Friday, March 14, 2008

On Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Les Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881)


As one of the foremost visual artists of Impressionism, Pierre-Auguste Renoir possessed an aesthetic sense that relied on the most immediate aspects of appearances, that is, impressions. His style depicts representations of reality that seem to mimic the subjectivity of human perception with their partially detailed look.

And one hallmark example from Renoir’s prolific practice is the Luncheon of the Boating Party. The work shows a couple of the artist’s friends, among them his future wife, Aline Charigot (the lady playing with a dog), enjoying a few moments after their afternoon meal on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise along the Seine River in Chatou, France. This oil painting is a display of the artist’s virtuosity with handling light. The two men in sleeveless shirts, in the foreground, serve to distribute the light coming from the balcony’s opening throughout the whole picture. The rounded forms and intensely light values of the apparel of the two men accord a sense of unity to the painting. Without them, the work would have possibly appeared as a stark, light and dark contrast meeting at the canvas’ diagonal area.

As for visual texture, the rhythmic repetition of feathery brush strokes lends a homogeneity that is neither monotonous nor fantastically surreal. Almost every element in the composition, perhaps even with such inanimate elements as the metal bars of the railings, has that sense of being viewed through either half-closed eyelids, or watery eyes. Yet even so, Renoir does not entirely abandon the beauty of detail as can be seen in the luncheon’s ‘debris’ on the table in the foreground. Half-filled wineglasses, fruits, and tinted wine bottles, besides counterbalancing the brightness of the mantle, show another dimension of detail and reality. Seen through glass, liquids look more vivid and fluid; and surfaces that have a natural sheen, such as grapes, gain greater visual weight and, therefore, have a greater fidelity to their more edible counterparts.

The entirety of the color spectrum appears to have been successfully traversed as proven by the soft contrasts and the harmonious meeting of light and dark. In essence, the color values used achieved a high degree of harmony despite their obvious disparity. Very few actual lines were used in keeping with the generality of vision, but there is a great deal of implied and actual lines used. Take for example the people’s, even the dog’s fur, which possess no outlines about them to show form but instead rely on contrasting colors and well-angled strokes to communicate the solidity or softness of actual forms. Scales of objects and people seem aptly faithful to the actual, though the same cannot be said of the works deepest background since the thrust of Impressionism is to look only at the most general appearances. Proportions are also well-defined, and close to the actual, as can be seen in the difference between the people in the foreground and those in the back and their relation to the things around them.

From a contemporary hermeneutic standpoint, what is most apparent in the work is an abandoning of the Hegelian dialectic between realism and surrealism. The ideology of partiality towards either the actual or the ideal cannot but bow to Renoir’s artistic prowess and sensibility. Why should there be a strict hegemony of one ideology over the other, when in fact, daily life stands testament to the melding of the ideal and the material worlds? On the one hand, cold realism shows the human being as helpless in the face of his environment and his senses. And on the other hand, surrealism calls one to retreat to the world of the mental and ethereal—yet another sign of cowardice.

But as the Luncheon of the Boating Party shows, such a contradiction can only go so far. First, Renoir’s impressionist art reminds people that though they can see, it does not mean that everything is clear: we learn little by little based on what and where we train our attention to. This is evidenced by the fleeting appearance of the painting, which also implies that the material world is not all that there is. Second, the Luncheon shows that happiness is all really a state of mind merely brought to life by willpower. Every face in the painting has its own maturity to it. Each tells a unique discourse about the lives they live, whom (or what) they share it with, and what it means to live. Though the characters and color shades are various, they all seem to say that the goal of living is happiness, and that getting there is a choice entirely up to you.

And most central to this argument for simple and harmonious living is the ‘girl with the glass.’ In Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film, Amelie, the mystery of the drinking girl (whom we shall refer to, for purposes of discussion, as ‘Kim’) in the middle ground is interpreted as a sort of numb participation with society’s workings—as one character in the movie remarked: “She is in the middle, yet she is outside.” True enough, a sort of center can be established with Kim as the reference. The railings running diagonally on the left side meeting with the thin post, near the two standing men behind Kim, together with the horizontal railing behind them establish three actual lines, or two angles, in the space which create the illusion of depth. But their more important role is to hint at another line—an implied line—that runs parallel to both of them: a parallel of angles. Following the table’s edge (the one closer to Aline Charigot), one finds a parallel for the diagonal line of the railing. At the same time, taking Kim’s figure as a vertical line, it is ultimately revealed how important she is to the whole composition as a focal point for asymmetrical balance and emphasis. With the implied lines just presented, it is also obvious that the dark tone to Kim’s left counteract the heavy use of light colors elsewhere in the painting. Everyone around Kim is happily preoccupied with someone or something as can be seen in their eyes and facial expressions. But Kim seems not to be staring into space; instead, she emanates the look of staring within herself.

The womb of the nineteenth century, which gave birth to nihilism and communism, saw the world either as a machinery of the people inexorably geared toward conflict in the hopes of proletariat domination, or as a mere cipher with man as a god-in-waiting. But Renoir saw in the world simply a mélange of people trying to get along, just wanting to be happy. His art sees the harsh realities of the world but does not give in to it. Instead, Renoir finds concord between the ideal and the real hoping always to strike a balance between a trust in the heart and the bleak unknown that is the world.

Renoir painted to give hope perhaps because he knew that a time such as ours would come, when people would either be caught in too much materialism, or too much dreaming. And the figure of Kim tells us to never lose hope in making earth a better place for our loved ones. Everyone else in the Luncheon of the Boating Party looks happy either for the present or in recalling the past, yet Kim is central because she is the embodiment of hope and living without regrets, thus always finding happiness for herself and others.

Like a quiet student who prefers to sit at the back of the room with a handkerchief to her lips, seemingly unprepared for the intellectual tortures, Kim knows that though there have been many trials and that many more trials are to come, she has, and never will cease believing in her self, her abilities, and in her loved ones.

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