Renoir's Pastel Counterproofs

No artist has ever produced images as seductive and pleasurable, or so full of sweetness and simple joy, as Pierre-Auguste Renoir. "Renoir: The Pastel Counterproofs," a recent exhibition at the Adelson Galleries, in New York City, shoawed the artist at his most delicate and most creative. The prints, which involved a novel technique for the time, came about through the close friendship that developed between Renoir and Ambroise Vollard, the great French art dealer. Vollard did not meet Renoir until the early 1890s when the painter was well into his 50s and already something of a success, and Vollard was an up-and-coming gallery owner. Nonetheless, the two formed a firm friendship, and in spite of the artist's long-term association with another dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, they began to do some business. Vollard, an enthusiast of graphic work of all kinds, encouraged Renoir to try a new printing technique known as counterproof pastel.

The idea was simple: A sheet of damp paper is placed over a pastel and the whole is then put through a printing press. The top layer of the pastel is transferred onto the paper, making a thin and delicate impression of the image in reverse. Unlike most printmaking techniques, counterproof does not allow multiple impressions to be taken. It is, therefore, a technique whose sole advantage is in the quality of the image that it produces. In the case of Renoir, it turned out to perfectly reinforce the delicate, sensual, and pleasurable touch of the artist's hand. Moreover, Vollard had at his disposal the services of Auguste Clot, a master printer who had perfected the technique after considerable experimentation. He discovered that a very fine Japan paper took the best impression of the pastel when run through a lithographic press. Later he would mount the print onto a heavier sheet of paper to make the product more robust. Many of the pastels from which the counterproofs were taken are still in existence and clearly suffered little from giving birth to these airier versions of themselves.

The exhibition at the Adelson Galleries was all the more extraordinary because the 70 counterproof pastels by Renoir on display had never been exhibited before; they had been sequestered in one of Vollard's portfolios for almost 100 years. Their discovery provides new and extremely pleasurable insights into Renoir's activities in the last two decades of the 19th century. It was at this stage of his career that the artist was turning away from Impressionism and trying to develop a new means of constructing a more solid version of the world. He was also experimenting with new ways of painting, including fresco, as well as with other printmaking techniques. Renoir was never an artist who liked to stand still, and his whole life had already been a long and remarkable adventure.



The story of Renoir is the stuff of legend. He was born in Limoges, France, in 1841 and, at the age of 4, moved with his family to Paris, where he was brought up in an old house attached to the Louvre. He studied in a local school where the singing teacher was none other than the great composer Gounod, who reportedly wanted the youngster to pursue a career in music. But Renoir was, from the first, a visual artist. His parents?noting his passion for drawing?apprenticed him to a porcelain decorator at the age of 13. The young man was allowed two hours every day to wander the corridors of the Louvre and make sketches. It was there he obtained his passion for painting and first came across his heroes, Boucher, Watteau, and Fragonard, all rococo painters whose charisma, poetry, and appreciation of feminine charms had an obvious influence on the young Renoir's vision.

In 1874 Renoir took part in the first exhibition of the Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers?the group instantly dubbed 'Impressionists' by an outraged newspaper article. Despite the notoriety, paintings did not sell, or if they did, their prices were only enough to pay a few bills. Renoir was obliged to walk the streets with his masterpiece La Loge, visiting dealer after dealer until he found someone willing to give him enough money to cover his month's rent. A second Impressionist exhibition in 1877 was further savaged by the press. During these years Renoir was obliged to sell many of his greatest paintings for little more than a song. But as the economy improved, he at last began to make better sales. Most lucrative were the many portrait commissions that began to come his way. Paris was entering a new age of frivolity and wealth and the charming touch of the artist was in keeping with this new spirit. The public was beginning to come around to the brighter palette and more open handling of Impressionist art.

Renoir married and made trips abroad to Algeria, Italy, and Guernsey, painting everything and broadening his knowledge of art. By 1883, however, he began to feel that Impressionism wasn't enough for him. Vollard himself reports the painter's thoughts on the matter in his wonderful memoir Renoir: An Intimate Record (Dover Publications, Mineola, New York). "I had wrung Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor draw," Renoir reportedly said. "In a word, Impressionism was a blind alley as far as I was concerned."

Renoir rejected Impressionism on two counts: First, he found that the pure practice of painting outside was overly complex and confusing. The glare of daylight and the shifting weather conditions seemed to him to make the task impossible. He was interested when Corot told him that it was always necessary to rework paintings in the studio, and he began to feel that the achievements of Impressionism were not so great after all. "I'm sick and tired of the so-called 'discoveries' of Impressionism," Renoir told Vollard. "It isn't likely that the Old Masters were ignorant of them; and, if they did not use them it was because all great artists have despised mere effects. By making Nature simpler, they made it more impressive."

