{"id":132579,"date":"2019-01-10T11:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T16:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132579"},"modified":"2019-01-11T14:34:54","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T19:34:54","slug":"daddy-issues-renoir-pere-and-fils","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/10\/daddy-issues-renoir-pere-and-fils\/","title":{"rendered":"Daddy Issues: Renoir P\u00e8re and Fils"},"content":{"rendered":"

The filmmaker Jean Renoir made a career of dismantling the beliefs of his absentee father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Jean satirized the aristocracy and upended his father\u2019s saccharine scenes of leisure. An exhibition now at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, in Paris, looks at their relationship.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jean Renoir,\u00a0still from La Chienne<\/em>, 1931\u00a0\u00a9 Les Films du Jeudi<\/p><\/div>\n

The Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir rarely spent time with his second son, Jean. Whenever Pierre-Auguste was around the house, he demanded to be called patron<\/em>\u2014\u201cthe boss\u201d\u2014rather than the more typical papa<\/em>, and Jean grew to view him more as a boarding school headmaster than as a father. As for the actual parenting, that was mostly left to the family\u2019s nanny, Gabrielle Renard. Renard, who was only sixteen when she moved into the Renoirs\u2019 home in Paris, spent years with Jean\u2014taking him to the movies and to puppet shows, playing with toys and strolling the winding streets of Montmartre and the seaside in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Pierre-Auguste moved the family. Ultimately, Renard became one of the central influences on Jean\u2019s filmmaking career: where his father\u2019s paintings often portrayed their French aristocratic class in an earnest, sentimental light, Jean\u2019s films cut deeper, thanks to the influence of Renard\u2019s critical sensitivity. \u201cShe taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes,\u201d Jean wrote at the beginning of his 1974 memoir, My Life and My Films.<\/em> \u201cShe taught me to detest the clich\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n

The strained relationship between Renoir\u00a0p\u00e8re<\/em> and fils <\/em>manifested itself in their art. Pierre-Auguste was most present when he was painting his son. His portrait of a one- or two-year-old Jean from 1895 depicts the boy in gauzy, halcyon strokes as he smiles and coos in Renard\u2019s arms and plays with toy farm animals. Pierre-Auguste painted from behind his easel, watching his son at a remove, as though the childhood of the boy he was painting were already part of the past. Other times, he was strict with how his son acted and looked. He forbade Jean to get a haircut until he was sixteen, forcing him to grow out his reddish hair and dressing him up in the regalia of the bourgeoisie\u2014a pair of equestrian trousers, a bright foulard\u2014for the sake of his paintings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pierre-Auguste Renoir,\u00a0Gabrielle et Jean<\/em>, 1895.\u00a0Photo \u00a9 RMN-Grand Palais (Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie)\/Herv\u00e9 Lewandowski<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When he did permit his son a haircut, even that was tied to his art: he wanted to depict Jean as a hunter for his painting Jean comme chasseur<\/em> (1910), one of the most emotionally loaded paintings the elder Renoir ever crafted. Jean\u2019s noble pose and his hunting outfit were meant as shorthand for his coming of age and his place within a larger artistic and aristocratic lineage. Stylistically, the work is evocative of Peter Paul Rubens and, even more so, Diego Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s commissioned portraits of young royalty. For Jean, however, this kind of portrait would become, as epitomized in his 1950 satiric film The Rules of the Game<\/em>, a perfect encapsulation of the aristocracy\u2019s\u2014and his father\u2019s\u2014absurdity and, eventually, their self-inflicted demise.<\/p>\n

There is always a good deal of tension within creative families. When calculating the causes for an artist\u2019s creative success, what is the balance between DNA and family affluence and influence? And what are the emotional challenges within the family itself?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pierre-Auguste Renoir,\u00a0Jean comme chasseur<\/em>, 1910\u00a0\u00a9 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

