Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [181]
Today, there’s usually a crowd in front of Renoir’s painting at the Musée d’Orsay (Level 5, Gallery 32), but in 1877 most Parisians weren’t ready to accept that contemporary scenes from their daily life were worthy enough for something as lasting and high-minded as fine art. Renoir felt differently. He painted his boyhood friends, sipping their grenadine, on a scale normally reserved for heroes. Instead of to a Roman interior, we are transported to a recognizable locale in Paris, the Moulin de la Galette guinguette at the foot of the Montmartre mill that gave it its name.
Although the merrymakers are relaxed, the painting itself is a complex piece of craft, a large composition with several figures moving under changing conditions of light, filtered through the courtyard’s acacia trees. While David used light to help tell his story (Brutus in darkness, his wife and daughters in the harsh light of reality), for Renoir light is the story. And in place of David’s clearly outlined figures, Renoir’s softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.
The impression of ease and spontaneity this new technique created was hard won. It took Renoir over a summer, working in his nearby atelier on rue Cortot, to finish the painting. His friends later claimed that Renoir painted the whole thing right there at the Moulin de la Galette, but in view of its large dimensions that’s unlikely. Plus, he also had a fair amount of editing to do back at the studio. During Renoir’s time, Montmartre was outside the official city limits, so it was an especially freewheeling, some might say seedy, place. The Moulin de la Galette in particular was not exactly respectable, which was precisely its attraction for bourgeois Parisians who went up there to “slum” on the weekends. Besides struggling artists, it was frequented by pimps, prostitutes, and local toughs. Renoir’s idealized vision hints at none of that. He’s more interested in the pleasurable surfaces of things, not their complicated substances.
When the painting was exhibited in 1877 Paris was not as peaceful as Renoir’s painting would have us believe. In an effort to revive the monarchy that year, President MacMahon dismissed his Republican-minded prime minister and put a monarchist in charge. He then dissolved the parliament. His constitutional coup d’état, known as le seize mai after the date on which it happened, nearly brought the rocky Third Republic down for good, just seven years into its existence. Renoir remained focused on light and color throughout. “For me, a picture should be something likable, joyous, and pretty—yes, pretty,” he said. “There are enough ugly things in life for us not to add to them.”
Like Renoir himself, the urbane figures in his painting are turning away, taking a day off from the ugly hassles of modern life. This form of escapist leisure for the masses was born in Renoir’s Paris. But most of it was taking place in new glitzy attractions on the boulevards. By 1877 the Moulin de la Galette was the last remaining guinguette in Paris. Visitors to the Orsay tend to get nostalgic over Renoir’s painting now, but there was already a good deal of nostalgia—for the simple life that once was—when it was painted.
Eventually Renoir became a successful, even wealthy painter in his old age. He and his Impressionist friends were the first generation of artists who managed to do this from the bohemian margins, without ascending the traditional hierarchy of the Parisian art world. Unlike Watteau and David, for example, Renoir did not have lengthy academic training. He went to the École des Beaux-Arts (what the Royal Academy became after the Revolution), but he didn’t stay