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“Vilhelm Hammershøi, Auguste Renoir, and the Problem of Innovation”
Southeastern College Art Association Conference University of North Florida, Jacksonville, October 2004
Dr. Rob Jensen Art Department University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506
2
Minor art and the canon: Hammershøi and Renoir
Consider the following eulogy offered the Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi, by one of his own countrymen upon the artist’s untimely death in 1916. “Renoir is an artist for the entire world; Hammershøi, name and repute notwithstanding, only for a small country.”1 The
Danish critic offered no criteria for his judgment; it was too obvious to him. Even in his own country Hammershøi could be no more than a minor artist. His diminished posthumous reputation within the history of art might be summed up by the decision in 1931 of the director of the Statens Museum in Copenhagen to return a gift of 28 pictures by Hammershøi to their donor merely on the grounds that the museum lacked space. Here is a poignant example of how the triumphant modernists translated the kind of stylistic differences between artists such as Vilhelm
Hammershøi and Pierre-Auguste Renoir into historical and geopolitical arguments and their long-term effects on the canon of modern art.
The meat of such a comparison is obvious. Two pictures with similar subjects painted roughly fourteen years apart encapsulate these differences: Renoir’s Study (Nude in the
Sunlight) 1875 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Hammershøi’s Seated Model, 1889 (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). Hammershøi worked nearly in monochrome, whereas Renoir loved the richness, variety, and luminosity of color. A Hammershøi painting minimizes the presence of the artist’s fashioning hand; when we do notice the artist’s brushwork, we tend to read his tightly controlled, methodical technique as a matter of cool or even cold objectivity. Conversely, for most Renoirs we are immediately conscious of the painting’s surface. We see a Renoir as a complex accumulation of apparently rapidly applied touches of paint. These are generally understood by his audiences to be the index of the subjective, warmly emotive response of the artist to the observed motif. Renoir’s technique gives a sensual liveliness to his subjects, which 3 themselves usually embody pleasure in a variety of forms. Hammershøi’s coolly methodical technique matches the stilled, introspective character of his pictures. Hammershøi’s two principal subjects, women and architectural environments, are invariably treated as inanimate geometries, where the possibility of movement, of change, has been excluded. Hammershøi chose to imprison his women in their interiors, to lock them in their windowless spaces, in a manner not seen in Western painting since Vermeer.
A century later, the differences between Hammershøi’s pictures of apparent self-denial in both aesthetic means and treatment of subjects and Renoir’s effusive, generous pictures may no longer seem as important as they did in 1916. Many art scholars now profess to question the hierarchies that gave Renoir international fame and Hammershøi local stature. Hammershøi’s pictures also may no longer appear so out-of-step with their times as they did at the beginning of the 20th century. For example, there is a particular kind of modern sensibility in Hammershøi’s pictures that is often missing from Renoir’s paintings, a descriptive concreteness that eschews the pictorial conventions to which Renoir often adhered. This difference is especially notable in their treatment of the nude. Renoir’s approach to the Nude in the Sunlight, strongly invokes pastoral conventions stretching back to Giorgione. At the same time, Renoir’s experimental approach to painting frequently led to an inconsistency in his technique. This is often expressed in the artist’s ambivalence of how to use the division of tones and Impressionist divided brushwork in respect to the representation of the human form. Characteristically, in the Nude in the Sunlight Renoir executed the background in broad strokes of paint between which the canvas often shows, yet treated the model as a closed form, fairly carefully worked up. Unlike Renoir,
Hammershøi painted very few nudes in his career. Seated Model was painted early in his career and its large size suggest that the artist intended it to be more than an academic study, to be, in 4 fact, an ambitious statement of his personal aesthetic. The picture has none of Renoir’s indecisiveness and makes a lucid public display of Hammershøi’s formal ambitions within a time-honored convention. However, Hammershøi appears content, in a way that Renoir never was, to depict his model as a model, and in a manner perhaps more closely related to Cézanne’s nudes than to academic studies, to see the human body more as a motif or a thing rather than as a symbol (unlike Renoir’s typical evocation in his nudes of both art and pleasure). There is also a visual reticence that pervades this and many other pictures by Hammershøi’s, a descriptive discreteness that makes the model retreat before our eyes, even when the whole point of the picture appears to be the artist’s careful tonal modeling of the woman’s body.
