Life is a festival

Bright sunshine on this early spring Saturday in Frankfurt am Main, and yet crowds of art enthusiasts make the pilgrimage to the Städel Museum. “Renoir. Rococo Revival” is the title of the exhibition, which is literally surrounded by visitors and which wants to explore the artistic relationship between the Impressionist Renoir and the artists of the French 18th century.

Apparently, success is doubly guaranteed. Because as much as Renoir’s paintings appeal to a wide audience, so do those of François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard or Antoine Watteau.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), a trained porcelain painter, was already familiar with Rococo art when it experienced an astonishing reassessment in the course of the 19th century. For decades after the French Revolution, reviled as a hobby of the feudal nobility, from the middle of the century it was again considered the epitome of French art of living, was collected, exhibited and praised in books by the Goncourt brothers, for example.

Recreator of the Rococo theme

The exhibition at the Städel is surprising in that it presents Renoir far less as a “painter of modern life”, to quote Charles Baudelaire’s overused phrase once again, and more as a copycat and new creator of Rococo themes.

With his oeuvre, Renoir covers the spectrum of 18th-century subjects, from gallant gatherings in the open air to still lifes, from depictions of nudes to boudoir scenes, described as “frivolous”, which satisfy the male gaze at female charms. The fragrant, pastel colors and the softly rounded forms of Renoir’s pictorial production are recognizable as adaptations in direct comparison to the rococo works, which are a good hundred years older and made possible by the exquisitely equipped Frankfurt exhibition.

Only the noble protagonists are replaced by a middle-class figure, who nonetheless likes feudal depictions, as in the monumental, two-meter-sixty-foot portrait of an equestrian entitled “Morning Ride in the Bois de Boulogne” from 1873.

Naked yet virtuous

Towards the end of the Rococo, early bourgeois painting of virtue emerged in France, represented above all by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. No longer the debauchery of the libertins, but proper household chores are the subject; in addition, the morally charged warning against the immoral lifestyle of young women or the high value of family get-togethers.

With Renoir, all that remains is the sensual depiction of youthful bodies and beautifully draped fabrics. The “Bathers” are naked but virtuous nonetheless; just as the bourgeois lied about his affairs. The family portrait of the “Children in Wargemont” from 1884, loaned to Frankfurt from the Old National Gallery in Berlin, fully corresponds to the moral ideal.

But the basic mood remains the same. Life is a festival, that’s how Renoir’s painting could be described if there weren’t more differentiated compositions like the gray portrait of his painter friend Frédéric Bazille.

But Renoir, who always sent new works to the annual “Salon”, which set standards and generated sales – which, however, were not always accepted by the conservative jury – did not simply want modernity, but also success. Rather, he was looking for successful modernity . For his bourgeois buyers, he created exactly that polished past without rough edges that provided aesthetic support in the whirlpool of rapid change in the world.

After this Frankfurt exhibition, the Impressionist Renoir will no longer be celebrated as a “painter of modern life” like Manet or Monet. Renoir took up the art history of his country to the extent that gave his buyers the comfortable feeling of being aware of tradition and yet belonging to their own time.