LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART PART I  / 

29

Property of a European Collection PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) Gerbe d'anémones signed "Reno...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:350,000.00 - 450,000.00 USD
Property of a European Collection PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) Gerbe d'anémones signed Reno...
Property of a
European Collection
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR
(1841-1919)
Gerbe d'anémones
signed "Renoir" (lower right)
oil on canvas
12 5/8 x 16 1/8 in. (32.1 x 41 cm)
Estimate: $350,000-450,000 <p>Provenance
Louis Bernard, Paris
Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the above
on September 29, 1916)
F. Arbouin, Paris (acquired from the above on December 12, 1917)
Bernard Lorenceau, Paris
Gisèle Rueff-Bèghin, Neuilly (sale: Sotheby's, London, November 29, 1988, lot 12)
Anon. sale: Sotheby's, New York, November 10, 1992, lot 10
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Renoir painted Gerbe D'AnÉmones during the latter part of his life. He worked up until his death, painting with a brush strapped to his hand as he suffered from severe arthritis. Born in Limoges, his early experience began with the painting of flowers on porcelain and screens. Eventually he found himself steeped in the Impressionist movement of the 1870s and 1880s. The artists who were linked to Impressionism explored an interest in the inescapably subjective aspects of perception and experience, which led them to exercises in spontaneity, loose brushwork, and the abandonment of conventional rules of composition, perspective, and color. Taking the everyday world around them, in place of more traditional subjects, artists such as Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir, focused on leisurely activities that enabled them to focus wholly on the external effects of light, atmosphere, and color without being encumbered by weighty subject matter. While some of these artists continued to delve further and further into the abstract qualities of light and color, Renoir tended to stick to traditional subjects such as bathers and figural groups and even visited Italy to absorb more fully the influence of classical art, especially the colorism of Venetian artists such as Titian. There he found a way to continue his interest in the painterly surface of the canvas, while structuring his canvases along classical lines.
In Gerbe D'AnÉmones, the vase that normally sat atop a table in his previous still-lifes has been ignored and cropped out, leaving us with only the flowering upper portion of a bouquet. The blooms burst across the canvas nearly filling it entirely and nullify any deep three-dimensional background or perspectival space. A bright red color suffuses the entire canvas, creating a rhythm of shapes that flow seamlessly into the blended but flattened ground area. The loose modeling of form and the rhythm of red, pinks, and white move our eye across the surface, where the flowers vacillate from defined form to abstract shapes. While similar to Monet, there is a distinct difference. Renoir's flowers are a more static form than the broken and fleeting lilies of Monet; the interest is neither in a spontaneous moment nor in the painting en plein air. Rather, Renoir, still faithful to the immutable aspects of classical art, focuses more on the permanent structuring of form with color, but one in which color predominates. His rich and luscious colors come together into areas of fluid form and then drift in a sort of blending activity with the whole. Monet's forms tend to break apart into such minute color particles that we are left with almost pure abstraction. With Renoir's AnÉmones, color takes command as the agent of structural coordination.
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