Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Loge

0:00:06.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Courtauld Galleries in London looking at one of their most famous paintings. This is titled La Loge by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

0:00:15.6 Dr. Beth Harris: It was part of that historic exhibition that the Impressionists set up to circumvent the restrictions of the official exhibitions and appeal directly to a public with a new kind of art.

0:00:29.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: This was not painted actually in the theater, but rather this is a painting that was made in his studio to look as if it was in the theater. We see this elegantly dressed woman with this extravagant pearl necklace, sparkly earrings, a large gold bracelet, white gloves. She holds opera glasses in one hand and a fan in the other.

0:00:49.8 Dr. Beth Harris: We know that this woman was a model who worked for Renoir for several paintings and the man behind was a family member. So this is a constructed painting made to seem like a caught moment in time where you’ve just turned your head and come upon this couple.

0:01:07.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: The sense of spontaneity is probably most effectively expressed by the soft and loose brushwork, by the lack of hard defined lines, by the sense that the artist’s brush was quick.

0:01:18.9 Dr. Beth Harris: Contour lines are a technique that is expected of painting in this period, but here let’s take an example of the cuff on the woman’s right hand where that bluish grayish paint merges with the color of her arm and with the colors of her dress and even that left side of her forearm merges with that ledge that her arm rests on.

0:01:46.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: That spatial ambiguity and the ambiguity between separate forms can be seen also on the right side just over her shoulder, perhaps a shawl, but where does the shoulder end, where does the shawl begin and where on the other side does the shawl end and where does the man’s chest begin?

0:02:03.1 Dr. Beth Harris: And so the space has become flattened because of those all over brushstrokes that Renoir is using and my eye is drawn to that diamond of bluish blackish paint that is supposed to be a space in between her dress, her bodice, and the crook of her elbow, but that blue paint comes forward and blends in with all the paint around it so we don’t read that as a space behind.

0:02:29.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: My eyes are riveted mostly on hers because she looks directly out and what’s interesting is that she can’t be looking at the performance because the performance would be slightly below her. She must instead be looking at somebody else.

0:02:43.8 Dr. Beth Harris: That was a big part of what happened at the theater. An increasingly popular destination now open to middle and upper-middle class people, the people who were populating the streets of Paris that had been recently renovated with cafes and department stores.

0:03:03.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: The idea of public spectacle, people parading the streets, people shopping, people going to theater, people dressing to be seen.

0:03:12.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And there’s just so much ambiguity here and that ambiguity is a key experience of modern life in the city. What is the man looking at? Who is she looking at? All of these things are unknowns and paintings were supposed to be legible and this painting is filled with unknowns.

0:03:32.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: There seem to be multiple sources of soft light and in fact the entire painting has a slightly yellow greenish cast to it and it is possible that Renoir is trying to replicate the multiple sources of artificial light.

0:03:45.6 Dr. Beth Harris: Renoir gives us shadows that are green, shadows that are bluish, highlights that are pinkish and so he’s moving away from that academic tradition of modeling and using color instead.

0:04:00.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: This is just an incredibly awkward composition and yet he’s pulled it off beautifully. The two heads are knocking against each other, the spatial relationship that would help to explain why his head is so much smaller is not clearly defined. Renoir is in some ways creating a kind of anti-composition.

0:04:18.6 Dr. Beth Harris: While so much of this is radically new, there are some art historical precedents. What I think of when I look at the flowers that she wears is the 17th-century Spanish painter Velázquez, this kind of rapid, quick brushstrokes that suggest when you’re far away pink flowers but become when one is close just touches of pinks and whites. So all of this flattening of space, this loose brushwork, the lack of clear contour lines, these are things that are radically new in the 1870s.

0:04:53.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s interesting to think about the category of subject that this is. It’s not history painting, it’s not a portrait. Ultimately this painting seems to be about how we look in the modern world.

This work at the Courtauld Gallery

Fashion and Illusion in Renoir’s La Loge from Google Arts & Culture

Robert Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

Ernst Vegelin Van Claerbergen, et al., Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at the Loge (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2008).

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