Renoir @ Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid & Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao

Intimate Renoir
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
18 October 2016 - 22 January 2017
Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao
7 February - 15 May 2017

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR

Bathing on the Seine, La Grenouillère, 1869

Oil on canvas, 59 x 80 cm

Moscow, The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

© The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR

Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, 1875

Oil on canvas, 54,5 x 65 cm

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

© Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Writing about his father, the filmmaker Jean Renoir said: "He looked at flowers, women and clouds in the sky as other men touch and caress". Intimate Renoir, the first retrospective in Spain to focus on the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), will challenge the traditional concept that reduces Impressionism to the "purely visual". Rather, it will emphasise the central role played by tactile sensations in Renoir's paintings, which are present in all the different phases of his career and are expressed through a wide range of genres including group scenes, portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes.

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR

Le Moulin de la Galette, Study, 1875-1876

Oil on canvas, 65 x 85 cm

Copenhage, Ordrupgaard

Photo Anders Sune Berg

Pierre-Auguste RENOIR

The Promenade, 1870

Oil on canvas, 81,3 x 64,8 cm

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 89.PA.41

Curated by Guillermo Solana, Artistic Director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibition will present a survey of more than 75 works by the artist loaned from museums and collections worldwide and will show how the artist made use of the tactile qualities of volume, paint and textures as a vehicle to evoke intimacy in its various forms (friendship, the family or erotic ties) and how that imagery connects the work to the viewer through the sensuality of the brushstroke and the pictorial surface. 

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
www.museothyssen.org