Renoir. Intimacy - Tapa blanda

The filmmaker Jean Renoir described how his father “looked at flowers, women and clouds in the sky as other men touch and caress”. In contrast to the habitual conception of Impressionism, which reduces it to “the purely visual”, this book, as the exhibition it accompanies, singles out the central role of tactile sensations in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s canvases, which are evident in all the different phases of his career and which he expressed in a wide range of genres, including group scenes, portraits and nudes, as well as still lifes and landscapes. This publication comprising more than 70 works by the artist, from museums and collections world-wide, reveals the way Renoir made use of the tactile qualities of volume, material and textures as a vehicle to depict intimacy in its different forms – social intimacy, among friends and family, or erotic – and how that imagery connects the work and the viewer to the sensuality of the brushstroke and the pictorial surface.