that year was just as atypical. Maternity (1900) was the first mother and child scene she had ever drawn. And yet it was a subject she knew. The composition was tender, gentle, balanced – quite unlike her studies of older children and nudes.

Her withdrawal from creative life did not go unnoticed. ‘Every year, Terrible Maria, I see arrive this firm, chiselled writing,’ Degas observed, ‘but I never see the author appear with a folder under her arm. And yet I am growing old. Happy New Year.’16

passed.20 He was 37 years old.

All the while, Maurice continued to drink. Having invested in land on the Butte Pinson in the commune of Montmagny, Paul Mousis proposed that he build the family a new house. They could have a high fenced garden and no immediate neighbours; it would be far less awkward whenever Maurice had one of his ‘turns’.

became clear that for the time being, it would be most practical for the family to make their base the apartment in the Rue Cortot.22

Maurice remembered the decision as one of the happiest ever made on his behalf.23 For Suzanne, it was as though she had been reborn.

Suzanne began to work prolifically. She took familiar subjects: nudes, her maid Catherine, her dogs, and flowers – the beauty of which she had now come to appreciate. She also began work on a large canvas, The Moon and the Sun and the Brunette and the Blonde (1903).24 Her painting reflected her altered state of mind.

Returning to Montmartre, Suzanne was like a wilted plant revived. People knew her, too, even if only by sight. Among young art students and amateur painters, her glittering backlist of employers like Puvis, Renoir and Lautrec had turned her into a minor celebrity. Renoir’s interest in a woman immediately recommended her in the eyes of budding male artists.

Suzanne always mixed her own colours

Suzanne could hardly believe it: Maurice’s pictures were actually good – very good. And they were nothing like hers. He had a style which was entirely his own. ‘You need to learn to draw,’ his mother told him firmly once she had assimilated what she was observing.

admitted to an institution to receive professional care. On 12 January 1904, he left his home with Suzanne, Madeleine and the man he still called ‘M. Paul’, and was escorted to Sainte-Anne’s psychiatric hospital in Paris.34

Sainte-Anne had restored Maurice’s body and Suzanne’s peace of mind. But it had kept a part of his soul.

Painting had finally brought Maurice what he had always craved: Suzanne’s attention and an intimate mother–son bond.

Meanwhile, the art scene in the capital was flourishing. While Suzanne’s career continued to stagnate, all around her, creativity was simmering

The young Pablo Picasso had come to see a painting he had had accepted to the Exposition Universelle, Last Moments (1899), fittingly, just as the Exposition was closing.

El Quat Gats

From time to time, I look at your study in red chalk, which is still hanging in my dining room; and I always say to myself: ‘that she-devil Maria could draw like a little daemon’. Why don’t you show me your work anymore? I am nearing 67.17

Suzanne was still striving to steer Maurice towards a more salubrious way of life in early September 1901, when a shattering piece of news reached her: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was dead.

Then followed a job in a factory, making lampshades; that lasted only a few weeks before Maurice got into a fight.26 And the more positions he was dismissed from, the more angry, self-critical and despondent he became. The fallout led to alcoholic binges of increasing severity and duration.

Their family friend Dr Ettlinger, who had stood as witness at the couple’s wedding, had urged Suzanne to teach Maurice to paint. Doing something creative with his hands would at the very least distract him and channel that unspent energy, Dr Ettlinger had reasoned. It might even prove the miracle cure to his malady. Suzanne was ready to pounce on any new idea which offered a potential remedy, however speculative the results. And painting was what she knew. She agreed: the countryside often proved a source of inspiration to new painters. It seemed worth a try.27

Suzanne disliked using tubes of paint. She preferred the control of pigments that hand mixing allowed, and scoffed at the disdain in which certain painters held the business of mixing paints themselves (on the basis that it turned them into artisans rather than artists).

Soon, Suzanne was astonished and delighted to see that his work was developing. It was getting better. And his rate of production was staggering; in little more than a year, Maurice completed nearly 150 canvases.41 Fascinatingly, he was not attracted to the figures that caught his mother’s attention. Maurice shied away from human exchanges. Rather, he was drawn to buildings and walls, and he executed his studies with the exactness of an architect, using the same mathematical precision he had brought to his scrutiny of scientific manuals.

Once or twice, Suzanne happened to mention the work of the recently deceased Alfred Sisley, and henceforward, the painter became Maurice’s obsession and his idol.

Why do you still have to work? Why continue to torture yourself?" And then Renoir answered, "The pain passes, but the pleasure, the creation of beauty, remains.

