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A thread
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Philadelphia
Over four decades, from shortly after his 40th birthday to the year of his death, the pharmaceutical tycoon Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) assembled a collection of about 900 paintings—among numerous other objects—a panoply that includes 59 works by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and 181 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). (That’s the world’s largest ensemble of Renoirs, hence the not wholly inaccurate impression that he is the painter of every other canvas on view at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation.) Barnes began collecting in 1912, when he sent his former high-school classmate, the Ashcan School painter William Glackens, to Paris to buy art for him. Among Glackens’s purchases were three modest paintings by Renoir. Later that year, Barnes went to Europe himself and acquired more works by the artist. He continued to buy Renoirs, several at a time, until 1939. Barnes’s infatuation with Matisse also began in 1912, when he was introduced to Gertrude and Leo Stein and acquired two paintings by the radical artist from Leo.
The famously cantankerous collector’s voracious appetite for the two painters is now celebrated in “Matisse & Renoir: New Encounters at the Barnes,” a revelatory installation occasioned by the closing of the foundation’s galleries for maintenance, which allows a selection of important works to be moved temporarily to the special exhibition galleries. The pairing reflects more than Barnes’s fondness for both artists. Matisse greatly admired Renoir. They met in 1917, when Matisse began to winter in Nice, near Renoir’s home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and were friends for the last two years of Renoir’s life, despite a nearly 30-year age difference and the older artist’s reservations about the younger’s work. (Renoir did concede that Matisse used black effectively.) Matisse valued the connection highly. The show suggests that he regarded Renoir as a mentor and responded in his own paintings to what he saw in the elder artist’s studio.
Organized by the Barnes Foundation’s curators Cindy Kang and Corrinne Chong, the exhibition moves familiar paintings from their usual, often slightly overwhelming context and puts them in fresh relationships, so that we see some of them as if for the first time. Had I ever before paid attention to Renoir’s surprisingly intense “The Seine at Argenteuil” (1888), with its emphatic red boat cutting across a brushy expanse of deep blue water? Had I concentrated as hard on such life-size figure groups as “Leaving the Conservatory” (1876-77), with its marvelously constructed crowd and lush orchestration of blacks and grays? Renoir’s ties to old master painting were made clear, making me consider differently the meaty nude “Bather Gazing at Herself in the Water” (c. 1910) and the robust seated women in “Tea Time” (1911), with its broken color.
Similarly, I found myself looking more intently at three of Matisse’s Nice interiors, painted between 1919 and 1921, savoring their rich variations of pattern and texture. And it was good to remember that “Dishes and Melon” (1906-07), a vigorous still life playing the rounded forms of crockery and fruit against a small sculpture, was one of those first Matisses bought from Leo Stein. (Stein and Barnes became friends and correspondents, and in 1921 Barnes bought 13 Renoirs from Stein.)
While Barnes acquired far more Renoirs than Matisses, he was generally bolder in his choice of the younger artist’s work. “New Encounters” includes such stellar Matisses as “Le Bonheur de Vivre” (1905-06), the intensely colored, formative vision of Arcadia, here installed at perfect eye level, and the rock-solid “Studio With Goldfish” (1912) itemizing paintings, a screen and a sculpture, anchored by the rectangle of the studio window. Equally arresting are two canvases—painted in 1947—twin compositions, both with two women seated at a table before an open window, that turn interior and exterior into jaunty floating shapes and patterns, each painting reversing the warm and cool color choices of the other.
While the strength of many works in “New Encounters” is emphasized by their removal from their habitual locations, the well-documented relationship between Matisse and Renoir is less visible. The curators suggest that Matisse’s seeing the full-length “Promenade” (c. 1905)—a woman wearing a near-iridescent blouse, with a child, outdoors—in Renoir’s studio influenced his approach to figure painting, and that the older man’s mentorship provoked “a newfound sensuality” in Matisse’s works made in Nice. His “Moorish Woman (The Raised Knee)” (1922-23), a seated nude in a fictive “orientalist” headdress and sheer drapery, and “Reclining Nude” (1923-24), an eloquently modeled figure against a flowered screen, are certainly sensual, but so are many nudes from earlier years. Matisse’s trio of vertical figure groups, each titled “Three Sisters” (all 1917), is compared with Renoir’s life-size figure groups, such as the gorgeously painted, wrenchingly sentimental “Mussel-Fishers at Berneval” (1879), but cause and effect are less clear. No matter. It’s a treat to see everything in “Matisse & Renoir: New Encounters at the Barnes” in an unexpected way.
Ms. Wilkin is an independent curator and critic.
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Appeared in the July 15, 2024, print edition as 'Connected French Canvases'.
