The Frick Collection:
Dancing with Pierre-Auguste Renoir...
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| Dance at Bougival |
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art are special places. Millions of people come here from all over the world to explore their treasures. It is exhilarating to visit these museums anytime but especially when there is a major event, even if it means waiting on long lines.
I crawled with
hundreds of people through the Iris & B. Gerald Canter Exhibition Hall at
The MET in the summer of 2011. During a three month stretch almost 662,000
people visited the late Alexander McQueen’s “Savage Beauty" exhibit. They came
to see his “bumster” trouser, three-point origami frockcoat, S&M jewelry,
spray-painted dresses, futuristic styles, a life size hologram of Kate Moss,
and many more of his ultra creative costumes. They came not out of sympathy for
the famed British fashion designer who committed suicide at 40, a year before
his exhibit opened, but to be dazzled by his uninhibited sense of fashion, art,
history, and workmanship.
In 2012 I saw CindySherman’s Retrospective at MOMA, also heavily attended. It featured
more than 170 photographs, all self-portraits that traced her artistic career
from the 1970’s to the present. A master of disguise Sherman dressed as a faded
movie star, sex kitten, naïve ingénue, straight-laced secretary, housewife and
more. She accomplished this by physically altering herself with wigs, costumes,
makeup, and prosthetic-body parts. She meshed art, cultural influences,
pornography, fairy tales and horror films. In one work she appeared as Grandma
Moses in a banana leather jacket and a sky-blue taffeta, another as a
Renaissance Lady in an elegant dress, jewel adorned hair with a fake nose.
No exhibit inspired
me more than the Renoir, Impressionism
and Full-Length Painting at The Frick Collection in 2012.
Small in size, it
featured just nine large life-size paintings, several measuring almost six-foot
in height displayed in the Frick’s East Gallery, a long classical styled room with an arched portal, elegant
keystone, fluted Ionic pilasters. Colin
B. Bailey, the Frick’s Associate Director brought these works together for the
first time. Built around The Frick’s La
Promenade (1875-76), a mother walking in the park with her two young
daughters, the museum’s most important impressionist work, the exhibit studied
Renoir’s portraits and subjects from the mid-1870’s to the mid 1880’s.
The other eight paintings included La Parisienne (1874) from the National Museum of Art, Cardiff; The Umbrellas (1881-1885) from The National Gallery of London; Dance in the City and Dance in the Country (1882-83) from the Musee d’Orsay, Paris; The Dancer (1874) from the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Madame Henriot “en travesty” (1875-76) from the Columbus Museum of Art; Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (1879) from the Art Institute of Chicago; and my favorite, the reason I write this article, Dance at Bougival (1882-83) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The other eight paintings included La Parisienne (1874) from the National Museum of Art, Cardiff; The Umbrellas (1881-1885) from The National Gallery of London; Dance in the City and Dance in the Country (1882-83) from the Musee d’Orsay, Paris; The Dancer (1874) from the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Madame Henriot “en travesty” (1875-76) from the Columbus Museum of Art; Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (1879) from the Art Institute of Chicago; and my favorite, the reason I write this article, Dance at Bougival (1882-83) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Born at Limoges,
France in 1841, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is considered one of the great artists of
the French Impressionists movement. The size of these paintings and their
bright colors gives the illusion his characters, specifically the trio of
paintings of dancing couples, are ready to lurch off the canvass. But Bougival
is why I returned to the Frick three times with a different friend each visit.
Bougival drips with
gusto, life, and lust. It is earthy and sexy. The outdoor setting – painted in
a studio - is a Sunday country-dance near Paris. Art critics chat about the
dirt floor littered with cigarette buts, chestnut trees and people drinking
beer from plain mugs sitting at an oak table in the background, but the male
dancer’s passion and assertiveness mesmerized me. Standing in this very large
wing with maybe only fifteen other visitors I am free to savor Bougival from
many vantage points, and I too, wanted to whisk my partner, all three, around
this beautiful gallery.
The young woman in
Bougival, is Suzanne Valadon, a trapeze artist turned model, Renoir’s one-time
lover, and mother of artist Maurice Utrillo whose father was rumored to be one
of several men including Renoir. The gent, a working-man, with clunky brown
boots and straw hat, holds her firmly against his body and stares intently at
her beautiful face and head wrapped in a long flowing red bonnet. She looks
away, her eyes cast downward in a shy yet flirtatious way as if desire stirs
within her as they dance oblivious to the festivities around them.
"Dance Me To
The End Of Love"
Dance me to your
beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through
the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an
olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end
of love
Dance me to the end
of love
Oh let me see your
beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you
moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what
I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end
of love
Dance me to the end
of love
The Renoir exhibit completed its United States run September 3, 2013 at Boston’s Museum of
Fine Arts.
