France - Year 1915. WWI had just broken out. The nation is in chaos. Yet none of this turmoil is shown in Gilles Bourdot film "Renoir".
The audience is first introduced to ravishing Andrée, who in search for work, cycles to artist Renoir´s estate in the French Riviera. The beautiful light Bourdot manages to capture set the tone right throughout the movie.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir is shown for the first time sat in his wheel chair. His long grey beard makes him look very old. Andrée and the artist agree - she will pose for his painting.
The plot line was driven on with the introduction of Auguste´s son, Jean, who injured his leg at the front, forcing him to return home. It takes a while until, not so surprisingly, Andrée and Jean fall in love. The twist then occurs when Jean decides to go back to support his fellow soldiers after recovering from his injury, leaving behind his ageing father and his lover.
One does not actually learn that much about what made Renoir the artist he was: Apart from the occasional explanation about his art ("Structure comes from colour, do not use black"), his celebration of the model´s young flesh or how his rheumatoid arthritis impaired him as an artist.
Bourdot more subtly hints at what made Renoir such an important artist of his time: The beautiful colours and lighting of Cagnes-sur-Mer reflects the essence of impressionist painting. Colour dominates. It is needed because reality (WWI) is too harsh. Moreover, Christa Theret as Andrée is the ideal fit: Her body perfectly shows what Renoir´s paintings were about - beauty and female sensuality.
Otherwise the film was quite disappointing as the director shifted the focus from father Auguste to son Jean Renoir (Vincent Rottier) with the son´s character lacking in depth and his love relationship with Andrée becoming quite annoying towards the end.
The good sides of the film though clearly outweigh the weaker and therefore I give it 6/10 because the colours and lighting just reflect Renoir´s art so strongly. The film is definitely worth watching.
The trailer. To get a sense of what the film is about!
My Perspective On Art
Saturday, 16 March 2013
Saturday, 9 February 2013
"Dark Romanticism" in Frankfurt (Review)
Tantalizing women, myths and tales, as well as death and nightmares were among the topics of the "Schwarze Romantik" exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt:
Upon entering the exhibition one is confronted with several sinister works by Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Füssli, the very first being "Nachtmahr" - translated as "nightmare" (shown below/right). A horse with saturnine look stands above a young woman in a deep state of sleep.
Other eerie paintings and sketches from this dark face of the romantic movement are shown:
Several illustrations of cannibals are displayed in works by Spanish painter de Goya, adding even more to the fright of the viewer. Additionally, special emphasis was placed on mythical characters ("Medusa" by Levy-Dhurmer) or illustrations of plays from Shakespeare amongst others, depicting the wicked witches in Macbeth.
Walking through the exhibition, one notices that women are a central topic to this dark sub-movement of romanticism:
Antoine Joseph Wiertz´s "Hunger, Madness and Crime" (left) shows a starving mad woman, with a dead baby lying on her lap. Frightening about this painting is the fact that there is a child´s cut-off leg in the right side of the painting.
Later, when seeing the first paintings of modern painters, such as Munch, Dali or Max Ernst, the viewer understands that the exhibition is not solely about the this dark spirit of romaticism. But that it is also about the continuation of this idea in the epochs of symbolism (Munch) and surrealism (Dali).
The exhibition´s aim was to show dark romanticism as an attitude which started at the closure of the 18th century all over Europe and was carried forward into the 20th century. Dreams, especially nightmares play a pivotal role in the works presented.
Otherwise, remarkable for me is the use of visual displays (as this is not so common in Germany) showing excerpts from famous black and white movies, adding even more to the dark atmosphere the museum managed to create:
This scene shows a unraffled woman whose eyeball gets slit open just after a single,narrow cloud is shown crossing the full moon at night - perfect visual analogy. The film "Un Chien Andalusien" was directed by Luis Bunuel with the help of Dali in France in 1929. (clip above!)
Summed up it can be said that the exhibition is rather substantial (over 200 works) presenting a wide range of paintings from the early beginning of romanticism - e.g. Caspar David Friedrich- to works from modern artists such as Max Ernst or Paul Klee. What made this so special was the use of expressionistic film, for example "Frankenstein" or "Faust" as it added a lot to the overall sinister feel of the exhibition.
Unfortunately "Dark Romanticism" only ran in Frankfurt until the the 20. January, although the Musee D'Orsay in Paris will show the same exhibition, only slightly modified (greater emphasis on symbolism), from March 2013.
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