Second, Renoir was hankering after an art that could display more solid and convincing form. He had always felt a passion for sculpture, and he now began to make drawings and paintings in which he combined an Impressionist palette with more heavily contrasted linear drawing and more modeled three-dimensional form. This resulted in works such as Bathers of 1887, which was met with derision from all sides. The Impressionists saw it as a sellout, while the academics regarded the draftsmanship as weak and unlikely. Still, Renoir persevered. His passion was always to paint young women, and it was their form and charms that drove him to find a means of representation that would do them justice. It is hard to imagine today that the rosy and healthy young women he favored were regarded as ugly in the Paris of his day. Renoir professed to prefer an earthy beauty and a healthy complexion over the refined paleness that fashion then aspired to. "I don't see how artists can paint those over-bred females they call society women!" he told Vollard. "Have you ever seen a society woman whose hands were worth painting? A woman's hands are lovely?if they are accustomed to housework."

Renoir's paintings of this period still cause controversy today and enjoy the lively attention of both passionate fans and passionate detractors. At their best they are charming, sensitive, and often sensual, imbued with a lightness of spirit and an air of pleasure that is instantly seductive. But often the drawing contour is overstressed so that the figures take on an odd and unnatural appearance. Renoir's drawing was always somewhat idiosyncratic if not downright naïve, a fact that enhances the almost childish allure of some of the work but that accentuates its weakness when the contrast in a piece becomes strident.

In the pastel counterproofs we can see Renoir working on quick sketches of his favorite subjects: nudes and portraits of healthy young women; young women enjoying themselves in the park or in restaurants, young women bathing, young women chatting to one another. The approach varies from deploying a quite classical heavy line as in Baigneuse Assise?an almost painfully correct study?to a very open, suggestive approach as in Le Bain, where the figures all but dissolve in a landscape and it is hard to find any lines at all.

Renoir's problem with his new approach is well displayed in Jeune Fille au Cheveux Longs. The counterproof shows a young girl staring away from the viewer, her head slightly tilted. One senses that the artist wishes to convey the beauty of the young sitter, but the slight insistence in the line and the rather carefully modulated tonal modeling of the face have given the image a somewhat frozen look. Worse, the heavy, still line makes us aware of the oddity of the drawing. The face is shown in three-quarter view but the nose is drawn in profile. The placement of the eyes seems incorrect and the nearside jaw line is wobbly and improbable. The result is somewhat eerie and more reminiscent of the strangeness of Balthus than the lighthearted pleasures of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Other pieces are far more successful. In Baigneuse Assise, Renoir shows himself capable of the almost classical drawing in which every form of the nude is well realized. Here the artist displays his extreme sensitivity to the carriage and weight of the model as she turns away from us and tips forward slightly under her own weight. In spite of the studious nature of the piece, Renoir conveys his customary charm in both his touch and the disarmingly simplified rendering of some of the form, in particular the breast and right hand.

In some of the pieces, such as Le Croquet, Renoir experiments with a heavier dark line amid areas of broken and suggestive color. Here we see him trying to select which contours he wishes to define and which he wants to leave open. The color, moving across the piece in lively patches, acts as an almost decorative surface. A similar approach is taken in Berthe Morisot et sa Fille, where a heavy line alternates with open patches of color to produce an image that breathes life, even while insisting that some of the form will be defined.

In one image the artist succeeds on all counts. Enfant au Chapeau is a very careful portrait in which the bright-red blouse of a young girl is pitched against the browner reds of her hair and the lighter pinks of the ribbon on her hat. The forms of the head, hat, and clothing are achieved with a delicate rendering that dissolves into a haze of understated tonal gradations. Here the softness of pastel counterproof works to create a gauzelike atmosphere around the whole so that the entire image gels.

If Renoir's struggles during these years were formal, they always seem motivated by the pleasure of looking at his subjects. Indeed, nearly all of his work displays an exquisite lightness of touch, a sensitivity, and a joie de vivre that no doubt account for the artist's enduring popularity. "The truth is that in painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can reasonably be made into a formula," said the artist. "There is something in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is the essential. You come to Nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat."



John A. Parks is an artist and teacher who frequently contributes to American Artist, Drawing, Watercolor, and Workshop magazines.