Renoir exploited his own flaw by playing on the expectation that he was indecisive even when he was not. By so doing, he tried to avoid confrontation. On 16 August 1900, he accepted the invitation to become a Chevalier (Knight) of the Légion d’Honneur, the government-sponsored award for lifetime achievement. He knew that Monet would be furious that he had accepted this honour from ‘the establishment’. Unlike Monet, Renoir never saw a contradiction between being an innovative artist and accepting official recognition that would help his reputation and sales. He had revealed his true feelings about the award in 1881, when Manet had been offered it (as noted in Chapter 1): ‘I will salute you as the painter who is loved by everybody and is officially recognized.’79 Now, almost twenty years later, in 1900, despite Renoir’s positive feelings about the award, he tried to soften Monet’s expected anger by blaming his acceptance on his own indecisiveness. A week after he had accepted the award, Renoir confessed sheepishly to Monet: ‘Dear friend…I wonder what difference it makes to you whether I’ve been decorated or not. You are admirably consistent in your behaviour, while I have never been able to know the day before what I would do the next. You must know me better than I do myself, just as I very probably know you better than you do yourself. So, rip up this letter and let’s not talk about it any more and long live friendship! My best wishes to Mme Monet and to everyone at your house. Yours, Renoir.’80
Renoir’s feigned indecisiveness about accepting the Légion d’Honneur did not fool Monet, who felt sad about what Renoir had done. The same day that he received Renoir’s letter, Monet wrote to his biographer and friend Geffroy: ‘You doubtlessly know of Renoir’s decoration. I am very saddened by it and Renoir knows it so well that he wrote me as if to apologize, the poor man. Isn’t it sad to see a man of his talent, after having struggled so many years and so valiantly survived this struggle in spite of the administration, to accept the honour when sixty years old? Humans are really pathetic! It would have been so great to have all remained uncorrupted by rewards, but who knows? Maybe I’ll be the only one remaining pure in this regard, unless I become really senile.’81 On top of this disappointment, Monet seems to have expressed his thorough distaste to his son-in-law and pupil, Théodore E. Butler, who wrote to a fellow artist: ‘Did you see that Renoir had been decorated? – Mr Monet was utterly disgusted.’82 Despite his disapproval, Monet continued to care about Renoir. A year later, Monet wrote to a friend who was living near Renoir in the Midi: ‘Do you sometimes see Renoir, and is he really in better health? If accepting the medallion of the Légion d’Honneur could have done the miracle of making him feel better, I would forgive him for his weakness.’83
Although Monet and other anti-establishment liberals disapproved, Renoir’s conservative friends were delighted that he had received and accepted this honour. The painter joked in a letter to his dealer: ‘Yes, my dear Durand-Ruel, I am the culprit. So I hope that the firm of Durand-Ruel will take up a collection to buy me an honorary throne [that is, toilet].’84 Bérard not only approved but had accepted such an honour himself. In his 1900 acceptance letter, Renoir wrote: ‘I have chosen M. Paul Bérard, chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, 20 rue Pigalle, Paris, to represent me in accepting my decoration as chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.’85 (He abandoned his pretence of indecision when he was later offered higher ranks in the Légion, those of officer in 1911 and commander in 1919, which he accepted gladly; see Chapters 6 and 7.)
Renoir’s trust in this long-standing institution indicates his staunch conservatism, which increased as he aged. Although some of his Impressionist friends, like Pissarro and Monet, denigrated the art of the Louvre, Renoir venerated the great art of the past. Just as he had gone to see the frescoes in Italy to inspire his own work, so he repeatedly took Julie, Jeannie, Paule and Jeanne Baudot to the Louvre to copy paintings. For example, in December 1897, Julie wrote in her diary: ‘Monsieur Renoir came to see us at the Louvre. He gave Jeanne an excellent lesson and told her to take a section and finish it in one go. He said that Ingres always painted a torso in one go, free to begin it again the following day.’86
Julie in particular took Renoir’s old-fashioned views to heart. She came from a wealthy, conservative family and was surrounded by friends of the same opinion. She even supported the traditional view that women were inferior to men, writing for example: ‘M. Renoir was charming, affectionate, and likeable as a woman never would be.’87 Julie often wrote approvingly of Renoir’s conservative opinions. In September 1897, she reported: ‘Monsieur Renoir attacked all the latest mechanical contraptions, saying that we are living in an age of decadence where people think of nothing but travelling at dozens of kilometres an hour; that it serves no useful purpose; that the automobile is an idiotic thing; that there is no need to go so fast; that the whole thing will mean change…. The labourer is no longer capable of thought, of bettering himself…. Whatever is the point of going so fast?… Isn’t M. Renoir right? What a sound mind, always saying such sensible things.’88 Renoir, who came from an artisan background, feared industrialization that would replace workers with machines. Beginning with the appearance of Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species, in 1859, science began to pervade all aspects of life, which Renoir found horrifying. This is ironic since, from 1868 through 1877, Renoir had been a leader of a modern art movement.89 At that time, Renoir’s choice of Impressionist daily-life subject matter, as in Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876 (see page 86), was as innovative as his style, with its feeling of freedom and randomness, a palette that is light and bright, strokes that are mobile and visible, an arrangement that is random and non-focused and forms that are open and imprecise. Both the subject matter and style had caused conservative critics violently to reject his work. By 1878, however, he was already moving away from the modern Impressionist style and, by 1884, he had also rejected the daily-life subject matter. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Renoir rejected modernity in other aspects of his world.
