Renoir’s masterpiece, flogged for a pittance
Milo Andreas Wagner reviews Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at La Loge at the Courtauld Gallery
4 April 2008

Impressionism is often unfairly called “chocolate-box” art. I would agree
that to decorate a box of confectionery with a Monet is the gravest of
insults even to the cheapest of chocolates. But if the ubiquitous Monet is the poster child for Thorntons, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is surely the same for Charbonnel et Walker.

While Monet’s painting only became really interesting when he went blind (his earlier, bland daubings are seen at their best on grisly budget
greetings cards), Renoir, from his early 30s, produced a series of sublime masterpieces.

Renoir was a man who rendered the finest extant portrait of the composer Richard Wagner in just 35 minutes. A man who, in his later years, wheelchair-bound and afflicted with arthritis of the fingers and ankylosis of the right shoulder, had a brush strapped to his paralysed fist in order that he might still paint. And paint he did, in those later years – some of his finest pieces. These anecdotes attest to his two defining characteristics: he was brilliant and utterly dedicated to his work. The lasting impression of a Renoir is not one of sentimentality, or of superficial prettiness, even though it may be delightful to look at.

There is an extraordinarily physical quality to his work, too, not in the sense of being painterly, but in its depth and colour. Lawrence Gowing wrote that: “One feels the surface of his paint itself as living skin.” Complementing this textural depth is an intoxicating “blur”, a rail against sharp definition and the quintessence of the Impressionist project. The figures of a Renoir blend sublimely into their settings, and the settings back into the figures. That his subjects exist in intricate symbiosis with their environment is both a technique of the brush and a philosophical statement, nowhere better illustrated than in his early masterpiece of 1874, La Loge (The Theatre Box).

La Loge is the centrepiece of Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at La Loge, the latest exhibition in Britain to pay homage to the artist. The Courtauld Gallery has a well-deserved reputation for this sort of thing and it does not disappoint. Taking La Loge, one of the stars of its unparalleled permanent collection, as the centrepiece for this show is in keeping with the current trend at the Courtauld (and it probably saves them a fortune), but it’s also a shrewd move: the painting feels very much at home here. By judiciously selecting appropriate contemporary stablemates, much about La Loge is explained simply by reference to what is around it.

Looking from the stage, rather than at it, seems at first a delightful conceit: we are sucked into the very private world of the Parisian loggia box. But its inhabitants are supposed to be the sole objects of our appraisal: they are only at the theatre to be noticed. And what fine lenses we have through which to see them: Renoir’s masterpiece, Edgar Degas’ own enchanting La Loge, Mary Cassatt’s magnificent Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge. The spectacle of high society, so cruelly and barbarously mocked in the fictions of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and in the French daily Le Charivari (which printed a new loge box caricature each day), is unapologetically celebrated here in all its elegant charm.

In Renoir’s La Loge, gaze is all-important: while the man looks eagerly out into the theatre, presumably to see who is admiring his female companion, she lowers her opera glasses in order to be seen. Renoir, being the first to choose the theatre box as a subject, catches this moment with freshness and zeal.

In addition to being a vivid snapshot of a social scene, La Loge is also a masterpiece of portraiture. The delicate femininity expressed through careful attention to the woman’s lips and eyes is wonderful to behold. Renoir, sometimes considered more famous for his nudes, takes great care with clothing in this painting. The woman, a Parisian model named Nini (nicknamed “Fish-face”), is embellished with great delicacy, exemplifying Renoir’s obsession with pretty girls in expensive frocks. She sits in front of Renoir’s own brother, Edmond.

The extraordinary virtuosity of technique in this ambitious composition
leaves me incredulous that Renoir found no buyer, and in the end was forced to flog the painting for a pittance: only enough, in fact, to cover that month’s rent.

Renoir did not stick to the occasionally draconian requirements of the Impressionists: in La Loge he used black paint, and made no particular effort to convey the impression of the theatre in his consideration of light. Yet the painting is undoubtedly a great Impressionist success, and was certainly the most lastingly influential piece in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, where it was premiered. It’s true that in 1874 the rot had just set in: this show trampled over the barriers of acceptability and started traditional art’s slow decline into modern art. But let’s not punish Renoir for the sins of others.