Hammershøi’s self-conscious refusal of color and his concentration on subtle gradations of tone are curiously closer in feel to Picasso and Braque’s cubist pictures painted around 1910, with their similarly restricted palette and subtle tonal modulations, than they are to the pictures by the contemporary artist we know Hammershøi most admired, the American James McNeill
Whistler. No actual relationship between Hammershøi’s work and that of the French cubists, of course, exists. To evoke such a relationship, however, is to engage in what has become a typical practice by anyone who seeks to raise the value of one artist’s work by comparing it to the work of more valued artists. Art historians, for example, have routinely extended such labels as
“impressionist” to artists far removed from the historical group known by that name, consistently with the aim to elevate the respective importance of the thus labeled artist. But even if one were to concede that there was a fundamental connection between Hammershøi’s essentially anti- modern aesthetic and the aggressively avant-garde practice of the Parisian cubists, would that sufficient to raise the reputation of Hammershøi within the history of late 19th-century European painting, to something on par with Renoir? 5
To answer this question it is perhaps first worth noting that unlike Renoir, Hammershøi acquired a very loyal clientele early on in his career, forming a base of patrons that steadily increased as he grew older. The provenances of the 72 paintings included in the catalogue of the
1998 Guggenheim Museum retrospective indicate that only a handful were in the artist’s possession at the time of his death and these clearly were all paintings the artist chose not to sell.2
In addition, a little less than a third of the paintings belonged during the artist’s lifetime to a single collector, a dentist named Alfred Bramsen, who began to collect the artist’s paintings in
1888 when Hammershøi was just 24. A number of the artist’s paintings were subsequently acquired by museums in Scandinavia, Germany, and elsewhere, signs that the artist enjoyed a notable international reputation during the years around 1900. The obscurity into which the artist’s work fell over the last three quarters of the 20th century cannot undermine the fact that during his lifetime he was widely perceived by his contemporaries to be a very significant artist.
Yet, having said this and despite the artist’s Guggenheiim retrospective, shown in New
York, Paris, and Copenhagen, and many other indications of renewed interest in his oeuvre, it is highly unlikely that Hammershøi will ever become canonical on par with Renoir. This is because art history neither considers aesthetic merit nor treatment of subject matter as decisive constituents of artistic importance in evaluation the historical stature of an artist. Although even professional art historians have not always been conscious of this fact, canonicity is determined by the perception that an artist has made significant contributions to the larger history of art, that is, that an artist is understood to have made some important innovations that subsequently influenced the development of art. This clearly can be said of Renoir, but not of Hammershøi.
There is, therefore, a definite ceiling to the rehabilitation of the artist’s reputation.
Returning to the Guggenheim retrospective, the Danish curators selected for the show 6 roughly half the paintings dating from the years before the artist’s 40th birthday, and took the other half from the last decade of his working life, that is, up to 1914, when his career was cut short first by the outbreak of the First World War and then by throat cancer, from which he died, following a long illness, in 1916. Clearly the curators believed that Hammershøi’s work gradually matured over time, but they also wished to demonstrate that the artist achieved a substantial, high quality body of work in the youthful stages of his career. In other words, the fairly even distribution of pictures means that Hammershøi’s work had no peak period, consistent with an artist who was not and is not today valued for his innovations. This perception is supported by the nearly universal absence of reproductions of his art from the general surveys of the era.
The international rediscovery of Hammershøi’s work has led some art scholars to claim
Hammershøi as an innovative artist, but one who used a vocabulary misunderstood or ignored by audiences guided by modernist aesthetics. They assume that once modernist prejudices are wiped away, Hammershøi, largely on the strength of the aesthetic qualities of his pictures, will emerge as a major artist of lasting historical significance. However, these efforts, as so many similar rehabilitation efforts, flounder over a basic confusion as to what makes works of art canonical and what actually constitutes innovation in art. For example, Poul Vad, Hammershøi’s principal biographer, has observed that in Hammershøi’s art, “conservatism and radicalism are blended in the oddest way.”3 For conservatism Vad means Hammershøi’s conventional Danish middleclass values and tastes and an artistic practice so firmly grounded in tradition.
Conversely, Hammershøi’s radicalism Vad discovers in the deeply idiosyncratic nature of his painting. Vad makes an error art historians often make, which is to confuse idiosyncrasy with innovation. 7
Hammershøi’s work demonstrates that it is possible to be inventive without inspiring a subsequent generation of artists. Hammershøi was both personally and artistically insular. He always worked alone and resisted contact with other artists. Hammershøi’s isolation is best illustrated by the story of his efforts to meet Whistler, who was not only Hammershøi favorite contemporary artist, but who also influenced an entire generation of European and American printmakers, painters, and photographers who adopted variants of Whistler’s tonalism.
Hammershøi visited London in 1897, drawn there through the mediation of his patron Alfred
Bramsen, who had gone to London to study music, had met Whistler there and had shown him some his paintings by Hammershøi. Bramsen relayed Whistler’s favorable reception to the artist. Yet, though he remained in London for almost eight months, Hammershøi never managed to meet the great man. Unable to form important interactions with his contemporaries,
Hammershøi was equally unfortunate in attracting no followers. Without imitators and younger admirers, Hammershøi’s inventions, such as they were, essentially died with the artist. In this sense, his art represents an aesthetic dead end.