I took to spending free days wandering the Joslyn galleries, where, among other things, I tried to reconcile Renoir’s plump and rosy, wine-warmed wenches with the graceful if sinister beauty of the B-47 bombers nurtured and nourished at my air force base, eventually concluding that anything that says yes to life (a Renoir) is automatically saying no to war, regardless of how attractively its weapons and justifications may be packaged. Thus, like those bohemians with whom he was feeling a growing kinship, Airman Second Class Tommy Rotten woke up one morning to find himself once and for all a pacifist.

I can usually see a way to understand terrible things; Satanic worship, decaffeinated coffee, cosmetic surgery, but Renoir’s portrait of Madame de Bonnières? No. It cannot be understood or forgiven. And framed in gold plastic and spot-lit from above? No offence intended, Charlotte, there is not a chamber of hell hot enough for a woman of your taste.

In addition to freeing painters from the chore of grinding and mixing their paints, the convenient new tubes made it far more practical to paint outdoors. “Without paints in tubes,” Auguste Renoir observed, “there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionism.

He winks at me and ignores me for the rest of supper, during which he instructs Ross about current diabetic treatments, corrects Maggie's perfectly pronounced Renoir as Ren-wah, and keeps fondling Kate's breasts. Okay, not exactly, but he touches her arm or hand whenever he talks or she does, and it's so frequent it's bordering on molestation. I can't believe no one's putting a stop to this.

Only the painter who knows his business can create the impression that a picture was done in one stroke.

The world of Rnoir is a single entity. The red of the poppy determines the pose of the young woman with the umbrella. The blue of the sky harmonizes with the sheepskin the young shepheard wears. His pictures are demonstrations of over-all unity. .... Renoir believed in the Chinese legend that a mandarin can be killed at a distance by an unconsciously lethal gesture made in Paris.

The pain passes, but the beauty remains

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro with Renoir’s impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment.

Elle n'avait jamais vraiment aimé les impressionnistes. Elle trouvait qu'ils manquaient d'outrance, de passion. Seul Renoir, parfois, savait traiter un corps de femme avec ce manque de respect qui lui était dû.

Once the list is developed, pick a dozen names from the list, which are a mix of both current and past celebrities. Then pose the problem and ask, “How would this situation be handled by…” • Donald Trump • Lady Gaga • Muhammad Ali • Bette Midler • Napoleon • Louis Armstrong • Gustave Eiffel • Renoir • Thomas Edison • Madam Curie • Hillary Clinton • Ronald Reagan • Big Bird • Donald Duck • Plato

Delaurier makes an intrigued noise and picks up the finished drawings Renoir has sitting under a rock, just in case the wind picks up. "I like them." "Of course you do. They're the cruelly oppressed creatures of society," Renaire says. "Look at how the bourgeois humans have hurt them, how they're forced to huddle near sewer vents for warmth in this brutal freezing world. These poor souls need your help, Emile. Look at their plight, their misery. Save the pigeons.

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues that Brennan should have won awards for even better performances in To Have and Have Not (1944), My Darling Clementine (1946), Red River (1948), The Far Country (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959). Thomson counts no less than twenty-eight high caliber Brennan performances in still more films, including These Three (1936), Fury (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), and Bad Day At Black Rock (1955). Brennan worked with Hollywood’s greatest directors—John Ford, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, King Vidor, and Fritz Lang—while also starring in Jean Renoir’s Hollywood directorial debut, Swamp Water (1941). To discuss Brennan’s greatest performances is also to comment on the work of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, and many other stars.

For example, say you plan to visit a museum and want to be able to identify the artist (Cézanne, Picasso, or Renoir) of paintings there that you have never seen. Before you go, instead of studying a stack of Cézanne flash cards, and then a stack of Picasso flash cards, and then a stack of Renoir, you should put the cards together and shuffle, so they will be interleaved. You will struggle more (and probably feel less confident) during practice, but be better equipped on museum day to discern each painter’s style, even for paintings that weren’t in the flash cards.

