ART
RENOIR AT THE LEICESTER GALLERIES
IF good taste and efficiency were all that were required for the production of art, then England would probably have
more great artists than any other nation. It is our fear of being regarded as anything but gentlemen that has made our art so tasteful and clever, yet so lacking in significance and originality.
Our typical English painters endeavour primarily to do the proper thing in the proper way. Some of them even come back from a visit to Paris with the preceding year's French fashions in art. But in looking at the work of French painters like Renoir we are compelled to admit that good taste is not everything in art, for while his colour is, at times, quite raw, even distasteful, his figures (considered from the standpoint of naturalistic representation) gross and his tech- nique impulsive and (from our English standpoint) inefficient, yet we know we are in the presence of great art. Each work has that organic unity which is the one definite purpose of all art, all other attributes being only a means towards its accom- plishment. When we talk of the simplification of form, for instance, in Renoir's Le JugemenI de Paris we mean that certain incidental forms have been eliminated, that other characteristics have been accentuated, in order to impart an organic entirety to the work as a whole. That the technique of this picture cannot be clever is inevitable, since it was painted at the time that Renoir was almost paralysed with rheumatics and was forced to paint with the brush strapped to his wrist. Considered as units in themselves, some of the figures in this composition seem deformed and disproportion- ate; but this seeming deformation becomes a reformation of form when our vision can encompass the picture as a whole, and not as a series of parts.
That Renoir was a painter who, when he liked, could be a thorough master of technique is seen from his painting of the figure Baigneuse, where each form takes its place in space, where the recession and projection of forms are felt and painted with a truth of relationship to each other that only a supreme craftsman could accomplish. Only in one picture in this exhibition is there an obvious lack of homogeneity : Jeunes filles jouant au rolant (1), where the meticulous painting of the figures in the foreground is not only in contrast to the painting of the impressionistic landscape, but is conceived apart from the landscape, and looks almost as if the back- ground and the figures were the work of two different artists.
Although the exhibition represents a wide range of develop- ment, this is perhaps the only picture which fails in its unity. Even in the rather gaseous impressionism of Dans les Pkurs (6) a harmony of colour compensates for lack of form
Renoir, however, had too great a sense of form to be a slavish partisan of impressionism ; and so we find that while his palette gained luminosity from this school, he was able to adapt its colour theories ') a more solid organization of form as in Femme lutinant u crabe (2).
Although Rer-Ar's work has become fairly well known through the isolated examples that have appeared from time to time in England, this exhibition of twenty-seven of his paint- ings is an unusually successful attempt to give the general public a comprehensive survey of his work.
W. MCCA.NCE.
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