Renoir directed his strongest negative feelings towards the assembly line, since mass-production seemed to him the antithesis of craft: ‘He spoke about socialism [Julie Manet recorded in July 1899], which does so much harm: “It has taken everything away from the people, from the workers. Religion, which for them was such a consolation, has been replaced by an extra twenty-five centimes a day. It’s not by making the labourer work fewer hours a day that you will make him happy, because a man without work gets up to no good and the labourer will spend his free time in a bar. What is needed is to get him to do work which is less taxing. There is no longer anything of interest for the working man to do. In the olden days he would make a chair after his own fashion, and with pleasure; now, one makes the legs, another the arms, and a third puts the whole thing together. They want to do the job in the fastest time possible so they can be paid.”’90
The most controversial example of Renoir’s conservatism occurred during the Dreyfus Affair, the political and social crisis that gripped France and much of Europe from 1895 until 1906. It concerned a Jewish military officer from Alsace-Lorraine, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely accused of selling French military secrets to the Germans. In 1894, Dreyfus was court-martialled for treason and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil’s Island. In truth, a French army major, Count Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, had forged evidence that resulted in the conviction of the innocent Dreyfus by a secret military tribunal. From 1895, when Dreyfus was humiliated at Paris’s École Militaire, until eleven years later when he was honoured at the same institution as a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, intense anti-Semitism flared throughout France. The conviction tapped into an existing undercurrent of anti-Semitism strong in most of Europe at this time.
Renoir, too, became caught up in the Affair as an anti-Dreyfusard, particularly because of his political conservatism and fear of anarchism. Entrenched in his anti-modern position, surrounded by many conservative friends and with his long history of bowing to popular opinion, it is hardly surprising that Reno
ir got on the anti-Dreyfus bandwagon. After all, ninety per cent of French people had done the same, as had his friends Degas, Forain, Guillaumin, Julie Manet, Rodin, Henri Rouart, Rouart’s four sons and Valéry.91 Yet in Renoir’s case, anti-Dreyfus did not mean anti-Semitic, if we define anti-Semitism as hatred of or discrimination against Jews as a national, ethnic, religious or racial group. In 1984, when I published Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters, I concluded there, particularly on the basis of Julie Manet’s diary, that Renoir was anti-Semitic. However now, after having studied Renoir for an additional thirty years, after having read an additional two thousand letters by, to and about Renoir, and after diligently studying his character and personality, I have changed my opinion and I do not believe that Renoir was an anti-Semite.
Nonetheless, during the Dreyfus Affair, Julie Manet recorded in her diary statements that show Renoir’s anti-Dreyfusard position. She wrote in 1898: ‘today I was at Renoir’s studio, where the Dreyfus Affair and the Jews were being discussed. “They come to France to earn money, but if there is any fighting to be done they hide behind a tree”, said M. Renoir. “There are a lot of them in the army, because the Jew likes to walk around wearing a uniform…. They are asking that the Dreyfus Affair be made public, but there are some things which simply cannot be said. People don’t wish to try to understand that sort of thing,” he added. M. Renoir also let fly on the subject of Pissarro too, “a Jew” whose sons are natives of no country and do their military service nowhere. “It’s tenacious, this Jewish race. Pissarro’s wife isn’t one, yet all the children are, even more so than their father.”’92 The patriotic Renoir who had served in the Franco-Prussian War was infuriated that Pissarro’s children, as practising Jews, had a religious exemption from joining the military. While his language is racist, it does not demonstrate hatred. Neither does Renoir’s behaviour, as will be seen later. Four factors contributed to Renoir’s use of such pejorative language.