Leeda looked straight out of Martha’s Vineyard---all perfect cheekbones and alabaster skin with a smattering of sun-induced freckles and clothes that were totally season-appropriate. Even loose and sloppy like she was today, she looked like the kind of loose and sloppy you saw in People magazine when they caught a celebrity all tired and mussed up at the airport. Birdie, on the other hand, was curved and rosy and Renoir soft. She looked like the milk-fed farm girl that she was. The two were second cousins but nothing alike. Leeda was straight up and down, and Birdie was as gentle and easy as the rain. Leeda had grown up wearing mostly white and exceeding everyone as the glossiest, the smilingest, and the most southern of the southern belles in Bridgewater. Birdie had grown up with dirt under her fingernails, homeschooled on the orchard, her feet planted in the earth. Before Judge Miller Abbott sentenced Murphy to time on the orchard picking peaches that summer, Murphy had pegged Leeda for uptight and Birdie for weak. But their time together---picking peaches, sweating in the dorms at night, cooling off in the lake---had been like living the fable of her life. The lesson being that when you think you know more than you do, you end up looking like an idiot.

Renoir, as it turned out, was also deeply anti-Semitic.

Each fragment of the world—and in particular the sea, sometimes riddled with eddies and ripples and plumed with spray, sometimes massive and immobile in itself—contains all sorts of shapes of being and, by the way it has of joining the encounter with one's glance, evokes a series of possible variants and teaches, over and beyond itself, a general way of expressing being. Renoir can paint women bathing and a fresh water brook while he is by the sea at Cassis because he only asks the sea—which alone can teach what he asks—for its way of interpreting the liquid substance, of exhibiting it, and of arranging it. In short, because he only asks for a typical form of manifestations of water.

If the two Sherpas were Impressionist painters, the older man would be Renoir, and the younger Monet.

Their expressions were like those caught by Renoir in the faces of The Daughters of Paul Durand-Reul, relaxed, proper, satisfied, slightly ingenue, the background filled with spring color. It was unreal, a garden party far removed from the Revolution that surged beyond the orchard walls. Here, aristocrats dined among white-gloved servants, as in a painting, while songbirds sang in the trees.

– Je me rappelle surtout un fait que nous a rapporté mon père, comme il rentrait à la maison un des jours d’émeutes. Des gens tiraient sur la troupe. Un passant s’approche d’un homme qui n’arrivait pas à toucher son but ; et lui prend le fusil des mains, vise un soldat qui tombe et comme il rendait l’arme à son propriétaire, celui-ci eut un geste comme pour lui dire : “Continuez, vous vous en servez si bien.” Et l’autre : “Non, ce n’est pas dans mes opinions.” Degas se plaisait à ces récits du passé.

Un jour, Mme de Staël était dans une barque sur le lac Léman avec Mme Récamier et Benjamin Constant, quand un des rameurs : " ce nuage à l'horizon nous annonce un gros temps." " Dites, Benjamin, fit Mme de Staël, si nous faisions naufrage qui de nous deux sauveriez-vous ?" Et Benjamin Constant à Mme de Staël : "vous, vous savez nager.

Here we are in the domain of the human spirit: what do you want to say and how do you want to say it? One hundred eighty years ago, Balzac wrote eighty classic novels in twenty years, using just a quill pen. Who among our word-processing writers today can even approach such a record? In the 1930s, Jean Renoir made a commercially successful feature film (On Purge Bébé) in three weeks—from concept to finished product. And early in his career, Kurosawa— directing and editing himself—would have the first cut of his films done two days after shooting.

Renoir’s clever use of complementary colours–the way he’d position a red umbrella against a green dress; an orange cup against a blue tablecloth–was no accident, he assured the students.

Jean Renoir, working on his first American picture, created beautiful, lush shots of the Georgia swamp, although much of the film was made in the studio. But Brennan remembered the cottonmouths and was grateful that he had a double in scenes with snakes, since one of the reptiles (they were not defanged) bit one of the trainers. Like other cast members, Brennan found Renoir “wonderful.” “Oh, what a gentleman,” he recalled. “Oh, I just loved the guy. He was so gentle and nice.” During one take, Walter turned to the director and said, “How was that, Gene?” Renoir said, “[I]t was good. I liked it. I have tears in my eyes.” Walter said, “Oh, I thought it was lousy.” A perplexed Renoir, whose understanding of English was imperfect, called for an interpreter. When he agreed to let Brennan do the scene again, he had to admit the retake was better.

Swamp Water was a huge hit, especially in the South. Much has been made of Darryl Zanuck’s editing of Renoir, who preferred longer takes and atmospherics to Zanuck’s taut plot construction and melodramatic character types. But the authenticity of the performances—especially those delivered by Brennan, Andrews, Huston, and Baxter—override the script’s sentimentality and

One must have only one master—nature,” Pissarro had said. Renoir had put it this way: “You come to nature with your theories and she knocks them all flat.” And Monet—ah, Monet. Was it any wonder he described it best of all? “A landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape because its appearance is changing in every moment. But it lives through its ambiance, through the air and light, which vary constantly.

