Renoir: The Body, The Senses (through September 22, 2019)
Ida O'Keeffe: Escaping Georgia's Shadow (through October 6, 2019)
Clark Institute of
Art
Williamstown, MA
This summer's blockbuster exhibit at the Clark is devoted to
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). In Renoir's lifetime he was heralded but his
star faded to the point that, in 1986, one critic proclaimed him the
"worst artist to ever achieve canonical status." I wouldn't go that
far, but I confess that I'm more in second camp than the first. He's not my
least favorite Impressionist–a category I reserve for Mary Cassatt–but I
generally spend my time in Impressionist galleries gazing at the work of those
I find more interesting (Pissarro, Monet, Manet, Morisot, Sisley).
The Clark's core collection features a lot of Impressionist
works, so you go with what you've got and build on it. It's Renoir show dwells
upon his nudes and how his attention to color, form, and texture impacted
subsequent artists. His admirers were many and varied, among them Picasso,
Maillol, Léger, and Matisse. Selections of their work are displayed as well so
that one can make comparisons. Did this change my mind about Renoir?
Not really. I get what art historians have said about
Renoir's cheerful palette, one that's heavy on pastels and soft lines. At the
end of the day, though, there's a reason why his work found favor with the
tastemakers of his day when critics savaged many of his contemporaries. Renoir
simply didn't spill much bathwater, even when painting nudes. His fleshy puffball
bodies stand solidly within a canon forged by past masters such as Titian,
Ruben, and Tintoretto. Some have called Renoir's work innocent in a
prelapsarian fashion, though today some of the bodies he painted look pretty young
and might ruffle contemporary feathers. I'm not going there other than to say
that it's usually unfair to pass ex post facto judgment on cultural value
systems. For me, Renoir's faces are more problematic than his bodies; they
often appear vacant and/or insipid.  |
| Picasso |
Mostly The Body, The
Senses underwhelmed me because I found the work of Renoir's admirers far
more interesting than his own. There is a telling remark is one of the panels
in which Renoir is quoted as saying that he did not see his work as a radical
departure as it was always his intent to fit within the sweep of Western
European painting. He largely succeeded, which begs the question of whom do we
find more appealing, those who long to conform (Renoir) or those who spit in
the eye of convention (Manet, Picasso, Lautrec). My vote goes to the rebels.
 |
| Ida and Georgia at Peace |
For me, the Clark's best current exhibit is one devoted to
Ida Ten Eyck O'Keeffe (1889-1961). If that last name tempts you to wonder if
she was related to Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), the answer is yes; she was one
of Georgia's sisters and to say that there was family drama involved would be
an understatement.
Let's start with why we know Georgia's name, but not Ida's. It's
not because Ida was trying to piggyback on her older sister. She was a serious
artist in her own right who apprenticed with a printmaker before obtaining an
MFA at Columbia. Another sister, Anita, also trained as an artist. Here's where
it gets ugly. Georgia was fiercely protective of her own artistic reputation
and didn't like family competition. Anita faithfully gave up her art career at
Georgia's insistence, but Ida did not. Georgia at first supported Ida, but
things eventually soured and Georgia did little to help and quite a lot to
discourage. (It probably didn't help matters that Georgia's husband,
photographer Alfred Stieglitz, tried to seduce Ida. She rebuffed him, but one
wonders if this got back to Georgia.) 
The real question is how Ida's work stacks up. She's not another Georgia and her work is best
approached on its own merits. The Clark showcases several aspects of her work.
She was assuredly an observant modernist with an eye for reducing objects to
geometric forms and sharp angles. I particularly liked her series of paintings
depicting the solidity of Highland Light in North Truro (Cape Cod). Note how
the lighthouse beam captures a fish as if it is being beamed aboard. She
captures similar abstracted magic of a harbor scene in which bridge, sails, and
cables are reduced to straight lines and bathed in somber light.
Ida also painted buildings differently. Compare, for
instance, how Ida rendered a Missouri limekiln as if it were a Spanish
cathedral. It evokes the rooted-earth and reduce-to-basic shapes style of
someone such as Charles Sheeler or Charles Demuth. If you know Georgia
O'Keeffe's paintings of New Mexico adobe churches you can see how Ida tracked
differently. There is also Star Gazing in
Texas, which shows Ida at home with the proletarian art of the Great
Depression. She's more Grant Wood than Georgia O'Keeffe in this iteration.
Is Ida O'Keeffe an underappreciated great artist? That might
be a bit much to claim, but she's intriguing and one wonders what her
reputation would have been without all the family sturm und drang. She once proclaimed that she too would have been
famous if she had a Stieglitz backing her. Was this a passive aggressive
backslap at her headstrong and ego-fragile sister? Perhaps. Georgia invested a
lot of energy is creating a Stieglitz-free niche for herself once she began
spending more time in New Mexico than in New York, but it was her New York
reputation that gave her the space and money to break out. Could she have done
so without Stieglitz? As they say, families are complicated!
Rob Weir
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