cover image Renoir: A Retrospective

Renoir: A Retrospective

. Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, $0 (386pp) ISBN 978-0-88363-387-8

Renoir declared women artists, writers and lawyers to be freaks. The French impressionist, whose pictures brim over with charming, sensuous females, treated real women with boorish insensitivity. He was a reactionary opposed to education and railroads, a chauvinist and a child of his time in his obsessive sensuality. This scrapbook of letters, interviews, snippets from memoirs, and comments by friends, family and contemporaries gets beyond the seductive charm of the paintings. Instead of the conventional view of the spontaneous artist, we get the experimentalist who was dissatisfied with almost everything he painted. Modern critics who reject Renoir's gossamer world as an evasion of reality clash here with traditionalists who hold that his instinctual art rose to the highest levels. Some 250 reproductions (half in color) complement this enlightening compilation of opinions, memories and critiques. (November 27)