SAN DIEGO MUSEUM of ART | Idol of the Moderns: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and American Painting

This exhibition is no longer on view at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Idol of the Moderns: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and American Painting provides the first investigation of the American critical response to Renoir between 1904 and 1940 and of his relationship with American artists who drew inspiration from him and his work. Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art and curated by Anne Dawson, professor of art history at Eastern Connecticut State University, and Steven Kern, SDMA curator of European art, the exhibition presents approximately forty paintings, one-third of which are by Renoir.

This exhibition acknowledges Renoir's immense popularity with critics, collectors, and the public, particularly in the years between the two world wars. Idol of the Moderns also explores Renoir's impact on work by leading American artists including George Bellows, John Sloan, Marsden Hartley, Isabel Bishop, Guy Pène DuBois, and Morgan Russell, whose admiration of Renoir comes through strongly in their own work. Aside from Renoir and Cézanne there is little else to stir me but Picasso and Rousseau and it is in communion with these spirits that I am working. Renoir is so lovely at this time—the things he is doing are so simple and so pure and the color so beautiful— He is perhaps at his best in color just now...
Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, November 1912

For American painters working within a variety of approaches of the early twentieth century -- American impressionism, the Ashcan School, formalist realism, early modernism, regionalism, the Fourteenth Street School, and academic figure painting -- Renoir's art both affirmed their most important aesthetic goals and provided a model of how to achieve them.

Of the Impressionists, the most admired
man in modern circles today is Renoir.
Guy Pène du Bois, June 1914

Support for this exhibition is provided by Mercedes-Benz, Wells Fargo, The Westgate Hotel, The Potiker Foundation, and John & Toni Bloomberg.

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