(jazzy music)
Female: A lot of people know about Impressionism
but very few people know about the crisis
of Impressionism and this painting is a great
example of that crisis.
Male: We're in the Philadelphia Art Museum
looking at Auguste Renoir's The Large Bathers.
This is a painting that is not Impressionism,
you're absolutely right, that really
in a sense rejects Impressionism.
Here we have one of the leaders of the Impressionist
movement just a decade later turning his back
and saying, "No, I want to create Classical nudes."
Female: Exactly, and part of the impetus
for this was seeing Seurat's painting
of The Bathers at Asnieres and La Grande Jatte.
Both paintings which took Impressionist
subject matter, leisure in the city,
but made of that subject something
really timeless and gave them a sense
of permanence and a sense of being composed and thought out,
which were things you couldn't say about
Impressionist paintings.
Impressionist paintings look like they were done
quickly and on the spot.
Male: In fact, Renoir made numerous studies
for this painting, some large scale drawings,
and spent three years preparing this canvas.
The other influence that's so important
to keep in mind is that the artist
had finally gotten to Italy.
He'd gone to Rome.
He'd seen Raphael.
He had seen Classical art.
In fact, he went to Pompeii and had seen ancient fresco.
Unlike Impressionism which is seeking the fleeting,
here he's reversed himself.
Now he's seeking to create a painting
that is an expression of eternal beauty.
Female: That's right.
This is the crisis of Impressionism,
this turning away from the fleeting moment
that's caught rather quickly with sketchy brushstrokes
and the desire to paint something
that is more timeless and more permanent
and more connected to the traditions of art.
Male: But the result is a very curious painting.
On the one hand, you've got this very tight
handling of these figures.
You can really see an emphasis now on contour.
But it's been placed in this landscape
that is absolutely Modern,
very much a product of the 19th century.
Female: Of Impressionism.
It looks like an Impressionist landscape in the background.
Male: It really does.
So his painting is kind of a collage
of styles and of intentions.
Female: This is truly a crisis.
First of all, you have the subject of the nude,
which is an important subject in art history
especially since the Renaissance,
and the question of how do you create a modern nude
is something that Baudelaire asked
in his famous essay The Painter of Modern Life.
These don't look like Classical figures.
If you look at their faces,
they look like Parisian women,
so we know that we're not looking at
a Renaissance painting,
but it does end up being a clash of styles.
Male: Renoir is rejecting not only his own
impressionism, he's rejecting the pathway
that had been offered by Manet 20 years earlier
in paintings like Olympia or Le déjeuner sur l'herbe;
the incongruity of the nude in the modern world.
Female: So Manet, when he gives us Olympia,
gives us an image of a nude where we feel
the tension of that tradition coming into the modern world.
We're aware of that problem,
and that Renoir's trying to erase that problem.
Male: I think he is.
I think he's trying to reclaim young women
flitting about in a park-like setting,
which is an absurdity.
Yet he's trying to suggest that within
the veil of art, this is somehow
a reasonable proposition.
Female: What this highlights for me
is the importance of form.
If you think about Cezanne painting
the subject matter at the end of his life
in his Great Bathers series, or if you think
about Degas and other artists of that generation
picking up on this traditional subject of bathers,
the way that they apply paint is radically modern.
The problem with this painting, of course,
is that Renoir's really retreating into the past.
It's a profoundly conservative painting
in the way that it's painted.
Male: But it does speak to the tensions
between tradition and modernity
that were so present at the end of the 19th century.
This painting is absolutely a product of its day.
Female: There's a feeling that Impressionism
went too far, leaving behind
all of the seriousness of art history
to embrace the fleeting and the momentary.
Male: So if we look at this canvas,
despite all of the weighty issues that we're discussing,
these are figures that are meant to,
in a sense, speak to a sensual frivolity,
that recalls the 18th century,
that recalls the late Rococo.
You might think of Boucher, although
this is much more tightly rendered.
It's a sort of odd combination
of the subject of the 18th century
with references to the style of the 16th century
and perhaps even of the Ancient world.
It is really this kind of funny collage
that speaks to the 19th century's ability
to harvest ideas and styles from history
and bring them into the modern world.
(jazzy music)