The recent and controversial transfer of the Barnes Foundation to a new museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia has produced a surge of scholarly interest in the prodigious and quixotic group of Pierre-Auguste Renoir paintings known as “the late work.” The largest and most definitive collection of this amorphous body of painting and sculpture, ranging roughly from the artist’s Durand-Ruel career retrospective in 1892 to his death in 1919, was previously located in Dr. Albert Barnes’s original house museum and school in suburban Merion, Pennsylvania. The secluded location and limited access to this magisterial horde ensured the type of private, educational, and ultimately spiritual aesthetic experience that Barnes intended to provide for the viewer, but likewise sequestered the work from greater scholarly and public attention. Perhaps a result of this relative isolation, Barnes’s cache of Renoirs has become contentious to the point of irony in the critical literature. As cited in John House and Martha Lucy’s Renoir in the Barnes Collection, already in 1937 the critic Alfred Frankfurter declared Renoir’s late work to be “the most completely misunderstood of all modern painting” (38). Today it has become almost de rigueur to bemoan the parade of corpulent, frothy, pink nudes that inhabit Renoir’s Arcadian dreamscapes of tactile pleasure and earthy fecundity. Postwar critics have found it difficult to articulate the profound influence that this seemingly retrograde group of paintings had on avant-garde painters such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, effectively obscuring the importance of this decorative painting within the wider narrative of modernism. Whereas the Museum of Modern Art has never included Renoir in its discourse, and deaccessioned the sole Renoir painting in its collection in 1989, Barnes recognized the paramount significance of Renoir’s late works and made them the lynchpin of the rigorously formal method he taught at his school. The new prominence of the Barnes, and the publication of Renoir in the Barnes Collection, should dispel some of the lingering misunderstanding surrounding this massive collection of paintings as well as restore Renoir’s important place in the history of modernism.

This authoritative catalogue of Barnes’s collection of Renoir paintings seeks to answer the obvious question every visitor to the foundation asks: Why so much late Renoir? Of the 181 works of art by Renoir in the collection, a whopping 160 of them are from the late period. Barnes was particularly enamored of the artist’s late period because he believed the painter’s relentless formal interrogation of specific motifs was an ideal example for the aesthetic education of his students. He loathed the elitist separation created between the fine arts and everyday life and famously arranged his collection without regard to chronology, instead focusing on the decorative and formal correspondences created by the juxtaposition of paintings and sculptures from a variety of cultures and eras with more utilitarian, yet aesthetically pleasing, objects such as medieval ironwork, Quaker furniture, and Native American ceramics. The confluence of aesthetic forms found in a variety of objects from the most disparate traditions proved to Barnes the universal aspect of vision, and he believed in the democratic leveling of the art world so that any individual could take aesthetic pleasure in the constellation of objects that surrounded her or him. For Barnes, the supremacy of Renoir’s late work inhered in its evolving, and imminently teachable, formalism—a probing search for the most innovative means of aesthetic expression founded in the perpetual quest to resolve opposition between line and color, tradition and modernity, art and life.

In the spirit of Barnes’s formalist orientation, the catalogue lushly illustrates these paintings, and the tone and hue of the reproductions faithfully approximate the soft and nuanced color gradations—subtleties that are notoriously difficult to replicate in print. The volume also implicitly acknowledges that not all of the 181 Renoirs in the collection are of equal importance or quality. House and Lucy devote sixty-four long entries to the most prominent works, and reproduce the rest in subgroups according to genre: nudes, landscapes, figures in landscapes, children, women with hats, half-length figures, and still life. This method of division highlights the fact that for all the masterpieces in the collection Barnes was also keen to purchase minor works that presented more immediate and spontaneous renditions of the formal motif. Because of the educational mission of his foundation and the nature of his decorative wall ensembles, Barnes collected not only major, large-scale paintings but also a variety of such small works and studies meant to balance the symmetry of his hangings, to create rhyming visual forms across the walls of the galleries, and to provide context for painterly method and technique. An obsessive interest in the formal qualities of painting is perhaps the common denominator that best unites the painter with his most voracious collector, and the small sketches Renoir made “as a way of filling his time and keeping his hands busy” (14) interested Barnes as simpler and almost unconscious expressions of universal formal motifs.