History has known many creative families. There are novelists such as the Waughs, the Bront\u00ebs, the Amises, and the Dumases; musicians like the Marsalises; filmmakers like the Coppolas; painters like the Holbeins and the Brueghels. More rare, however, are families who succeed in separate creative pursuits\u2014like Quincy Jones in music and his daughter Rashida in acting. Creativity, however, is often a wellspring, and children can be encouraged by their artist parents to \u201cbe creative\u201d rather than pushed toward a specific medium. Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, wanted first to become a musician before becoming a novelist. The author John Banville wanted first to become a painter (and his daughter Ellen is a singer). Even Pierre-Auguste first tried his hand at porcelain painting before moving to canvas.<\/p>\n

Jean and his father rarely saw eye to eye, and while the son\u2019s films would eventually prove themselves to be more compelling and existentially inquisitive than the paintings of his father, his work drew on their tumultuous relationship. Perhaps all creativity is, in some way, created in the crucible of family tension. Perhaps it comes from the desire to define oneself in opposition to one\u2019s family while also living up to its expectations. Perhaps what we try to escape is invariably what defines us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Jean Renoir in his father\u2019s studio, 1911 (photographer unknown)\u00a0\u00a9 UCLA Library Special Collections<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay in Paris\u2014and, earlier, at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia\u2014an exhibition called \u201cRenoir Father and Son: Painting and Cinema\u201d attempts to divine the secrets of their creative dynamic, although it mostly displays their similarities. It is true that, on the surface, the father\u2019s paintings and the son\u2019s films had numerous connections. Jean shot frequently in the South of France, especially in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and sometimes in Montmartre, where the elder Renoir tended to paint. Jean was also one of the first filmmakers to normalize shooting outdoors, taking after his father, who had been a pioneer of painting en plein air<\/em>. They shared source material, too: both had a penchant for the novelist \u00c9mile Zola. Both were interested in questions of Realism and, in Jean\u2019s case especially, the role of memory.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Fran\u00e7ois Florit, poster for Jean Renoir\u2019s Nana<\/em>, 1926\u00a0\u00a9 La Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que fran\u00e7aise<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

But the apparent similarities between the two Renoirs can be misleading. Often, what look to be resemblances are actually more devious acts of appropriation. Take, for instance, Andr\u00e9e Heuschling, whom Pierre-Auguste met while she was a young girl modeling in Nice at the School of Decorative Arts. Heuschling became one of the elder Renoir\u2019s main models, appearing in several of his seminal paintings, such as\u00a0Les baigneuses<\/i>\u00a0(1918\u201319). He took particular pleasure in her company, especially as he went through a rough patch near the end of his life. His wife, Aline Charigot, had recently passed, World War I had just started, and his health was in steep decline. He nicknamed Heuschling \u201cD\u00e9d\u00e9e,\u201d and she became not only one of his most important models but also, for a time, his central confidante. Jean knew of this intimacy and, just weeks after his father died, he proposed marriage to Heuschling. He gave her the lead role in his film Backbiters<\/em>, encouraged her to change her name to Catherine Hessling to become a more marketable star, and, ultimately, put her into four more of his films. He made her his muse but also his wife, his partner, his lover. Jean had found a way to give her more than his father could. She had been prominent in Pierre-Auguste\u2019s paintings and kept him company in dire times. Jean, taking her as wife and muse, co-opted his father\u2019s source both of inspiration and of intimacy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Catherine Hessling, 1926\u00a0\u00a9 La Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que fran\u00e7aise<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Indeed, Jean took freely from his father\u2014in themes, in source materials, even in the people with whom he was close. But where Renoir p\u00e8re <\/em>largely celebrated and embraced the leisurely life of the bourgeoisie, Renoir fils <\/em>questioned, parodied, even disparaged it. Jean\u2019s film A Day in the Country<\/em> was one of his most finely tuned repudiations of his father\u2019s honey-soaked values. The movie, which was based on the short story of the same name by Guy de Maupassant, depicted a bourgeois Parisian family who spend a day in the countryside, where a pair of boatmen seduce the mother and daughter. Shooting the film in Marlotte\u2014where his father had often painted\u2014and filming mostly at magic hour\u2014so that golden light drenched the lakes and the grass as in many of his father\u2019s paintings\u2014Jean created a movie that borrowed the surface-level aesthetic of his father\u2019s work while perverting its underlying message. At one point in the movie, the daughter looks to her mother and asks, \u201cDid you feel a sort of tenderness toward the grass, the water, the trees?\u201d She says this sincerely, but it comes across as anything but: the supposed aristocratic tenderness toward the natural world had always been a canard to Jean, who saw it as a place in which humans acted on their darker, lustier desires while merely dressing with decorum.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La balan\u00e7oire<\/em>, 1876\u00a0 \u00a9 Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais\/Patrice Schmidt
Right: Eli Lotar, On Set of Jean Renoir\u2019s \u2018A Day in the Country<\/em>,\u2019 1936\u00a0 \u00a9 Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais\/Jean-Pierre Marchand\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p><\/div>\n

