Remarkably, according to Barnes curator and Renoir specialist Martha Lucy, about half the foundation's Renoirs date from the last decade of his life. Clearly Barnes regarded these works, made when the artist's hands were gnarled by arthritis, as something special.
Why? Because Barnes believed that in old age Renoir achieved a rare mastery over form, light, and color. Even more heretical, he considered Renoir to be a wellspring of modern art, on a par in his influence on younger artists with his friend Cezanne, whom Barnes also admired.
Many critics, scholars, and collectors have rejected this apotheosis, and still do. Dissenters consider Renoir's late pictures, especially his zaftig, roseate female nudes, to be an old man's sentimental indulgence, or worse.
Beginning Thursday, Philadelphians will be able to decide the question for themselves when a traveling exhibition dedicated to late Renoir opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With the estimable Barnes collection nearby, Philadelphia becomes, for the summer, Renoir City, the perfect venue for a serious evaluation of the artist's final flowering.
Organized by the French National Museums and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with involvement by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the show of 92 works - 78 by Renoir, the rest by artists who admired him - poses a stern test of Barnes' thesis.
Joseph J. Rishel, the Art Museum's curator of European painting and sculpture before 1900, is already persuaded.
"Barnes was right to love Renoir as much as he loved Cezanne," he exclaimed during a conversation about the show.
(Well, actually, a lot more; Barnes acquired "only" 69 Cezannes. And, as he proclaimed in his book on Renoir, he considered Renoir the more well-rounded painter: "He has achieved a union of expressive force and decorative richness unprecedented in plastic art.")
