Enjoy Yourself

"Why do people always look for ideas in painting?" asked the great French Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir. "When I look at a masterpiece, I am satisfied merely to enjoy it." Last week at Manhattan's Wildenstein gallery plenty of satisfied art lovers were thoroughly enjoying themselves. The reason: the first big U.S. show of Master Renoir's paintings in a decade.

Drawn mainly from private collections in the U.S., the exhibit offered many seldom-seen glimpses into Renoir's sunny, easygoing world. Unlike some of his contemporaries who were fascinated by life's seamy edges, Renoir doted on what was pretty, could see no reason for painting the drab and bizarre. Even Montmartre's famous dance hall, Le Moulin de la Galette, he peopled with gay, attractive couples instead of the garishly lit libertines and doxies of Toulouse-Lautrec. The landscapes and floral pieces which Renoir did for "mental relaxation" glowed with the pure bright colors which he confidently splashed onto his canvases without even bothering to mix on his palette.

But the show's brightest attractions were the French girls Renoir was "always anxious to paint as beautiful fruits." Three-fourths of the pictures were dominated by his sloe-eyed, apple-cheeked, melon-curved women who had a tree-ripened look about them that few other painters could match. Filled with preternatural healthiness, they always seemed to enjoy themselves--boating, strolling on the beach, playing at shuttlecock, buying a hat or peacefully dozing in the sun.

Nowhere was there any hint of Renoir's own hardships. Although he spent the last 25 years of his life fighting a losing battle with constant illness, no personal gloom ever disfigured or darkened the 4,000 canvases he completed before his death in 1919. When a stuffy teacher, annoyed by his high spirits, once said sardonically, "You seem to take painting as fun," Renoir quickly replied: "If painting were not fun to me, I should certainly not do it."

That craftsmanly joy in painting kept him working to the end, propped up in a wheelchair with a brush strapped to his arthritic fingers. Last week Manhattan gallerygoers could see the result of those last pain-racked hours: healthy, big-hipped servant girls looking as flushed and happy as if they had just stepped out of a steam bath.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.