First, prejudice against the Jewish people was commonplace in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. France, in particular, was still smarting at its humiliating defeat by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War twenty years earlier, in which Alsace-Lorraine, Dreyfus’s homeland, had been ceded to Germany. The idea that anyone would sell information to the Germans was anathema to an overwhelming majority of the French people, and Dreyfus’s Jewishness only fed this fury in a largely prejudiced public. Most French newspapers (with subscriptions of more than two million) were anti-Dreyfusards and asserted his guilt; many fewer papers (with subscriptions of 200,000) believed Dreyfus to be innocent.93 Among the Dreyfusards were Cassatt, Charpentier, Mallarmé, Mirbeau, Monet, Pissarro, Signac and Zola. On 13 January 1898, after the Dreyfus Affair had raged in France for four years, Zola published ‘J’accuse’, a ‘Letter to the president of the Republic’, in a pro-Dreyfus newspaper, L’Aurore, in which he charged French generals and statesmen with convicting an innocent man and – the worst crime – upholding the verdict through lies and suppression of evidence, once they knew that Dreyfus was not guilty.94
Second, Renoir’s racist language stemmed from his political conservatism, staunch patriotism and fear of anarchism, as advocated by Pissarro.95 As for the latter, Renoir worried that any association with anarchism would cause the value of his paintings to decrease. Like Cézanne, Renoir believed in Dreyfus’s guilt; both artists were staunch nationalists who trusted the French statesmen, military and popular press. Dreyfus’s innocence would reveal a weakness within the French military, which nationalists like Renoir and Cézanne were unable to accept, independent of Dreyfus’s religion.
Other conservative friends of Renoir, however, had motivations beyond nationalism to oppose Dreyfus and the Dreyfusards. For example, two of Renoir’s closest friends at this time, Degas and Julie Manet, were decidedly both anti-Dreyfus and vehemently anti-Semitic. Degas’s anti-Semitism was extreme. By 1895, Degas, then partially blind, had begun to have his maid, Zoé, read aloud the anti-Semitic daily paper, La Libre Parole. As a result of the Dreyfus Affair, Degas broke up with his Jewish childhood friends, the Halévys, even though they had converted to Catholicism. Daniel Halévy, in a diary entry of 5 November 1895, wrote: ‘[Degas] has become a passionate believer in anti-semitism.’ Julie Manet was also both anti-Dreyfusard and anti-Semitic, as her diary details. In January 1900, she became engaged to marry Ernest, one of Henri Rouart’s four sons, who were all anti-Dreyfusard extremists.96 Evidence of Julie’s anti-Semitism can be found in her diary of September 1899, where she records a contribution that she and five of her friends sent: ‘We, six young girls, are sending the modest sum of six francs to La Libre Parole to support the workers of La Villette for a fund to repatriate Jews to Jerusalem.’97
The Washerwomen (Aline with 4 year old Pierre) c. 1889. 56.5 × 47 cm (22¼ × 18½ in.). The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection, formed by Dr Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Md.
Bather arranging her Hair, 1885, 92 × 73 cm (36¼ × 28¾ in.). The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.
The Large Bathers, an Experiment in Decorative Painting. 1887. 117.8 × 170.8 cm (46⅜ × 67¼ in.). The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Carroll S. Tyson, Jr.
Julie Manet with Cat, 1887. 63.5 × 53.3 cm (25½ × 21 in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris
The Daughters of Catulle Mendès, 1888. 162.2 × 130 cm (63⅞ × 51⅛ in.). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Walter H. Annenberg
Stéphane Mallarmé, 1892. 50 × 40 cm (19⅝ × 15¾ in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris
The Artist’s Family, 1896. 172.7 × 137.1 cm (68 × 54 in.). The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pa.
Self-Portrait, 1899. 38 × 31 cm (16¼ × 13¼ in.). The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.
