"The reputation of the once exalted, still unshakably canonical, Impressionist has fallen on difficult days. Never mind the affront to latter-day educated tastes of a painting style so sugary that it imperils your mind's incisors; there's a more burning issue."
— Schjedahl, Peter (b. March 20, 1942)
Date
August 19, 2019
Metaphor
"The reputation of the once exalted, still unshakably canonical, Impressionist has fallen on difficult days. Never mind the affront to latter-day educated tastes of a painting style so sugary that it imperils your mind's incisors; there's a more burning issue."
Metaphor in Context
Who doesn't have a problem with Pierre-Auguste Renoir? A tremendously engaging show that centers on the painter's prodigious output of female nudes, "Renoir: The Body, the Senses," at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, sparks a sense of crisis. The reputation of the once exalted, still unshakably canonical, Impressionist has fallen on difficult days. Never mind the affront to latter-day educated tastes of a painting style so sugary that it imperils your mind's incisors; there's a more burning issue. The art historian Martha Lucy, writing in the show's gorgeous catalogue, notes that, "in contemporary discourse," the name Renoir has "come to stand for 'sexist male artist.' " Renoir took such presumptuous, slavering joy in looking at naked women—who in his paintings were always creamy or biscuit white, often with strawberry accents, and ideally blond—that, Lucy goes on to argue, the tactility of the later nudes, with brushstrokes like roving fingers, unsettles any kind of gaze, including the male. I'll endorse that, for what it's worth.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Peter Schjeldahl, "Skin Deep: Renoir's Nudes," The New Yorker (August 19, 2019): 90-91. <Link to newyorker.com>
Date of Entry
08/28/2019
