In His Rosy Glow

History is attached to the back of major paintings--small tags identify the artist and the title, of course, but additional labels from museums and art galleries record where and when these works have been shown, a kind of art-world pedigree.

In a long gallery at the San Diego Museum of Art, freshly painted in off-white and balmy sky blue for its next exhibition, only a few works have been hung, while several dozen sit vertically on padded carts. By the looks of the multiple tags on their backsides--some typed, some hand-printed, some engraved on tarnished metal plates--they are a well-traveled, well-heeled lot.

And so they should be. This is a rare assemblage of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and 19 American artists prominent in the early 20th century, including George Bellows, Isabel Bishop, William Glackens, Robert Henri and Leon Kroll.

At first glance, the activity-filled lawn tennis party of Bellow’s “Tennis at Newport” or the cool urbanity of two shop girls leaning on a counter and chatting in Bishop’s “At the Noon Hour” seem a world away from the calm domesticity of Renoir’s bourgeois scenes.

But there is a point in bringing these works together: They illustrate the idea that the French painter Renoir was highly influential on critics, collectors and indeed the artists of America in the first half of the 20th century.

The show is “Idol of the Moderns: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and American Painting,” which opened Saturday at the San Diego Museum of Art. It is co-curated by Anne Dawson, associate professor of art history at Eastern Connecticut State University, and Steven Kern, curator of European art at the San Diego museum.

Renoir was critically and popularly admired for both style and subject matter, says Dawson, speaking by phone from Connecticut. In an overarching way, “he was seen as someone who was the connection between the traditional and Impressionism, and also Postimpressionism. He was seen as someone who kept trying to experiment and to innovate.”

That notion conflicts with today’s vision of Renoir as the apotheosis of conservative 19th century tastes, with his sentimental depictions of plump, rosy-cheeked women and children.

“I think he had a big impact on the development of Modernism,” Dawson says. “He was used by a lot of American critics to push artists beyond Impressionism to more Modernist styles.”

The seed for the San Diego exhibition was Dawson’s doctoral dissertation at Brown University, which analyzed criticism of Renoir’s work in periodicals of the time such as the New York Evening Post, New York Sun and American Art News. Then, she says, “I wanted to expand my research into his influence on American artists.”

In 1996 she met Kern, who was curating a show at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., about the Renoirs collected by the Clarks. A year later, after Kern had moved to the San Diego Museum of Art, he welcomed her proposal for a show that would encompass Renoir’s impact on three groups: critics, collectors and artists.

Dawson emphasizes that the influences tracked by “Idol of the Moderns” are not based primarily on scholarly conjecture or visual interpretations. It was the artists and critics who pointed to Renoir as source and inspiration, in interviews, articles, letters and books.

In the late 1800s, Americans were already aware of French Impressionism, and the artist most identified with the movement was Monet. Then, at the turn of the century, tastes shifted. By 1914, American artist Guy Pene du Bois would declare, “Of the Impressionists, the most admired man in modern circles today is Renoir.”

“It had to do with a change in American aesthetics, what people wanted to see in art, led by the critics,” Dawson says. “One important thing was that Renoir was modern but accessible, and his works were sensual and happy.”

His late works were his most popular here. They are filled with radiant people in idealized pastoral or domestic settings--for instance, “Young Shepherd in Repose” (1911) or “Mother and Child” (1910), both in the San Diego show. Women were favored subjects, clothed and unclothed, and the critics and collectors drawn to them were predominantly men, as Dawson’s examples make clear. Dawson writes in the exhibition catalog that two influential American critics, James Gibbons Huneker and Willard Huntington Wright, “especially admired Renoir’s representations of women enjoying traditionally acceptable and passive female activities.”

Renoir’s palette and brushwork in these paintings were another part of their appeal. “He started out in a more academic style,” Dawson says, “then he was into Impressionism. In the 1890s he switched to a paint application that was looser, more free, and his colors became hotter, more intense. The three-dimensionality also became more pronounced.”

In 1908, Huneker, the New York Sun critic, called Renoir “the master colorist.” In 1915, Wright, author of the popular book “Modern Painting,” wrote that Renoir “had one of the most penetrating and powerful pictorial visions ever known.”

At about that time, the paintings themselves began arriving in this country. In 1907, noted English art critic Roger Fry, then curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, recommended the first purchase of a Renoir by a U.S. museum, “Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children” (1878). He believed the artist was underappreciated and wrote, “There are good judges who think that Renoir is destined ultimately to take a higher place than any of his contemporaries in the annals of modern art.”