Hammershøi quite likely would not have believed in any case that art was moving forward in any direction, which again set him in opposition to his Parisian counterparts and most of his Scandinavian contemporaries. Hammershøi never showed interested in innovation for its own sake and his aesthetic was in most respects backward-looking. One sees strong echoes in
Hammershøi’s work of the painters of the early 19th-century “golden age” of Danish painting, such as Christen Købke, and farther back, Vermeer, whose work Hammershøi closely studied in
Amsterdam. Out of these sources, and more contemporary influences such as Whistler,
Hammershøi achieved the fundamental elements of his style while still little more than a student.
So committed to this art of planar geometries, tonal modulations and tightly disciplined, nearly 8 architectonic brushwork, did Hammershøi become that he was to able wholly to resist the lessons offered by modern French painting.
Hammershøi twice visited Paris. The first time, in 1889, he accompanied four pictures, which he exhibited at the Universal Exposition, where he won a bronze medal. Hammershøi returned to Paris two years later, this time partly in a half-hearted effort to enlist the dealer, Paul
Durand-Ruel to promote his work, where he remained for a period of almost a year. Notably neither trip made any significant impression on Hammershøi’s art. His only recorded reaction to the latest French art fashions is found in a letter to a fellow Danish artist in early 1892. He noted that he had recently attended an exhibition at the gallery Le Barc de Boutteville of the
Society of Impressionist and Symbolist Painters, a group of young French artists, whose leading luminary was the symbolist theorist and painter, Maurice Denis. Hammershøi called the show
“rubbish” and reported “Most of the paintings look like jokes.”4 Tellingly, the only physical record of Hammershøi two stays in Paris is a single painting copied from an ancient sculpture in the Louvre.
Hammershøi’s refusal to be seduced by modern French painting was atypical of
Scandinavian artists who resided in Paris during the last decades of the 19th century. For
Hammershøi’s important contemporaries who made the trip to Paris, Impressionism and/or
Postimpressionism fundamentally reshaped the academically flavored naturalism of their youth, brightening their palettes and emphasizing the brushwork in their pictures. Some of
Hammershøi’s Scandinavian contemporaries even adopted the more extreme forms of symbolist painting that appeared in myriad forms in both the official and unofficial Paris exhibitions of the
1890s. But no artist stands in greater contrast to Hammershøi than his Norwegian contemporary,
Edvard Munch. Working in Paris within months of Hammershøi’s second Parisian sojourn, 9
Munch’s art underwent a fundamental transformation, in which naturalism gave way to overtly symbolist themes like “anxiety” and “jealousy.” Fusing naturalism’s social concerns with
Postimpressionism’s liberation of color and pattern from naturalistic representation, Munch laid the groundwork for the post-1900 expressionists, which is why Munch enjoys a prominent place in the canon. With the same geographical disadvantages as Hammershøi, Munch showed how a provincial artist could learn from French modernism and how a cultural outsider could successfully promote one’s art on an international stage.
It is the failure to innovate that makes the minor artist. We might extend this argument further and say that a minor artist is also someone forced to work within a major language (the site of the chief innovations of the day) that is not one’s own, or, to go still further, to consciously refuse to work in that language even to the detriment of one’s own future place in history. Renoir embodied that major language for artists everywhere in the Western world at the beginning of the 20th century. Hammershøi’s unwillingness to paint within that tradition, regardless of how beautiful his paintings may be, doubly contributed to his status as a minor painter. Even if Hammershøi was an original artist in his own day, his innovations were not taken up, whereas Renoir and his friends exerted a dramatic worldwide impact on the history of modern art. It is important to note in this context that over the course of his career, Renoir’s work underwent significant stylistic changes. Conversely, Hammershøi’s style, and this is one of the chief fascinations of his art, changed very slowly. He arrived very early on at his manner of painting and stubbornly adhered to it for the remaining thirty years of his life. This fundamental difference in their respective practices is to be accounted for by the radically different importance they attached to innovation. And it is their respective relation to innovation that accounts for Renoir’s canonical status and Hammershøi’s relative obscurity. 10
Quantifying the 19th-Century European Canon
Canons, whatever else they are, reflect the consensus view within the discipline as to what is most important. Canons, moreover, are less subject to changing fashions and personal tastes than art historians generally credit, and certainly since the beginning of the 20th century have altered very little, except through additions. Works of art are neither incommensurable nor equal. They can be precisely studied and compared. And one of the most interesting questions they pose is why some works of art and some artists are more important, more innovative than others. To paraphrase Dominick LaCapra writing about literary canons, all works of art are worth thinking about, but some works of art are especially useful to think with, that this value is renewed in different ways over time. Exceptional works of art do not simply mirror their times or exist in autonomous self-reflexivity. They redefine the times in which they are rooted and continue to exert an influence over the art and artists that follow in their wake. The importance of a work of art is directly related to how its contributions are picked up and used by other artists and how great such resonances are. This is because canons are driven by a dynamic interplay between innovation and tradition. Artists, not curators or academic art historians, make canons, or at least the canons that matter. Artistic ideas, like the ideas of science or the humanities, live on and acquire significance only through use, which of course is what we mean when we speak of artistic traditions. Artists are always the first and principal users of other artists’ work.
