Paris In July: Renoir, My Father by Jean Renoir

 

I am extremely pleased with myself for finally finishing this book! I bought it more than ten years ago on a visit to the Frick Museum in New York City, when I went to see an exhibit of Dutch masters. Apparently they didn't have anything else in the gift shop and but the pretty cover of this NYRB classic (it's a detail from Garden at the Rue Cortot, Montmartre painted in 1876, below. It's at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh). 

So. I've owned this book forever and I know I've put it on my list of books to read for Paris in July multiple times. I finally cracked it open a couple of weeks ago and though it's not a fast read, I really enjoyed it. I love art and I'm fascinated by the lives of artists. I wouldn't say Renoir is my favorite Impressionist but I really gained a new appreciation of his work from reading this book. 

Originally published in 1958, it's a memoir by filmmaker Jean Renoir, Auguste Renoir's middle son. Jean was wounded during WWI and as he convalesced with his elderly father, who was already crippled with rheumatism, the younger Renoir spent a lot of time talking to his father about the artist's life. The book is a combination of a biography of his father's life and his own recollections growing up in Paris and various other parts of France. The family often spent summers in the countryside in various parts of France, particularly Essoys in Burgundy, where his mother Aline was born, and later in the south of France, near Nice (I was actually lucky enough to visit Nice a few years ago and was sadly unaware that there's a Renoir museum just 20 minutes away in Cagnes-sur-Mer, in his final home. I did get to visit the Chagall Museum and the Matisse Museum, so I really wouldn't complain but I wish I'd known!)

It's quite an interesting memoir about Renoir's life and how became and artist and met up with his fellow Impressionists. He's one of the most prolific of the group, with at least 4000 paintings to his record (and the book includes stories about other paintings that were lost or stolen which just made me aghast. Some were literally used to patch up holes in a leaky roof). 

There are also great stories about the other painters including one about his good friend Gustave Caillebotte, who named Renoir executor of his estate and personal art collection after his death. Apparently it was Caillebotte's wish that the collection be given to the Louvre who didn't want the whole collection and turned 2/3 of it away. The third that they kept was stored away in the Luxembourg Museum. After his widow's death they just went to various heirs and were mostly sold outside France. Well, France's loss is the world's gain, I suppose! 

I feel very fortunate to have been to Philadelphia last year where I saw the biggest single collection of Renoir's works at the Barnes Foundation, a total of 181! Barnes was a huge art collector and began amassing Impressionist works in the 1920s. His entire house was designed to showcase his collection and was eventually left to the city of Philadelphia as a private museum. The collection was eventually moved to a larger space in downtown Philadelphia which resembles the original house with the exact layout of the all the artworks. If you ever get the chance it's absolutely worth visiting! 

I'm also extremely fortunate to live only a short drive away from the Phillips Collection Museum in DC near Dupont Circle. One of the highlights of the collection is Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party. The last time I visited one of the docents told me that Phillips and Barnes were rival collectors. Phillips was annoyed that Barnes had the bigger collection of Renoirs but always bragged that he had the best one. 

Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881.
Renoir's future wife Aline is in the left hand corner with the little dog;
Renoir's friend and fellow Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte is on the lower left leaning back. 

I enjoyed visiting Renoir's world but the book is pretty dense and took a lot longer to finish than I expected -- I am rather behind on Paris in July reading list and also my Big Book Summer Reading Challenge! But this book was on both lists and I'm also counting this as my Classic Nonfiction for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

I wish I had the discipline (and the time) to review each and every book I read, as soon as I finish it.  I finished My Name is Asher Lev, back in June.  Other things, other books, other reviews just got in the way.  It is a bad idea to wait an entire month to review a book, but I'll give it a shot.  To the best of my recollection.

Anway -- Asher Lev was a gift from my good friend Amanda, who used to blog about books but now mostly blogs about other things.  I put this on my TBR 2013 Challenge list because I didn't want the entire list to be books by authors that had been dead for years and years (Potok did pass away in 2002, but he's pretty contemporary compared to the rest of this list).

So, Asher Lev is an artist, and he begins his story by telling the reader that he is most famous for creating a painting of a crucifixion, a blasphemy for an observant Jew.  He's not just an observant Jew -- Asher was raised an orthodox Jew, a Hasidic, very traditional and conservative.  Asher lives in New York and was born shortly after WWII, and it is the life's work of his father to help other Jews in Europe, so that they can practice their faith safely.  His mother is studying Russian to be able to help persecuted Jews in Russia.

However, young Asher has different ideas.  As long as he can remember, he's been obsessed with drawing and painting.  It's part of him, he can't stop doing it, much to the chagrin of his father, who believes that he's just wasting his time on frivolity -- Asher's father wants him to do something to glorify God and help other Jews.  Every day, Asher struggles with his need to create art against his family's wishes -- he wants to please his father, and win his love, but his art is a part of him.  This is the story of his coming of age, as a young man and an artist, and how he tries to reconcile the two.