His story was almost word for word the same as Caroline Sack's, and hearing it a second time made it plain how remarkable the achievement of the Impressionists really was. They were artistic geniuses. But they were also possessed of a rare wisdom about the world. They were capable of looking at what the rest of us thought of as a great advantage, and seeing it for what it really was. Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, and Pissarro would have gone to their second choice.

Increasingly, a new generation of artists were finding the creative projects which so excited them systematically rebuffed by the official art bodies. It was exasperating. Did the jury of the Salon, that ‘great event’ of the artistic world, never tire of the tedious repertoire of historical events and myths that had formed the mainstay of Salon paintings for so long? Did they not feel ridiculed being sold the blatant lie of highly finished paint surfaces, of bodies without a blemish, of landscapes stripped of all signs of modernity? Was contemporary life, the sweat and odour of real men and women, not deserving of a place on the Salon walls? Young artists huddled around tables in Montmartre’s cafés, sharing their deepest frustrations, breathing life into their most keenly held ideas. Just a few streets away from the Cimetière de Montmartre, Édouard Manet, the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world, could be found at his regular table in the Café Guerbois surrounded by reverent confrères, who would in time become famous in their own right. When Manet spoke, his blue eyes sparkled, his body leant forwards persuasively, and an artistic revolution felt achievable. The atmosphere was electric, the conversation passionate – often heated, but always exciting. The discussions ‘kept our wits sharpened,’ Claude Monet later recalled, ‘they encouraged us with stores of enthusiasm that for weeks and weeks kept us up.’ And though the war caused many of the artists to leave the capital, it proved merely a temporary migration. At the time Madeleine and her daughters arrived in Montmartre, the artists had firmly marked their patch.

For many country folk, the railway was Paris. Its gleaming tracks brought tales of success, prosperity and realised dreams to the provinces, qualities with which the capital was increasingly seen as synonymous. For a countrywoman like Madeleine, short on money and luck, overworked, and whose future appeared only to offer more of the same, those dazzling steel tracks represented a chance. All at once, resignation turned to hope. Suddenly, Madeleine could see clearly. If she stayed in Bessines, her future was mapped out – and it was bleak. But if she boarded the train to Paris, anything was possible – perhaps even happiness. Jeanne and Widow Guimbaud were horrified when, not five years after Marie-Clémentine’s birth, Madeleine announced that her mind was made up: she was going to start a new life in Paris.

Then, at last, Madeleine’s luck turned. She came across Montmartre. With its windmills, its clear air and the old-fashioned, village feel of its higgledy-piggledy houses perched on a slope, few places recalled the Limousin countryside so vividly as Montmartre. It was up to 129 metres above sea level at the highest point. Why, with its narrow, winding streets and alleys, and its cottages clinging to the hillside, a person could have believed themselves in Le Mas Barbu. The bustling Rue Lepic and the Place des Abbesses readily called to mind Bessines’ town square on a busy market day. And all around, steep, grassy banks rose up protectively, hillside homes bloomed with flowers, old men installed in wrought iron chairs sat outside doorways and set the world to rights, children played in the street and women chatted and gossiped as they made their way to fill baskets with provisions. At last, Madeleine had found somewhere familiar, reassuring, comforting. Montmartre felt like home.

She reminded Lars of one of Renoir’s women: small-faced and round-eyed with curly hair piled on top of her head, creamy-skinned, plump, and bosomy, possibly a little vacuous,

Pressed to give a name to this misty play of light on the water for the catalogue for the 1874 exposition that included Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, and Degas, Monet apparently said, “put ‘impression.’” The painting, Impression, Sunrise, certainly made one, as did the show—thereafter the group was referred to as the Impressionists.

as in Welles’ pictures (or in Renoir’s) through depth of focus but by virtue of a diabolic speed of vision which seems for the first time to be wedded here to the pure rhythm of attention. Undoubtedly all good editing takes this into consideration. The traditional device of shot-reverse-shot divides up the dialogue according to an elementary syntax of interest.