In his 1962 classic The Shape of Time George Kubler argued that it was precisely through the pattern of innovation and its dispersion that art and science most resembled each other. For
Kubler “the value of any rapprochement between the history of art and the history of science is the display of common traits of invention, change, and obsolescence that the material works of artists and scientists both share in time.”5 A great work of art, in Kubler’s sense, is very much 11 like a new idea in physics. It arises from a complex stew of cultural material, including not only major scientific or artistic discoveries that precede the innovation, but also, among other elements, the contributions of lesser ideas and individuals. It should be emphasized that no matter how canonical an artist or a work of art may be, revolutions in art, like revolutions in science, are never the work of an isolated individual. However, within these collaborative environments, individual figures clearly play decisive roles.
In order to establish art history’s consensus view of artistic importance in the 19th century
I undertook a textbook illustration survey of its most reproduced artists and works of art. For this purpose I chose thirty-six textbooks by German, Italian, French, English, and American authors published over the last four decades in order to get as diverse a data set as possible. With an obviously large number of artists to choose from, I limited my sample to fifty European painters, print-makers, and sculptors (as well as Americans who made their most significant work in Europe). A preliminary review of the most frequently illustrated artists in nine survey textbooks in my personal collection yielded roughly the top two-thirds of my list. For the bottom third, I selected a variety of artists whose works I found occasionally, but not consistently reproduced in the textbooks. One soon discovers in a survey of this kind that important but un- canonical artists are never represented by more than a single image, whereas for the top twenty- five artists in the rankings listed in Table 1, no 19th century survey text offers less than two illustrations, and many have significantly more. Hammershøi was illustrated only once in the 36 texts. Obviously there is an enormous difference in the quantity of illustrations devoted to the artists at the top compared to the bottom of the rankings. 12
Table 1. Artists ranked according to total number of illustrations in 34 European and American textbooks that include surveys of 19th-century European art* Rank Artist ills. Rank Artist ills. Rank Artist ills. Rank Artist ills. 1 Goya 144 14 Turner 78 27 Blake 35 39 Bonheur 17 2 Manet 130 15 Géricault 74 28 Pissarro 34 39t Caillebotte 17 3 Cézanne 134 16 Renoir 70 28t Menzel 34 41 Sisley 15 4 Van Gogh 121 17 Seurat 69 30 Gros 24 42 Böcklin 14 5 Monet 129 18 Constable 66 31 Moreau 23 42t Gérôme 14 6 Delacroix 119 19 Friedrich 55 32 Girodet 22 44 Rude 13 7 David 116 20 Munch 55 33 Rousseau 21 45 Sargent 12 8 Degas 101 21 Whistler 49 34 Morisot 20 46 Brown 11 9 Gauguin 96 22 Cassatt 46 34t Runge 20 47 Couture 9 10 Rodin 94 23 Corot 45 36 Millais 19 47t Bouguereau 9 11 Ingres 92 23t Millet 45 37 Puvis 18 49 Delaroche 9 12 Courbet 90 25 Canova 43 37t Rossetti 18 50 Meissonier 8 13 Daumier 83 26 Ensor 38 *Sources: Adams, Laurie Schneider. Art Across Time. Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1999. Argan, Guilio C. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1977. Bocola, Sandro. The Art of Modernism. Munich, Londodn and New York: Prestel, 1999. Brettell, Richard R. Modern Art 1851-1929. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate. Nineteenth-Century European Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Cole, Bruce and Adelheid Gealt. Art of the Western World. New York: Summit Books, 1989. Craske, Matthew. Art in Europe 1700-1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Eisenman, Stephen, ed. Nineteenth-Century Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Fleming, William. Art & Ideas. 8th edition. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990. Gauthier, Maximilien. Tout l’art du monde. Volume 3. Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1966. Gebhardt, Volker. The History of Art. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Barron’s, 1997. Gombrich, Ernst. The Story of Art. 16th edition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995. Gowing, Lawrence, ed. A History of Art. Rev. ed. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Andromeda, 1995. Hamilton, George Heard. 19th and 20th century Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, need date. ------. Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Hartt, Frederick. Art. 4th edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993. Hollingsworth, Mary. L’Arte nella Storia dell’Uomo. Florence: Giunti, 1989. Honour, Hugh and John Fleming. The Visual Arts: A History. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 2002. Huyghe, René, ed. L’Art et l’homme. Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1961. Janson, H. W. History of Art. 6th edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. Johnson, Paul. Art. A New History. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Kemp, Martin, ed. The Oxford History of Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kleiner, Fred S., Christin J. Mamiya, and Richard G. Tansey. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. 11th edition. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2001. Lucie-Smith, Edward. Art and Civilization. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993. Novotny, Fritz. Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1780-1880. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Penck, Stefanie, ed. Prestel Atlas Bildende Kunst. Munch, London, and New York: Prestel, 2002. Raynal, Maurice. The Nineteenth Century. Geneva: Skira, 1951. Read, Herbert. The Styles of European Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1965. Reynolds, Donald Martin. Nineteenth-Century Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Rosenblum, Robert and H. W. Janson. Art of the Nineteenth Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Sayre, Henry M. World of Art. 2nd edition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1997. Silver, Larry. Art in History. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993. Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History. Revised edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Terrarikum Valerio, ed. Lezioni di Storia dell’Arte. Volume 3. Milan: Skira, 2003. Thullier, Jacques. History of Art. Paris: Flammarion, 2003. Wilkins, David G., Bernard Schultz, and Katheryn M. Linduff. Art Past, Art Present. 2nd edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Zeitler, Rudolf. Die Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1966.