Although he passed away earlier this year, House has been a prominent voice in Renoir scholarship since the artist’s major retrospective in 1985 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His lead essay in Renoir in the Barnes Foundation provides the familiar biographical and historical background for Renoir’s career. He outlines the strong connections between Renoir’s modernism and both the art of antiquity and the French tradition, highlighting the particular brand of classicism Renoir employed in order to insert himself “between modernity and tradition” (1). Indeed, Renoir was one of the first Impressionists to begin marketing himself as what House calls “the latest, and perhaps last, old master” (13). During the period represented by the Barnes collection, Renoir almost exclusively painted classical motifs culled from the Louvre, making his painting palatable to state museums like the Luxembourg and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Both institutions purchased contemporary work of Renoir’s during the 1890s, and provided an official stamp of approval for the artist’s late style. Supporters in government administration—such as Roger Marx, who spearheaded the contemporaneous revival in the decorative arts—saw Renoir’s art as a modern manifestation of a particularly French aesthetic genius, and appropriated his work as part of the Rococo revival of the ancien régime. Yet early twentieth-century collectors like Paul Guillaume and dealers like Ambroise Vollard, as well as the Nabis, Matisse, and Picasso, were also attracted to Renoir’s staunch formal innovations and interrogation of painterly technique that they associated with avant-garde invention and originality. House notes that although Renoir is now seldom considered a revolutionary, he went “further than [his] contemporaries in the dissolution of form, replacing conventional modeling by the endlessly varied color touch” (4). Renoir’s decorative style of painting, which emphasized ideas of tactile surface embellishment, formal correspondences, and the ornamental ensemble, was thus an attractive aesthetic paradigm for both modernists and aesthetic conservatives who claimed Renoir as their champion.

Considering the trouble postwar art historians have had fitting Renoir’s late work into the history of modernism, Barnes Foundation curator Martha Lucy seeks to answer, against the grain, the pertinent question of how Renoir came to dominate Barnes’s “great modernist project.” She provides valuable and detailed provenance information pertaining to his collecting strategy. She emphasizes the doctor’s business relationship with Durand-Ruel and his personal friendships with Leo Stein and the American Painter William Glackens, each of whom encouraged his enthusiasm for Renoir. Barnes rhapsodizes in a letter to Stein, from whom he later purchased thirteen Renoir paintings in 1921, “perhaps the thing that most interests me in Renoir [is] his joy in painting the real life of red-blooded people, and his skill in conveying his sensations to my consciousness” (33). Whereas the popular accessibility of Renoir’s idyllic late work has made it suspect as kitsch, Lucy suggests that for Barnes it represented “the democratic potential of visual art,” while their pure engagement with form and tangible plasticity made them essential teaching tools for the “common man” (33). Indeed, Renoir’s fervent insistence that there should be no division between the fine arts and the decorative arts mirrored Barnes’s own belief in the universality of aesthetic principles across cultures and class. Lucy quotes the latter as saying with approval, “every man can find his own Renoir” (33).

Lucy also convincingly demonstrates how the meteoric rise of Renoir’s reputation between 1920 and 1940 in both Europe and the United States owed greatly to Barnes. Not only did his abundant purchases directly increase the painter’s market prices, but Barnes’s fanatical collecting of Renoir itself became a media spectacle. Newspapers kept a running tally of the growing number of Renoir paintings piling up in Merion, and the machinations of Barnes’s purchases became fodder for art-world gossip. The many publications issuing from the foundation’s press during the 1930s, in which Barnes emphasized the importance of careful visual analysis, also made him a leading proponent of American formalism. Yet Barnes’s formalism—unlike that of his contemporary Clement Greenberg, who fetishized purity and medium specificity—embraced material heterogeneity and sought to discover universal principles across genres and periods.

With the advent of Greenbergian modernism in the 1950s, the very slippages that Renoir sought to emphasize in his painting would become heresy: the artist’s volumetric bathers that occupy the liminal space between painting and sculpture, color and line, past and present were now beyond the pale. Feminist critics such as Tamar Garb have critiqued Renoir’s seemingly uncomplicated representation of “the natural woman” as at best slightly patriarchal and at worst misogynistic (Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998). And it may be that critics of the 1985 Boston retrospective, who almost uniformly panned the artist’s late work in a special issue of Art in America (74, no. 3 [March 1986]), were uncomfortable with a painterly hedonism that reflected too closely the tawdry social excesses of the Reagan era. Perhaps in our own age of economic crisis and budget cutbacks the trove of juicy late Renoir’s in the Barnes Collection might once again serve as a fecund aesthetic alternative to the sensory deprivations of austerity. There certainly is no better antidote than this lavish catalogue, which not only provides valuable new scholarship concerning the collecting, reception, and conservation of Renoir’s late work, but also serves as a compendium of this period, constituting some of the most formally challenging yet aesthetically exuberant painting in the history of modernism.