Soon, other major art institutions felt obliged to obtain Renoirs, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Private collectors were not far behind. The Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York had its first solo Renoir show in 1908; it was so successful it was followed by eight more in the next dozen years. The voracious art collector Albert C. Barnes acquired his first Renoir through his friend Glackens, who had gone on a European art shopping spree for him in 1912. In 1923, when Arts magazine wrote about the museum Barnes established outside Philadelphia, his Renoirs numbered 150. The same year, Washington, D.C., collector Duncan Phillips purchased one of the most famous Renoirs then and now, “The Luncheon of the Boating Party” (1881)--a sale announced in the New York Times and many other publications.

While the market and commentators were acknowledging Renoir, the artists were busy emulating him. In some cases, the influence was direct and obvious. Glackens, for example, was popularly called “the American Renoir.” Dawson traces Renoir’s impact on the painter from 1910, with the creation of such works as “Nude With Apple” and “Family Group.” which is in the show, on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. She points out the way it harks back to “Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children” in its casual familial composition, feathery brushstrokes and coloring.

The connection wasn’t universally lauded. In Arts magazine in 1928, critic Virgil Barker wondered if Glackens was “too much under the influence of the art of Renoir.” If “Glackens was once a genuinely native painter, he is now a French derivative.” Several other artists included in the exhibition show obvious ties to Renoir. In Mary Cassatt’s “Simone in a Blue Bonnet” and Kenneth Hayes Miller’s “The Shoppers,” the high red of the subjects’ cheeks and the way daubs of color create form are Renoir-esque. Henry Lee McFee applied similar elements of color and sensuous modeling to still lifes.

But in other cases, cautions Kern, the paintings “don’t offer direct comparisons. The artists were absorbing lessons that aren’t quite obvious. How Marsden Hartley was able to incorporate lessons from Renoir into a New Mexico landscape, for example, is a little bit of a revelation.”

Yet there is written evidence of it, in a 1918 letter he wrote to Alfred Steiglitz about his Sante Fe paintings: “You will see a little Courbet, and a little Renoir, and a little Cezanne, and you will also see myself,” he tells the photographer and gallery owner. “Idol of the Moderns” includes two of Hartley’s dramatic landscapes--”New Mexico” and “Western Flame” (both 1919)--which feature mounds of red mountains outlined in blue-black, under streaming yellow skies.

Although Renoir made no paintings comparable to these, Kern suggests we look for the influence in the free and vivid use of color. Indeed, it is known that Hartley was taken by Renoir’s use of color. Hartley wrote in a 1912 letter, “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.”

“Idol of the Moderns” found a home at the San Diego museum because of Kern’s interest in Renoir and his influence, and also because it could make use of the museum’s collection. While most of the works are borrowed, one Renoir, “Woman Combing Her Hair” (1907), and nine of the American paintings--a quarter of the show--are from the San Diego museum.

The Renoir paintings wereselected to show the range of his work, from his early to late career. However, because of their value, Renoirs are especially difficult to borrow, and several on the wish list proved impossible to obtain--including the landmark “Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children,” which Kern says, “the Met simply doesn’t loan out.” They were able to pry two other Renoirs from the Met--”Young Girl With Daisies” and “The Waitress at Duval’s Restaurant.”

Generally, the works are being hung in groupings with visual parallels--single portraits on one wall, duo or group portraits on another, works that incorporate landscapes and still lifes in other sections.

The dates on the American paintings are telling. They cover just after the turn of the century to 1937. By the early 1940s, the taste for Renoir was fading, supplanted by the currency of abstraction and art seeking to be more of the post-Freudian moment.

“My reactions to Renoir keep changing,” wrote Modernist critic Clement Greenberg in 1950. “One day I find him almost powerful, another day almost weak; one moment brilliant, the next merely flashy; one day firm, another day soft.” What was once deemed a virtue--accessibility--paled; Greenberg criticized the artist’s “susceptibility to the popular.”

Will Pierre-Auguste Renoir have his day again? “It’s possible; everything’s possible,” Dawson says. “It’s very hard to say where art criticism is going to go, but it’s clear that abstraction can only go so far.”

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“Idol of the Moderns: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and American Painting,” through Sept. 15, San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., except Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Adults, $8; seniors, young adults, students, miliary, $6; children, 6-17, $3; children 5 and younger, free. (619) 232-7931.

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Scarlet Cheng is a frequent contributor to Calendar.