13
To get a corroborating measure of canonical importance, seen here in Table 2, I used the electronic catalogue of the Getty Research Institute. Searching the Library of Congress artist subject heading listings for each artist yielded the total number of titles in the Getty library. This figure is listed in the column next to the artist’s name. The adjacent column indicates the total number of monographs in the Getty library published just since 1990.
Table 2. Artists ranked by number of citations under the Library of Congress subject index in the Getty Research Institute Library, L.A. (August 2004) Rank Artist Total Citations Rank Artist Total Citations citations since 1990 citations since 1990
1 van Gogh 383 58 26 Géricault 53 5 2 Goya 261 38 27 Millet 51 4 3 Cézanne 231 28 28 Menzel 49 6 4 Gauguin 221 21 29 Rossetti 48 6 5 Lautrec 175 16 30 Friedrich 40 9 6 Degas 159 14 31 Moreau 33 6 7 Turner 155 7 31t Böcklin 33 2 8 Munch 154 13 33 Morisot 32 6 9 Rodin 151 14 34 Millais 31 1 10 Delacroix 147 14 34t Sargent 31 5 11 Renoir 142 11 36 Cassatt 30 4 12 Monet 131 24 37 Sisley 25 2 13 Daumier 130 6 38 Runge 24 1 14 Manet 127 12 39 Puvis de Chavannes 22 0 15 Ensor 108 9 40 Hunt, H. 18 1 15t Ingres 108 11 41 Gérôme 17 3 17 Courbet 107 10 41t Rousseau 17 0 18 Blake 102 9 43 Meissonier 16 0 19 Whistler 99 7 44 Delaroche 13 1 20 Corot 94 7 45 Girodet 10 2 21 Constable 79 4 46 Bonheur 9 0 22 Canova 76 9 46t Bouguereau 9 0 23 Seurat 62 13 46t Caillebotte 9 3 24 David 59 4 49 Rude 7 0 25 Pissarro 54 3 50 Couture 5 0
While there is some shuffling in the rankings among the top twenty artists between the two data sets, an artist’s ranking either in the top or bottom half remains extremely consistent between the two tables. Among the top 25 in Table 1 only Caspar David Friedrich and Mary
Cassatt lose their places in Table 2 (in favor of Camille Pissarro and James Ensor). Renoir ranks higher in overall monographs, 10th, than he does in the number of textbook illustrations, 15th. In the textbook illustration study Monet had almost twice as many illustrations as Renoir, yet is below Renoir in Table 2 in total monographs. This is testimony to my earlier point about the 14 enduring popularity of Renoir’s art, which is in excess of the scholarly judgment of his importance. (Popularity exerts pressure on publishers, curators, and writers to satisfy public demand.) Monet has surpassed Renoir in the number of monographs devoted to the respective artists since 1990, which suggests that Renoir’s popularity has diminished somewhat in recent years.
Finally, I wanted to establish the most frequently reproduced works by the artists in my sample. I stopped at 52 works, listed in Table 3, all of which appeared in at least nine separate textbooks or one quarter of the total number of books in the sample. Renoir placed two paintings among the top fifty most frequently reproduced. Both paintings belong, not surprisingly, to a four-year period in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the core years of the Impressionist circle’s group exhibitions, when both art history and the marketplace considers Renoir to have painted his most important work.