Near the end of his life, Jean became more aware of how much of his self had been constructed in opposition to his father. \u201cI have spent my life trying to determine the extent of the influence of my father upon me,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI did my utmost to escape from it, to dwell upon those when my mind was filled with the precepts I thought I had gleaned from him.\u201d It seemed to slowly dawn on him that to rebel against his father was still to enter into a dialogue with him. To reject something or someone is to give it power\u2014to admit that it merits rejection at all. \u201cIf certain landscapes, certain costumes, bring to mind my father\u2019s paintings, it\u2019s for two reasons,\u201d Jean wrote: \u201cFirst, because it takes place during the period and in a place where my father worked a great deal in his youth; second, it\u2019s because I\u2019m my father\u2019s son.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sanford Roth, Photograph of\u00a0Jean Renoir with one of his father\u2019s portraits \u00a9 Museums Associates\/LACMA<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

He rarely admitted it so explicitly, but Jean had been hurt by his father\u2019s coldness toward him as a child. They got to know each other a little better during World War I, when Jean, who had enlisted in the French army, returned to their home in Montmartre after having been shot in the leg. A picture taken in 1916 by Pierre Bonnard, the painter and a friend of the family, shows Pierre-Auguste, then in his mid-seventies, sitting in a wheelchair, while Jean, looking spry in his early twenties, sits behind him, clad in his military uniform. Pierre-Auguste\u2019s wife had just died (he would die only three years later), and, in this photo, he looks regretful, as though, now left with so little, he mourned the lack of the filial relationship he could have had. Jean, however, looks energized. Even with his injury, he appears keen to move on, to recover and to continue with his life. In the late fifties, many years after his father died, Jean left for the United States, never to return to France. He felt the time had finally come to separate himself once and for all. \u201cFor our peace of mind,\u201d Jean wrote, \u201cwe must try to escape from the spell of memories. Our salvation lies in plunging resolutely into the hell of the new world.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pierre Bonnard,\u00a0Pierre-Auguste et Jean Renoir, <\/em>circa 1916\u00a0Photo \u00a9 Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais \/ Patrice Schmidt<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, the irony for the Renoirs\u2014as for all parents and children\u2014is that Pierre-Auguste, who watched his son grow up from behind his canvas, was able to define Jean, while Jean could only respond and react. No matter how much Jean rejected him, Pierre-Auguste had the upper hand: he had been there first. No matter how wrong he might have been, his ideas were the originals; Jean\u2019s, even in opposition, were inevitably derivations. \u201cWe are in a period of searchers,\u201d the elder Renoir once said, \u201crather than of creators.\u201d The past always has the advantage.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps all creativity is, in some way, created in the crucible of family tension. Perhaps it comes from the desire to define oneself in opposition to one\u2019s family while also living up to its expectations. Perhaps what we try to escape is invariably what defines us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":822,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33990],"tags":[46369,16240,46372,46370,34030,46371],"class_list":["post-132579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-big-picture","tag-jean-renoir","tag-musee-dorsay","tag-my-life-and-my-films","tag-peter-paul-rubens","tag-pierre-auguste-renoir","tag-the-rules-of-the-game"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDaddy Issues: Renoir P\u00e8re and Fils by Cody Delistraty<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 10, 2019 \u2013 Perhaps all creativity is, in some way, created in the crucible of family tension. Perhaps it comes from the desire to define oneself in opposition to one\u2019s family while also living up to its expectations. 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