It was an exhilarating time to be involved in the art world, in any capacity. At last, individualism was encouraged, not condemned. By the 1880s, Impressionism was yesterday’s news. Artists had already gone beyond it, and were experimenting with new forms, content and techniques. Diversity was the modus vivendi. Accordingly, 1880s Paris became the birthplace of some radically different movements, including Divisionism, Symbolism, Synthesism and Nabis. Furthermore, the proliferation of alternative exhibiting bodies offered real grounds for hope for avant-garde painters and those hailing from the fringes of society. The Salon was no longer the sole and hazardous rite of passage lying between a painter and success. There were now other organisations where reputations could be forged, such as the Société des Aquarellistes Français. But by far the most notable and innovative artistic venture in 1884 was the Salon des Artistes Indépendants. When his technically daring composition Bathers at Asnières (1884) was rejected by the jury of the 1884 Salon, former pupil of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts Georges Seurat was spurred to retaliate. Joining forces with a number of other disgruntled painters, among them Symbolist Odilon Redon and self-taught artist Albert Dubois-Pillet, Seurat helped found the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants. With Redon acting as chairman, the group proposed to do something unprecedented: they would mount a show whose organisers were not answerable to any official institution, and where there would be no prizes and, significantly, no jury. The venture introduced a radically new concept onto the Parisian art scene: freedom. The first exhibition, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, was held from May to July in a temporary building in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Louvre.

Like alcohol and coffee, song had been cast as the faithful servant of political opposition when Louis-Napoleon came to power. Singing in cafés was consequently one of the first forms of expression outlawed under his regime. However, when a series of decrees in the 1860s had lifted many of the restrictions imposed on entertainment venues (notably by permitting the use of props, costumes and music), café-concerts had begun to flourish. By the 1880s, there were over 200 such venues belting out hearty songs about working-class life across Paris. Along with the usual facilities of a café, café-concerts also offered a small indoor stage or a covered pavilion outside where singers, and sometimes acrobats and comedians, performed for an often raucous audience. Patrons paid more than they would in a standard café, either in the form of an entrance fee or through elevated drinks prices. But many judged the supplement worthwhile; the atmosphere was relaxed, the singers, though not first rate, were undeniably ‘of the people’, and unlike theatre-goers, audience members could also smoke. And as one guidebook writer exclaimed with surprise, ‘sometimes, one can actually hear quite good music.

Rodolphe Salis was a tall, red-headed bohemian with a coppery beard and boundless charisma. He had tried and failed to make a success of several different careers, including painting decorations for a building in Calcutta. But by 1881 he was listless and creatively frustrated, uncertain where his niche might lie. More pressingly, he was desperate to secure a steady income. But then he had the ingenious idea to turn the studio which he rented, a disused post office on the resolutely working-class Boulevard de Rochechouart, into a cabaret with a quirky, artistic bent. He was not the first to attempt such a venture: La Grande Pinte on the Avenue Trudaine had been uniting artists and writers to discuss and give spontaneous performances for several years. But Salis was determined that his initiative would be different – and better. A fortuitous meeting ensured that it was. Poet Émile Goudeau was the founder of the alternative literary group the Hydropathes (‘water-haters’ – meaning that they preferred wine or beer). After meeting Goudeau in the Latin Quarter and attending a few of the group’s gatherings, Salis became convinced that a more deliberate form of entertainment than had been offered at La Grande Pinte would create a venue that was truly innovative – and profitable. The Hydropathe members needed a new meeting place, and so Salis persuaded Goudeau to rally his comrades and convince them to relocate from the Latin Quarter to his new cabaret artistique. They would be able to drink, smoke, talk and showcase their talents and their wit. Targeting an established group like the Hydropathes was a stroke of genius on Salis’s part. Baptising his cabaret Le Chat Noir after the eponymous feline of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, he made certain that his ready-made clientele were not disappointed. Everything about the ambience and the decor reflected Salis’s unconventional, anti-establishment approach, an ethos which the Hydropathes shared. A seemingly elongated room with low ceilings was divided in two by a curtain. The front section was larger and housed a bar for standard customers. But the back part of the room (referred to as ‘L’Institut’) was reserved exclusively for artists. Fiercely proud of his locality, Salis was adamant that he could make Montmartre glorious. ‘What is Montmartre?’ Salis famously asked. ‘Nothing. What should it be? Everything!’ Accordingly, Salis invited artists from the area to decorate the venue. Adolphe Léon Willette painted stained-glass panels for the windows, while Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen created posters. And all around, a disorientating mishmash of antiques and bric-a-brac gave the place a higgledy-piggledy feel. There was Louis XIII furniture, tapestries and armour alongside rusty swords; there were stags’ heads and wooden statues nestled beside coats of arms. It was weird, it was wonderful and it was utterly bizarre – the customers loved it.