Table 3. Fifty-two 19th-century paintings, prints, and sculptures ranked according to the number of 36 texts overall in which the works are illustrated Rank Artist Title # Rank Artist Title # 1 Géricault Raft of the Medusa 29 22t van Gogh Starry Night 15 2 Goya Third of May, 1808 27 28 Daumier Rue Transnonain 14 2t Seurat A Sunday at La Grande Jatte 27 29t Gauguin Vision after the Sermon 14 4 Manet Olympia 26 29t Gros Pesthouse at Jaffa 14 4t David Oath of the Horatii 26 31 Courbet The Stonebreakers 13 6 Constable The Hay Wain 22 31t Goya The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 13 6t Delacroix Death of Sardanapalus 22 31t Manet Emile Zola 13 6t Manet Déjeuner sur l’herbe 22 34 David Napoleon Crossing Alps 12 9 Courbet Burial at Ornans 21 34t Delacroix Women of Algiers 12 9t David Death of Marat 21 34t Gauguin Where do we come from?… 12 9t Manet Bar at the Folies-Bèrgère 21 34t Rodin Balzac 12 12 Courbet Studio of the Painter 20 34t Seurat Bathers at Asnières 12 12t Delacroix Liberty Leading the People 20 39 Caillebotte Paris Street: Rainy Weather 11 12t Monet Rouen Cathedral (all versions) 20 39t Canova Paolina Borghese as Venus 11 15 Rude La Marseillaise 19 39t Rodin The Thinker 11 16 Rodin Gates of Hell 18 42 Cézanne Large Bathers (Philadelphia) 10 16t Turner Rain, Steam, and Speed 18 42t Degas 14-Year-Old Dancers 10 18 Munch The Scream 17 42t Monet Women in the Garden 10 19 Goya Family of Charles IV 16 42t Renoir The Boating Party 10 19t Monet Impression: Sunrise 16 42t Rossetti Annunciation 10 19t Renoir Moulin de la Galette 16 42t Whistler Falling Rockets 10 22t Delacroix Massacres at Chios 15 49 Gauguin The Specter Watches Over Her 9 22t Millet The Gleaners 15 49t Goya Saturn Devouring Children 9 22t Rodin Burghers of Calais 15 49t Ingres Large Odalisque (Louvre) 9 22t van Gogh Night Café 15 49t Turner Slave Ship 9
The University of Chicago economist, David Galenson, has measured the prices of 15
Renoir’s paintings at auction over the last four decades.6 The line on Galenson’s chart was produced by considering the value of Renoir’s paintings at auction, tabulated according to the artist’s age when he painted them, and econometrically adjusted to take into account the differing physical supports of the image, its size, and the modern fluctuation in the relative prices paid for all works of art sold at auction.
Galenson established that the peak year in Renoir’s prices is 1876, the same year he painted Moulin de la Galette, his most frequently reproduced painting in my textbook study.
The artist was then 35 years old. Following a sharp rise near the beginning of Renoir’s career, the respective value of his paintings fall sharply as we move toward the artist’s old age.
Galenson also discovered close correlations between an artist’s age/price profile and other forms of measuring artistic importance, such as frequency of textbook illustrations, museum hangings, and similar demonstrations of institutional valuing of art objects.
Galenson’s age/price profile is also reflected in the same in Table 1 of the seventy Renoir 16 illustrations reproduced in the 35 textbooks. The average year for the reproductions was 1880.
And in fact, less than a quarter (23%) of Renoir’s reproduced paintings date from after 1882.
The percentage is even smaller (10%) for works painted after 1887, despite the fact that the artist lived and painted for almost another quarter century.
Renoir’s auction prices and frequency of image reproduction confirm the not unsurprising notion that the artist has been perceived to be most innovative near the beginning of his career. I should add that in Galenson’s surveys of over a hundred major modern artists’ careers they all have significant spikes in their profiles that correspond to that period in their careers when they made their most significant contributions.
Renoir, the Uncertain Innovator
Let us recall the familiar facts of Renoir’s early career as an artist. For much of the
1860s he pursued, with limited commercial success, an aesthetic grounded in the work of
Edouard Manet and closely connected to that of his friend Edmond Bazille. Then, Renoir spent the summer of 1869 painting alongside Claude Monet, at which time the two artists worked out the technical innovations that later came to be most closely identified with the impressionist aesthetic. Their experimental, collaborative research set the stage and helped cement the personal relationships that led to the highly visible, if not commercially successful impressionist exhibitions of the 1870s. Renoir, as much as any of his friends, benefited from the critical attention garnered at these exhibitions, finding an important body of collectors, and a growing number of portrait commissions. He also seems to have been the greatest beneficiary among the
Impressionists of the initial collaborative environment in which they worked. All of this is consistent with Galenson’s age/price chart.
