Temporary Exhibition

Renoir: Intimacy

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”, the exhibition to be shown at the Museum in the autumn of 2016 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 survey comprising more than 70 works by the artist, loaned from museums and collections world-wide, will reveal 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.

Curated by the Museum’s Artistic Director Guillermo Solana, the exhibition is sponsored by Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and will subsequently be shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao from 7 February to 15 May 2017.