Breakthrough famous art made by Paul Cezanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Paul Cezanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Icons of Impressionism
Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a group of French artists borrowed an exhibition space, pooled their money and put on a daring art show in 1874.
Their artworks rebelled against the established French Salon system in their visible brushstrokes, bright, unblended colour and scenes of modern life in natural light rather than idealised history.
For just one franc, one could walk through their galleries and buy their original work.
An initial failure
Still, their show was a commercial failure attracting just a few thousand visitors compared to four hundred thousand at the official Salon exhibit in the same year.
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Reviewers lampooned the paintings they saw as unfinished and blurry, with one derisive critic giving them the satirical label – Impressionists.
Now, 150 years later, the connotation has flipped.
Impressionism is one of the most iconic styles in history, with Cezanne and Renoir’s paintings fetching as much as 100 million pounds – a far cry from their Impressionist debut.
Paul Cezanne masterpieces
To celebrate this 150-year milestone, the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA), in collaboration with Musee D’Orsay and Musee L’Orangerie has brought fifty-two masterpieces together in Cezanne and Renoir Looking at the World.
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The exhibit not only celebrates two fathers of Impressionism, Ms Cecille Girardeau, Curator of Musee L’Orangerie explains, but also highlights the way the two artists shared a close friendship.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir masterpieces
The exhibit puts the two artists’ work side by side to create a contrasting dialogue on their upbringing, art motivations, and impact on modern art.
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Cezanne and Renoir had very different upbringings which drove different artistic goals.
Gave up art… for a while
Cezanne came from a well-to-do bourgeois family who only grudgingly supported his artistic pursuits.
His father, cofounder of a banking firm, used money to pressure his son to his will – at one time going so far as to force the young Cezanne to give up painting and work at the family firm.
Renoir, on the other hand, came from a family of artisans – his father was a tailor, and his mother a hairdresser.
Because of meagre financial means, he worked as an apprentice at a porcelain factory at the age of thirteen and used his deft brush as a decorative artist to earn his keep.
For fame or fortune
This contrasting upbringing led to different motivations behind their art.
Ms Twiggy Au, Curator at the HKMoA, describes these differences, “For Renoir, it was very important in a way for him to win and gain fame… whereas Cezanne’s financial circumstances allowed him to focus more on how to innovate the artistic language.”
After the failure of the first Impressionism exhibit, Renoir’s financial pressures were exacerbated.
It forced him back to more lucrative, traditional avenues where luckily, his affable character and warm, idyllic style attracted portrait commissions from the more avant-garde patrons.
His painting of Marguerite Charpentier, a popular socialite, was well-received when exhibited at the official Salon in 1879.
Renoir’s portraiture became popular with the social elite of Paris, thus securing his finances.
Only one Paul Cezanne commission
In contrast, Ms Au explains, “While Renoir was able to make a living by receiving hundreds of commissions for his portraits, Cezanne in his lifetime was only able to secure just one which can be seen [in this exhibit].”
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Cezanne, in contrast to Renoir, struggled with a long period of continual rejection.
His paintings drew increasing criticism with few sales, and his irascible moods hindered his ability to network effectively.
Despite displaying sixteen works in the Third Impressionism Exhibit (1877), he received mounting derision, making it his last Impressionist show.
Worse still, in 1878, Cezanne’s father, whom he relied on for financial support, cut Cezanne’s allowance by half after discovering his illegitimate grandson.
Without artistic success nor familial support, he fell into a depression and would not be courageous enough to exhibit his work for nearly twenty years.
Around this time, Renoir, to encourage his friend’s artistic endeavours, worked to arrange a sale of one of Cezanne’s paintings to an art collector for a couple hundred francs, even offering one of his own paintings up in exchange.
Still, Cezanne began to distance himself from his Parisian artistic life and retreated to his hometown in Aix en Provence.
Two artistic styles
This allowed him to paint portraits of his own – though of a more intimate nature, of his wife and son. The move gave him artistic license to push towards his goal of developing artistic innovations without the pressures of the established art system in Paris.
This contrasting style in portraiture between the two artists is clearly highlighted in the exhibition.
The gallery features an early draft of Renoir’s Girls at the Piano, a commissioned piece from Musee du Luxembourg and contrasts that with Madame Cezanne and The Artist’s Son by Cezanne.
While Renoir’s portraits show a warm and idealised beauty, Cezanne’s portraiture is starker and more stoic, seeking to understand his subject’s core.
The difference in audience, purpose and tone in Renoir and Cezanne’s portraits can be seen while surrounded by these original pieces.
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While Renoir actively sought patronage and commercial viability, Cezanne’s art sought to push innovation by focusing on geometry and shape, rather than on how his art would sell.
Though the two artists’ career paths diverged, they maintained a lifelong friendship.
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This is especially shown in their travels across the South of France – to L’Estaque, Mount Saint Victoire, Cezanne’s family homes and the Bibemis Quarries, where they painted the landscape side by side en plein air [i.e. outside], occasionally joined by Claude Monet.
After Cezanne’s father passed away in 1886, leaving a large inheritance, Cezanne’s art took on even bolder experimentation.
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Renoir and Cezanne would journey to the Bibemus quarries, where Renoir would often watch Cezanne break down yellow-ochre limestones into blocks of geometric shapes, as shown in The Red Rock.
It was during these travels that the two artists may have shared their views on art theory as Cezanne pushed the boundaries forward to capture the essence of landscapes using bold shapes and colour, while Renoir continued to push into the colour and brushstrokes of Titian and Raphael.
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Both artists undoubtedly impacted and perhaps even anticipated the development of art movements including Cubism and Fauvism.
Renoir and Cezanne, mutual admirers of the other, collected each other’s art – and Picasso drew inspiration by collecting work from both.
Two original Picasso paintings in this exhibit show the relationship between the Cubist artist and the two Impressionists.
In Large Still Life, Picasso pushes Cezanne’s geometric still-life compositions even further, distilling the objects into pure line and shape.
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In Large Nude with Drapery, he echoes Renoir’s brush and colour technique to construct a fully bodied nude.
The exhibition not only showcases original masterpieces from two great Impressionists but reminds us of the lasting legacies they left: of turning yesterday’s rejection into today’s classic – of banding together in lasting friendship to create the avant-garde.
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Renoir famously said, “The pain passes, but the beauty remains”, and this exhibition is a testament to that.
Text Anne Jiao / Photos Martin Wray & Cammy Yiu