To give a reference point to Renoir’s profile we might refer to Galenson’s age/price 17 profile for Paul Cézanne’s career. The value of Cézanne’s paintings steadily increases
up to the age of 45. The brief dip thereafter Galenson explains is a statistical anomaly caused by a preponderance of works from this later period in public collections and hence out of market circulation. There is obviously a dramatic contrast in how these two artists have been valued by the market and by art history. Clearly, Cézanne’s price and reputation increased comparatively slowly with age and his peak value comes right at the end of his life. That is, again, not surprisingly, when Cézanne’s art has been generally perceived to have contributed most to the history of modern art. Galenson’s discovery of the close parallels between frequency of image reproductions, curatorial decisions about which works of art are hung from permanent collections, and auction results confirms the simple, yet astonishing fact that the origin of the modern canon, whether art historians like it or not, can be routinely, statistically, reduced to the single criterion of innovation. 18
Now we know that Renoir saw himself at the forefront of artistic experimentation in his time. As Lawrence Gowing wrote in the catalogue for the last major Renoir retrospective in
1985, “None of his friends experimented so widely and inconsistently. None would have cared to embark on so many different styles, or to imitate them so closely.” 7 Gowing believed that
Renoir’s empirical experimentation was a strength, even if it was also the source of the troubling weakness often found in his art, reflected in the steadily declining value attached to his paintings after the 1870s. From a very different and less admiring critical perspective, Fred Orton concluded from Renoir’s experimentalism, eclecticism, and inconsistency, that “in the History of
Impressionism it’s Renoir who causes the Modernist most problems in terms of the value to be placed on his paintings and hence the value of those paintings, and of Renoir, to Modernism.”8
Another way of saying this is that the vast output of Renoir’s paintings following 1876 has strongly interfered with our perception of Renoir as a major, innovative artist.
The crux of the matter is Renoir’s famous artistic crisis of the 1880s. Art scholars have struggled to account for the merits of Renoir’s art from the early 1880s onward. For example, in the catalogue for a Renoir retrospective held at the Kunsthalle in Tübingen in 1996, the show’s organizer claimed that the exhibition was designed to showcase “the real qualities that made
Renoir a great artist [and to rescue] him from the flood of his-primarily later-production.”9 Not surprisingly, out of the show’s 105 entries, the five years bracketing each side of 1876, contributed 55 paintings, or over half the works, in the exhibition, and only 27 pictures date from after 1886, that is, from the last 30, still very productive years of the artist’s career. Despite the curator’s well-meaning claim to be doing something new with his exhibition, that is, saving
Renoir from himself, Galenson’s numbers show that the curator’s supposed correction to
Renoir’s legacy is, or rather, and more importantly, was the norm, current even in the artist’s 19 lifetime.
In a conversation later recorded by his dealer Ambroise Vollard, Renoir confessed that he had, around 1883, “wrung Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I couldneither paint nor draw. In a word, Impressionism was a blind alley, as far as I was concerned.”10 This extraordinary admission has been subsumed under a general “crisis” of
Impressionism and in the process the implications of Renoir’s confession have gone largely unexplored. At best, such explanations as persistent criticism of the Impressionists’ practices, their failure to find a wider market for their art and the subsequent defections of key participants to the Salon, Degas’ insistence on the inclusion of artists in the Impressionist exhibitions seen by other members of the group as aesthetically inconsistent with the ambitions of the core participants, and the appearance of juste milieu Salon artists, adapting Impressionist technique and subjects to Salon tastes, have all been advanced as explanations for the apparent exhaustion of the Impressionist project in the early 1880s.11 Yet what has been overlooked is the most remarkable aspect of Renoir’s plight. When, in the previous history of Western art, has a major artist come to believe that the style upon which his artistic reputation was based had been exhausted? Other artists have survived criticism, found imitators, and been cast loose from the ties of early collaborators without feeling impelled to radically altar their styles. Why was it that
Renoir found himself in this extraordinary position? Would the Barbizon painters of the previous generation have ever reached the same conclusion? Certainly not Corot, or Daubigny, or Millet, or Rousseau. Nor does one find this personal crisis in figures such as Courbet and
Manet.
Renoir responded to this crisis first by attempting to theorize his aesthetic position, dreaming briefly of organizing an artists’ exhibition society devoted to an aesthetic principle he 20 called “irregularism,” and around which he hoped to develop an “entire grammar of art.”12 This appeal to theory, so uncongenial to such a process-oriented artist, quickly faded to be replaced with the notion that Impressionism must be reconciled with the French classical tradition.
Renoir never cited who his fellow participants would be, and in fact, it was during this period that the core Impressionists had generally drifted out of contact with each other.
John Rewald, in his definitive history of Impressionism, made no mention of these peculiar plans of Renoir’s nor has more recent studies of Renoir taken a particular interest in them, except to regard his actions as consistent with an artist searching for a way out of
Impressionism and anticipating his turn towards French classicism.13 But what is this effort to theorize his art but an attempt to conceptually redefine it in the wake of his failure to empirically, experimentally paint his way out of Impressionism? We should think it odd that Renoir felt he had reached a dead end. Would the Barbizon painters of the previous generation have ever reached such a conclusion? Renoir lost his way because he felt himself to be going in some direction. And to have that sense of direction, of technical progress, is also to take on the burden of this apparently newly found pressure to innovate. There are other explanations certainly.
