Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is still celebrated for masterpieces such as “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (1881), the jewel of the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. His later works, however, have fared less well with tastemakers. Substandard reproductions on chocolate boxes, coasters and posters have not helped, nor has the global shift in aesthetic taste.
    Now, “Renoir in the 20th Century”—which opened this past October at Paris’s Grand Palais and is traveling to Los Angeles and Philadelphia in 2010—strives to rehabilitate those later years, giving the out-of-favor Renoirs a second chance and displaying some lesser-known works, such as decorative paintings, drawings and sculpture. Through this exhibition, which juxtaposes Renoirs with canvases by his younger contemporaries, curators endeavor to show that the later works were, in fact, cornerstones of modern art, collected, revered and emulated by the likes of Matisse and Picasso.
    “We’re proposing a new approach to that period, showing its importance and influence,” says Sylvie Patry of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. One of the show’s four curators, she explains that Renoir is, along with Monet, the Impressionist painter whose life extended farthest into the 20th century, overlapping with new generations of artists. The late works “are not what people like the most about Renoir,” she concedes. “The artist is to some extent responsible for this disaffection: He let a lot of canvases that were, in fact, barely completed sketches slip out into the marketplace.”
    In recent decades, critics have dismissed even his more finished works as facile crowd-pleasers. When Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts staged a Renoir retrospective in 1985, New York Times critic John Russell labeled the artist “a difficult and a contradictory case” whose popularity “persists, regardless of both the vertiginous ups and downs in the quality of his output and the reticence of curators, historians and critics.”
    This was how he explained Renoir’s enduring mass appeal: “The case for Renoir, the people’s friend, can be put quite simply,” he wrote. “He sets before us a lost paradise that is persuasive in terms of everyday life. In that paradise, everyone is having a good time in ways that should not be beyond our reach. The juices of life flow thick, and full, and warm. Young women are plump and comely, and not at all self-conscious about letting us know it. Young men are strong, clean and chivalrous. All children are adorable, and even the household chores look fun. The sun shines, we never see an ugly thing anywhere, and even people who have never had much money are prettily turned out.”
    Critical distaste for 20th-century Renoirs may have another, more mundane explanation: Corpulent nudes with love handles and bulging bosoms are simply no longer in fashion, at least not with arbiters of taste. “People today don’t like very fat ladies,” explains London-based curator Ann Dumas, co-author of Renoir Women, published in 2005. “Those big pneumatic pink ladies aren’t everybody’s favorite subject.”

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