I wasn't sure I wanted to read another book about an artist after my disappointment with The Masterpiece by Emile Zola, which I finished a couple of months ago.  In that book, the main character was so obsessed by his art he lets it ruin his life and the lives of the people around him.  This book is quite different.  Asher is really struggling to satisfy his need to create art and his need to please his family.  It's a really interesting character study.  I'd never read anything by Chaim Potok, but the writing was excellent and the characters interesting and well-developed.  I took a few art history classes in college but I really don't know much about modern art.  I don't think Asher is necessarily based on a particular artist, but I tried to imagine what his art might have looked like.  I was also quite pleased that I recognized most of the real artists and works of art mentioned in the book, like Chagall and Modigliani, and Picasso's Guernica.

La Mariee by Marc Chagall.  

I've also been very amused this summer as many high school students came to the reference desk at my library looking for this book!  Apparently it was on the summer reading list for a local high school -- the choice was My Name is Asher Lev or The Count of Monte Cristo!  I still haven't read Monte Cristo but now I can definitely recommend Asher Lev.

The Kill by Emile Zola; and a painting by Edouard Manet

This weekend, while on a flight to our nation's capital, I finally finished my seventh book by Zola: The Kill, the second of his Rougon-Macquart series.  I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed in this book.  The last three novels I read by Zola were so well crafted and such great stories that I expected this to be just brilliant.

Here's the setup.  This is the story of a really unpleasant couple, Aristide and Renee Saccard, during the French Second Empire.  Aristide is in his fifties and is a frenetic, scheming financial speculator who is making money hand over fist by buying Parisian properties and selling them to shell companies.  He has all kinds of shady government connections and gets these properties to be massively overvalued; then, he cheats the government out of millions of francs by selling the properties to the government, because they're going to be knocked down in a frenzy of urban renewal.  (The government is about to tear down tons of old buildings to put up new ones and create the current grid layout of Paris with the wide avenues, etc.)  Of course, he's also living on the edge because he's constantly on the verge of financial collapse.

Aristide's wife, Renee, is twenty years his junior, and after the untimely death of his first wife, he married her upon the advice of his shrewd sister.  Renee was a young woman of good family who is in a fix, so to speak, so her father marries her to nasty Aristide with a huge dowry to save the family's reputation.  Aristide takes her money to start his career as a financial speculator.  Ten years later, she's shallow and bored, and things take a turn for the dangerous when she decides to take a new lover -- her handsome stepson who's only seven or eight years her junior.

Basically, the story is a whirlwind of parties, greed, and incest, and if you've read anything by Zola, you know how things are going to turn out.   It was an interesting story, and like most of his other books, the characters aren't particularly sympathetic, and their behavior is pretty shocking.  Last year I read three novels by Zola in pretty quick succession (Germinal, #13 in the series; Pot-Bouille (Pot-Luck); #10, and La Bete Humaine, #17).  It was pretty obvious that The Kill is a much earlier work.  I really found the plots and character development much better in the later books, and although the satire and political commentary is present in all of them, I thought it was much more masterfully done in the later works.  Zola kind of beats you over the head with it in The Kill.

Also, there are frequently awful characters in all the books, but in the later novels, the stories are so well crafted that I couldn't stop reading them.  In The Kill I just found them to be wretched people living to excess and not nearly as well developed as the later books.  It's still an interesting book, but it just made me want to read more of the later stuff.  (By the way, #3, The Belly of Paris, was my first Zola, and I liked it, but I think the best bits were the food writing.  It was a good choice for a first Zola since I wasn't able to start with #1, The Fortunes of the Rougons; a new translations by Oxford World's Classics will be published in August.)

And now for the Manet connection.  As I mentioned, I finished this book on a flight to Washington -- it was the end of Spring Break so I got to spend a couple of days with family in Maryland.  Yesterday, we decide to visit the National Gallery, and as I was passing through the French Impressionist rooms, I stumbled upon a group with a docent who was discussing this picture by Edouard Manet:

It was painted by Manet during exactly the same period that Zola was writing about!  Apparently, it was controversial because it's a great big picture, about 6'x8', and it's not just a great painting, it's a social commentary.  At this time, the subjects of enormous artworks like this were always classical or Biblical.  These people are homeless and in the country, which would have been a shocking subject for that time period.  The girl on the left is probably an unwed mother, plus we have two street urchins, and the man on the right in the top hat is called the absinthe drinker because he's in another picture by Manet with that name, so we know he's probably an alcoholic.

Portrait of Emile Zola, 1868
Edouard Manet

Basically, all these people are homeless and in the country because of . . . . urban renewal during the Second Empire!!  So here is Manet painting a picture and making social commentary about the very same subject as Zola!  I mentioned Zola's book to the docent and she was familiar with it.  She also reminded me that Zola was friends with some of the Impressionists, including Manet, who painted Zola's portrait in 1868; and Cezanne, his childhood friend, who is the subject of Rougon-Macquart #14, The Masterpiece.   So there you have it, literature and art colliding.  My visit to the National Gallery was absolutely serendipitous and I think now The Masterpiece will be the next Zola on my to-read list.