Paul Durand-Ruel, his dealer, suffered financial reversals in the early eighties that made him unable to meet his artists’ monetary needs. And Renoir’s more commercially successful contemporaries, such as Jean Béraud and Henri Gervex, had discovered at this time a formula for incorporating the impressionist palette and the strategic use of its facture with the academically- approved “finish” of Salon art. But these other explanations are really all part of the same situation: a mature artist who was failing to sustain his relationship with his audience, and who felt compelled to change, to somehow regain, if not financial rewards, then at least a renewed sense of historical mission. 21
In Renoir’s case, it meant a retreat from his earlier identity as an aesthetic innovator, ironically, a retreat that cost the artist disastrous financial and symbolic reversals. He told
Vollard many years later that the critics “roundly trounced” the most important painting he made during these years, the Bathers, to which he devoted three years before finally exhibiting the work in 1887. “This time, everybody... agreed that I was a lost soul.”14 The collectors who had begun to admire his impressionist pictures melted away; he lost all his portrait commissions.
Moreover, all his early patrons would never in the future buy a post-1880 painting. Renoir’s subsequent retreat to a semblance of his style from his peak years was an attempt to placate his dealer and clients. Even as he struggled to complete the Bathers he wrote reassuringly to
Durand-Ruel “I think you will be pleased this time. I have gone back to the old painting, the gentle light sort and I don’t intend ever to abandon it again.” 15
Renoir was never again to be at the innovative forefront of modern art. Or, to put it another way, admirers of Renoir’s later work were never able to make a powerful case as to how precisely those works innovated. Renoir’s commercial fortunes were restored when Durand-
Ruel opened the American market for Impressionism after 1886, but ironically his canonization in the 1890s retrospectively placed the artist permanently as a painter of the 1870s, and not as a vital, living artist, despite the twenty-plus working years left before him. So, even in the face of frequent critical support, as the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe noted in 1912, public collections contained nothing of his later work and “Exhibitions neglect the old Renoir for the young.”16 In life Renoir paid the price of international fame by his lifelong struggle under the burden of innovation. After death, canonization worked to stabilize, however uncomfortably and restlessly, the value and meanings attached to his art.
Who knows how conscious Renoir and Hammershøi were of the pressure to innovate. 22
But in their behavior we can see how Hammershøi responded to this pressure by turning his back on the thirst for the new. Similarly, Renoir struggled to find a novel artistic language that he could make his own, subtly overshadowed first by his friend Claude Monet and later by another friend, Paul Cézanne. That Renoir fared better than Hammershøi may have had much to do with the artist’s close association with some of the most significant innovators of the late-19th century, sharing many of their artistic ambitions. Hammershøi, arguably as great an artist as Renoir, but from a country that was then a cultural backwater, possessed few of Renoir’s advantages. He did not have the kind of personal relationships and artistic stimulations that cemented Renoir’s place in the histories of modern art. And what opportunities he had, he was unable to leverage.
Instead of exploiting his Parisian experiences to position his art vis-à-vis the Parisian avant- gardes, as Edvard Munch did so ably, Hammershøi retreated into the quiet of Denmark, barely touched by French modernism, and for a long while slipped silently from view.
1 Carl V. Petersen, review of the Hammershøi exhibition at the Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, in Tilskueren (Copenhagen, 1916), 515-25. Passage cited in translaton in Poul Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi, trans. Kenneth Tindall (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 354. 2 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916): Danish Painter of Solitude and Light (New York: June 19 to September 7, 1998). 3 Poul Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916), 164. 4 Quoted by Vad, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916), 17. 5 George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962), 10. 6 Among his many books on the subject see especially Galenson, Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 7 Lawrence Gowing, “Renoir’s Sense and Sentiment,” in Renoir (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 32. 8 Fred Orton, “Reactions to Renoir Keeping Changing,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 8 (1985), reprinted in Nicholas Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin, 1987), 375. 9 Götz Adriani, “Preface,” Renoir: Gemälde 1860-1917 (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1999), 10. 10 Ambroise Vollard, Renoir, an intimate record (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1925), 118. 11 See, for example, Joel Isaacson, The Crisis of Impressionism 1878-1882 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1980). 23
12 Renoir, “The Society of the Irregularists (May 1884),” reprinted in Wadley, 164-65. th 13 John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4 rev. ed. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973). 14 Renoir quoted by Vollard, reprinted in Wadley, 165. 15 Letter to Durand-Ruel (September-October 1885), reprinted in Wadley, 167. 16 Meier-Graefe, Auguste Renoir (Paris, 1912), reprinted in Wadley, 247-56, esp. 256.