Paul Durand-Ruel, 1910. 65 × 54 cm (25⅝ × 21¼ in.). Collection Durand-Ruel & Cie
Monsieur et Madame Gaston Bernheim de Villers, 1910. 81 × 65 cm (31⅞ × 25⅝ in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Third, Renoir’s socio-economic status and family background also contributed to his position as an anti-Dreyfusard. As outlined earlier, his paternal grandfather had been abandoned by his parents and taken in by a shoemaker, and Renoir always felt himself a stranger in the company of his more affluent, better educated and better connected Impressionist friends, most of whom were upper class or, in a few cases, middle class. The entire art world was dominated by those in the upper class, so Renoir felt like an outsider looking in on an exclusive milieu. In order to validate his presence as part of this circle, Renoir often felt the need to acquiesce in majority opinion. To disagree with the consensus would be to underline his difference from the art world and thereby separate himself from it. Renoir, the outsider, could not afford to distance himself any further.
Finally, Renoir’s manipulative personality may also help explain his anti-Dreyfusard position, which pleased the people around him. Among the thousands of surviving letters from Renoir, the most prejudiced is one to Bérard from around 1899, in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair and before Renoir developed a friendship with the Bernheims: ‘Dear friend, Duret (still the Dreyfus affair) is protecting the Bernheims, horrible Jews, against Durand-Ruel. When I see him, Duret, I’ll ask him to meddle in his own affairs. He is a man we can no longer invite. Best, Renoir. The Bernheims probably promised strong commissions, this is the secret.’98 Here Renoir is upset because he suspects that Duret was trying to sell some of his Renoir paintings to Bernheim rather than to Durand-Ruel, who was then Renoir’s principal dealer. This letter was Renoir’s calculated attempt to warn Bérard that should he want to sell any of his forty Renoir paintings, he should deal with Durand-Ruel or Renoir would be angry with him, just as he was with Duret. Today such language is considered racist and is less common; during Renoir’s time, and especially during the Dreyfus Affair, it was commonplace.
Renoir’s words must be read in conjunction with his actual behaviour towards Jewish people befor
e, during and after the Affair, which demonstrates no hatred. To recapitulate earlier chapters: for four or five years in his teenage years, he had worked for a Jewish porcelain-maker, the Lévy brothers. When he was twenty, his brother Pierre-Henri married the daughter of his boss, a Jewish woman, Blanche Marie Blanc.99 Renoir had a lifelong relationship with Henri and Blanche. In the 1870s and early 1880s, thanks to his patrons Charpentier, Duret and Ephrussi, Renoir had many Jewish patrons who commissioned portraits.100 Even at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, in 1898, he had no qualms about eating at the home of his friend, the Jewish writer Thadée Natanson. Renoir also kept up his friendships with other Jews, including Arsène Alexandre, Charles Ephrussi, Catulle Mendès and Claude Roger-Marx, and among his Jewish patrons were the Cahen d’Anvers, Foulds, Halphen, Nunès, Stora and Mendès.
The complicated friendship with Pissarro is relevant to this discussion. Pissarro was a fellow Impressionist with whom Renoir remained friends for forty years until Pissarro’s death in 1903. In Renoir’s 1876–77 painting of artists in his studio (see page 87), he included Pissarro, his bald head seen in profile. Pissarro, born a middle-class Jew, became an agnostic and married a non-Jew; nonetheless, as noted earlier, his children continued to practise as Jews. Thanks to his friendship with Pissarro, Renoir was happy in 1883 to accept portrait commissions from Pissarro’s wealthy Jewish cousin, Alfred Nunès.101 The following year, Renoir sought out another Nunès cousin, Lionel, who helped Renoir draft his manifesto for the ‘Society of Irregularists’.102 A few years later, friction developed between Renoir and Pissarro because of their divergent artistic directions. While Renoir experimented with Ingrist Impressionism, which Pissarro outspokenly denounced, Pissarro moved into Pointillism, a style Renoir deplored. Both during that period and afterwards, Pissarro’s well-known anarchism frightened Renoir, the staunch French patriot and defender of French nationalism. In fact, in 1881 and 1882, not only Renoir but also Monet and Caillebotte had found the political opinions of Pissarro and his friends, Gauguin and Guillaumin, to be too revolutionary.103 Pissarro’s anarchist sympathies were so well known that he had to flee to Belgium in 1894 to escape a round-up of anarchists in Paris. Julie Manet wrote in her diary in October 1897: ‘We also talked about the Natansons. M. Renoir said it was very dangerous to support anarchists such as Fénéon, who busy themselves with literature while awaiting an opportunity to throw themselves into politics and who will end up by doing something terrible. He must be right. Writers support too many bad causes, whereas painters are of sounder mind. Pissarro, however, is an anarchist.’104
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