The Renoir and Cézanne exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan

One seeks sensuality, the other the essentiality of forms. The subject is the same: the woman, beloved, wife, or bather whatever she is. These are Pierre Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne. Two painters born in the wake of Impressionism, from which they then distanced themselves, each developing their own peculiar creative direction. Great friends and workmates, but with different personalities, character and style. The canvases of the former express an overflowing joy of living – which he savored with genuine pleasure – those of the master from Aix tend to reduce and break down everything into geometric solids, in an aspiration to simplification that never finds peace.
To celebrate one hundred and fifty years since the birth of Impressionism, Palazzo Reale dedicates a major exhibition to these two protagonists of the movement, who profoundly marked and influenced the history of art of their time and later. The exhibition choice is interesting a double opposing narrative, which however does not fail to find points of contact. The two artists are immediately presented as friends and colleagues, and then described through works of similar content. The goal is not to elect the best; rather, the audience is called to appreciate the different creative sensibilities of the two masters; each capable of capturing and expressing a particular and different trait of reality. Even in front of the same subject.

Paul Cézanne and Pierre Auguste Renoir: the two protagonists reunited in Milan

As the introduction to the Palazzo Reale exhibition suggests, the two masters were first approached by the art dealer Paul Guillaume, who considered them since the dawn of the 20th century the true leaders of a new pictorial impetus – both classic and modern. He therefore began to acquire his works, many of which are now exhibited in Milan, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay and the Parisian Orangerie.

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The artist Paul Cézanne

Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, 1839 – 1906), just two years older than his colleague, dedicated his entire life to continuous and restless research. The one directed at the representation of objective and essential substance some things. He therefore differentiated himself almost immediately from the other pure Impressionists – who aimed to capture the subjective experience and the impression of the moment – ​​looking rather at geometric synthesis ee to the reduction of objects in essential forms: cone, cylinder, sphere. His brushstroke, pasty and angular, earned him the attribute of “bricklayer painting with trowel” by Manet.

The artist Pierre Auguste Renoir

If Cézanne came from a wealthy family (he was in fact the son of a banker), the same could not be said of Pierre Auguste Renoir (Limoges, 1841 – Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1919). Tailor father and worker mother; he made painting his profession and means of subsistence. He was an optimistic man – much more extroverted than his friend, who was instead grumpy and solitary – who always tried to express his passion in his work. joie de vivre that pervaded him. “For me a painting must be something lovable, happy and pleasant. The world is full of unpleasant things and there is certainly no need to make more of them”. Even when he was struck by the arthritic disease that prevented him from grasping the brush, he had it tied to his hand in order to continue painting.
Renoir’s second passion was art women. He loved to paint their faces, their seductive forms in nude bathers that echoed those of Titian and Ingres. As soon as he met Aline – his future wife – was enchanted by her and asked her to pose for him. In fact, she is seen as the protagonist of many of her works.

The Cézanne and Renoir exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan

Once past the entrance, the display projects the public into the picturesque atmosphere of Montmartre at the end of the 19th century. A tunnel lined with frames and colorful glass – perhaps a little too scenographic – introduces the actual exhibition. A similar immersion will then be found at the end. Before the last room, two corners reconstruct the masters’ ateliers, as if to evoke the atmosphere of the French Riviera of Aix-en-Provence and Cagnes. The landscape is missing… but the scent of oil and turpentine is there: the same one that all the paintings on display once gave off.

Between plein air painting and family portraits

The first sections of the route are dedicated to family portraits of painters, and to landscapes captured en plein air: as the good impressionistic rule required. The differences immediately emerge: Cézanne’s wife is constructed as a juxtaposed series of geometric solids combined with each other. The treatment he reserves for the human figure is the same as that used for inanimate fruits. And it is also equal to what happens in the landscape: in the Landscape with red roofwe note the author’s objective of extracting the basic forms from the scene, certainly not conditioned by the momentary impression.
Renoir’s natural views are very different, and he focuses rather on the brilliant colors and soft, flowing brushstrokes. If the painting of the first is all edges and segments, the second models the features in soft and gentle curves.

The Bathers by Cézanne and Renoir compared

Fertile discussion ground for both – despite the uniqueness of the results – are the Bathers. Cézanne cancels the distances between human and nature, wanting to express them harmony of their coexistence. The small canvases on display are some of the evolutionary stages of the journey that will end with the great work of the same name from 1905.
The Bathers – and women in general – painted by Renoir are of a completely different nature. Sensual, elegant, captured in their most overflowing expressions of joy of living. As is also understood by leafing through the catalog published by Skira, female figures were for him the heart and source of artistic inspiration. He said about it “if God hadn’t invented women’s gluttony, I would never have become a painter”.

Still life according to Cézanne and Renoir

The last section of works worthy of comment are the still lifes. A genre that more than anyone else allowed the painter from Aix to reduce reality to its most elementary forms. With the simple juxtaposition of touches of color, apples and pears were sculpted, analyzed from multiple points of view. In doing so, Cézanne laid the foundation for the birth of Cubism. Picasso would have made reference to these canvases, as the very last exhibition wall clearly underlines by comparing the two.
Once again, the inanimate portrayed by Renoir is something different. AND chromatic optimism and of subjects in their pure state: a plate of plump, ripe strawberries, a blue-patterned porcelain jar with a butter knife next to it. And then flowers: full vases, with petals and colors that overflow from the canvas, pushed by brushstrokes of pure and not at all diluted colour. A memory of the joy of painting that remains for a long time, like the sweet sugar of one of those fruits represented.

Emma Sedini

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