By Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 reporter
Dallas, TX – Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 reporter: When Pierre-Auguste Renoir arrived in Algeria in 1881, he may have been a bit surprised. Travel books romanticized the North African nation as an exotic Eden. But David Prochaska, who teaches history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says the capital city of Algiers, where Renoir stayed, was mostly an outpost of French colonialism, with dozens of streets marked by Parisian arcades and coffee shops.
David Prochaska, History Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: He saw a town, a city, that was not primarily Algerian, as we might think, but in fact a town that was primarily European, a town in which the European colonizers outnumbered the Algerians by a ratio of three to one.
Sprague: Prochaska wrote part of the catalog for the "Renoir and Algeria" exhibition now at the Dallas Museum of Art. He writes that the Impressionist master presented little of the French influence on Algeria in his paintings. Indeed, only one depicts Europeans and Algerians together. It's a view of an Arab festival just outside the Casbah. More common are paintings like "Mosque at Algiers," a sun-drenched scene of one of the country's holiest shrines. Prochaska says the painting is quiet and peaceful, almost timeless, but he adds it masks the turbulence of Algerian society.
Prochaska: At the very time Renoir painted this painting, the French authorities, fearful of the possibility of Islam, of Muslim militancy, had already clamped down on Muslim institutions, Muslim clergy and the like. In fact, it was not the Algerians, but the French who ran, who administered this mosque.
Sprague: Visitors to the DMA won't see paintings that document the politics of colonialism in Algeria. Instead, they will find often-charming scenes of exotic landscapes and women in traditional dress, all with the familiar feathery, yet agitated Renoir brushstroke.
Dorothy Kosinski, Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art: Let's talk about this. I love this painting. It's called "Ravine of the Savage Woman."
Sprague: Dorothy Kosinski is the DMA's Curator of European art. One of her favorite paintings is a large-scale composition of a famed wooded area just outside Algiers.
Kosinski: Here he's out in the wild, the vegetation and you can see how much he loves that.
Sprague: The golden hues from the hot African sun mix with cooler blues and purples in Renoir's interpretation of the valley.
Kosinski: And the variety of his brushstroke, it's just remarkable, sort of strong and very heavily layered paint.
Sprague: So why would Renoir, the painter of cherubic portraits and French country life, journey to exotic Algeria? Kosinski says he was following the path of his favorite artist, Eugene Delacroix, and possibly looking to experiment with light and color, two of Algeria's greatest assets.
Kosinski: So, I think it fit his overall aesthetic agenda. Besides, it rains a lot in France and it gets cold and you really get miserable by the late spring and he was in a way a painter-tourist who was fleeing south and across the Mediterranean to a place that was exciting, but also an enormous respite from the cold and damp of Western Europe.
Sprague: Kosinski has rounded out the exhibition by adding 40 more Renoirs, mostly owned by the Museum, to showcase other periods of the artist's career. But the genesis for the Algerian show occurred three years ago at the Clark Art institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The Clark owns one of Renoir's most famous Algerian portraits showing a young French girl wearing a colorful Algerian costume. Curator Roger Benjamin, with the University of Sydney in Australia, used this painting, as well as his own research, as starting points for the exhibition, which opened at the Clark. He read all of Renoir's letters home, including ones that complained few women would pose for him.
Roger Benjamin, University of Sydney: But in other places he's writing home that he loves this country, that the Arab people are the friendliest one could imagine and later on in reminiscences, he speaks very fondly of the country and its people. He said to his son, Jean Renoir, one of the things that struck him was that you would see a very grand personage in the street stopping to chat to a beggar, something you would never see in France.
Sprague: Benjamin says Renoir was less tolerant of wealth because he came from a working-class background. His portrait of an older and obviously poor Arab woman evokes a certain dignity that many guide books and tourist photos lacked when depicting similar scenes. But when Renoir returned to France, these experiences faded into distant memories. Michael Conforti is the director of the Clark Art Institute.
Michael Conforti, Director, Clark Art Institute: I would love to be able to come up with something that would confirm that there was a transformation of his artistic style while he was in Algeria, that he then translated back to his working life in France, but that just isn't the case.
Sprague: Still, Conforti believes "Renoir and Algeria" amplifies why the impressionist master remains one of the most popular artists on exhibition today.
Conforti: You have some of the most beautiful small-scale compositions that I think he ever did.
Sprague: Curator Roger Benjamin notes that critics have sometimes chastised Renoir for painting scenes that are so sweet, so pretty, that they have a saccharine quality to them. But Benjamin says the Algerian paintings stand out because, while beautiful, they're not sugary, making for an engaging diversion from many of Renoir's famous French paintings. "Renoir and Algeria" continues at the Dallas Museum of Art through August 31st. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.
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