Pricing & History
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$24,400
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February 2010
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BONHAMS AUCTIONEERS & VALUERS, several locations, USA - UK - Australia - Asia
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$24,400
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RENOIR, PIERRE AUGUSTE. 1841–1919.
"JUSQU'À PRÉSENT, LA PEINTURE SEULE A ÉCHAPPÉ AU PROGRÈS."
Autograph Manuscript Signed ("Renoir"), being a draft of his preface to the 1911 edition of Cennino Cennini's Livre d'art, ou Traité de la Peinture, 40 pp of which 7 are in another hand, mostly 4to (ruled sheets taken from an exercise book), sections dated May 10 and June 1, 1910, [probably Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1909-1910], minimal toning, chips, or fold separation.
"Art is the true history of peoples. It's in art that we have a view of their way of life and their ideals."
Victor Mottez, "painter of the Belle Epoque" and "pupil of Ingres," had published in 1858 a translation of a technical manual known as the Libro dell'arte by the fourteenth century artist Cennino Cennini. Mottez's translation was based on an incomplete manuscript, and some time after Mottez's death in 1897, his son Henri began to work on a more complete text. Henri intended the new edition to be a memorial to his father, and commissioned Renoir to write a preface.
Renoir's preface takes the form of a letter to Henri Mottez. In its published form, as it appeared in 1911, the preface discussed the painter as craftsman—painting as a craft like woodwork or ironmongery. Each artist was simply part of the continuum from Greek to Christian art. And whereas in the past a skilled artisan could have produced a work of genius, in the age of mechanization creativity has been suppressed.
The present manuscript is significantly longer than the published version, and we can see Renoir working and reworking his arguments. It represents the climax of Renoir's preoccupation with the decorative arts—he began his career as a painter of Limoges porcelain—and time after time he eulogizes a golden age while cursing the industrial one.
Excerpts: "One is filled with enthusiasm by all the marvels created by workers since the olden times of monks who made themselves architects, masons, sculptors, or painters... They knew how to make cheerful earthenware, tapestries, enamels, forged iron, and above all, without suspecting it, the glory and fortune of their country... Slavery has been abolished, but the factory has been created... We still have painting and this is why, my dear Mottez, I urged you to re-edit your father's work, the translation of Cennino, who shows us painters, still then workers... who, respectful of tradition, created these works which after several centuries we can admire in our museums... How many things young painters can draw from this treatise that I came to know too late!... This book is a reliable painting lesson, and is even more valuable because of the morality that flows from it. It shows us these painters of olden times with their simple and uncomplicated lives... I'm terrified by the Luxembourg [the gallery of 'living artists'] merely by entering the sculpture hall which gives me just one idea, to flee out of fear of receiving kicks and punches from these terrified and blanched statues. In the Louvre I find again old friends with whom I love to rest for a long time and in whom I always discover new qualities. Their calm poses give them something eternal and if there's movement as in the Kermesse [by Rubens], these people are at home and so little aware of being looked at that their playfulness, far from tiring you, makes you wish to be among them. How one would like to be in a landscape by Corot!... Cennino Cennini's treatise comes from one of the most glorious eras of Christian art."
Of additional interest are two passages on photography and its role in art history: "Among the many inventions more harmful than useful, there's one that hasn't harmed anyone and that provides unlimited pleasure. I mean photography. To travel round the world without cost and fatigue you only have to go and sit down at one of the photograph shops on the rue Bonaparte... Needing a fireplace, I sat down one day in one of [them]... They brought out for me an album of interiors, all the fireplaces from earliest convents to châteaux... Having found what I wanted, I began to look at other albums, and in that way I made a most instructive and interesting tour of France." (English translation from Robert L. Herbert, Nature's Workshop, 2000.)
Renoir is seldom thought of as a theoretical or intellectual painter; yet the present manuscript sheds light on his philosophy of art, which was abbreviated and diluted in the published preface.
See illustration.