Jeu de Paume. C'est un petit gout, he'd said. A little taste. The hostel knew Marguerite was a gourmand; he saw the treasures she brought home each night from the boulangerie, the fromagerie, and the green market. Bread, cheese, figs: She ate every night sitting on the floor of her shared room. She was in Paris for the food, not the art, though Marguerite had always loved Renoir and this painting in particular appealed to her. She was attracted to Renoir's women, their beauty, their plump and rosy good health; this painting was alive. The umbrellas- les parapluies- gave the scene a jaunty, festive quality, almost celebratory, as people hoisted them into the air. It's charming, Marguerite said. A feast for the eyes, Porter said.

He knew now that corruption is inherent in power, and, even worse, stupidity!

All the knowledge he had acquired in his search for truth, in his ceaseless effort to break through the disguises raised my men's stupidity now lay in his hand...

Mano mėgiamiausi poetai? Karalius Dovydas, Karalius Saliamonas, Ekleziastas; Lamartine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lautreamont, Valéry, Marie Noël, Jouve; Angelus Silesius, Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Traki, Langgasser; Leopardi, Campana, Montale; San Juan de la Cruz, Garcia Lorca, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats; Donelaitis, Maironis, Putinas, Aistis (pirmos 4 knygos). Bet mano preferencijos nuolat kinta Mano mėgiamiausi tapytojai? Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, Tiziano, Piero di Cosimo, Magnasco; Claude Lorrain, Georges de la Tour, Watteau, Fragonard, Chardin, Manet, Renoir, Soutine, Duffy, Chagall, Sérafine; Brueghel (Senasis), Memling, Hobbema, Vermeer; Dürer, Lucas Cranach (Senasis), Kokoschka; Gainsborough, Palmer; El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Dali; Galdikas, Samuolis, Vizgirda, Valeška, Gudaitis.

Go out the north exit of Nakano Station and into the Sun Mall shopping arcade. After a few steps, you'll see Gindaco, the takoyaki (octopus balls) chain. Turn right into Pretty Good #1 Alley. Walk past the deli that specializes in okowa (steamed sticky rice with tasty bits), a couple of ramen shops, and a fugu restaurant. Go past the pachinko parlor, the grilled eel stand, the camera shops, and the stairs leading to Ginza Renoir coffee shop. If you see the bicycle parking lot in front of Life Supermarket, you're going the right way. During the two-block walk through a typical neighborhood, you've passed more good food than in most midsized Western cities, even if you don't love octopus balls as much as I do. Welcome to Tokyo. Tokyo is unreal. It's the amped-up, neon-spewing cyber-city of literature and film. It's an alley teeming with fragrant grilled chicken shops. It's children playing safely in the street and riding the train across town with no parents in sight. It's a doughnut chain with higher standards of customer service than most high-end restaurants in America. A colossal megacity devoid of crime, grime, and bad food? Sounds more like a utopian novel than an earthly metropolis.

quirky new café-cum-cabaret, El Quat Gats,

Avanzo lentamente, estoy muy lejos de pintar como el pájaro canta, como lo pedía Renoir. Pero soy tu pájaro al fin y al cabo y he anidado para siempre entre tus manos.

Monet in turn introduced Sisley, Bazille, and Renoir to the group, which met evenings at the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles district, at the edge of Montmartre.

You see, there’s something frightening in this world: everyone has their reasons.” Jean Renoir, The Rules of the Game

The audience may have been startled to learn the dubious fact, aired by Guitry in his voice-over on his Renoir segment, that Monet and Renoir as young men once spent an entire year living on potatoes.

Cézanne, on the other hand, thought the Impressionists weren’t being sufficiently objective. He thought they lacked rigorousness in their pursuit of realism. His concerns were not dissimilar to those held by Degas and Seurat, who felt that the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Morisot and Pissarro were slightly flimsy; that they lacked structure and a sense of solidity. Seurat, we know, looked to science to help him resolve the issue: Cézanne turned to nature.

Over the years, the Oppenheimers also acquired a remarkable collection of French Postimpressionist and Fauvist paintings chosen by Ella. By the time Robert was a young man, the collection included a 1901 “blue period” painting by Pablo Picasso entitled Mother and Child, a Rembrandt etching, and paintings by Edouard Vuillard, André Derain and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Three Vincent Van Gogh paintings—Enclosed Field with Rising Sun (Saint-Remy, 1889), First Steps (After Millet) (Saint-Remy, 1889) and Portrait of Adeline Ravoux (Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890)—

The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.