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You know, it's not often that a father and son both become masters of very different art forms. An exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia proves that it is possible. "Renoir: Father And Son" shows paintings by the father of impressionism and also films his son made years later that became classics. NPR's special correspondent Susan Stamberg explores how their art connects.
SUSAN STAMBERG, BYLINE: They had a loving but complicated relationship, like many fathers and sons. Between these two, the father was 19th-century painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir; the son was 20th-century filmmaker Jean Renoir. The complications were artistic and personal.
What do you make of the fact that Jean, a year after his father dies, marries the father's last model?
MATTHIEU ORLEAN: It's too intimate maybe to get interpreted. I don't know.
STAMBERG: Too intimate to interpret, says Matthieu Orlean from the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris.
ORLEAN: It was, of course, a very important link, this woman, between the father and the son.
STAMBERG: The son put her in his movies. The father painted her about a hundred times in his final years. He died in 1919. In the paintings, she is timeless.
SYLVIE PATRY: She's very sensuous. And in Jean's films, she's very experimental; she's very adventurous in what she's doing. She's a modern woman.
STAMBERG: Curator Sylvie Patry.
Auguste Renoir's women are pink, zaftig, joyous. Jean's heroines - "Nana," "The Little Match Girl," and in his classics "The Rules Of The Game" and "Grand Illusion" - they're darker. His first film, a 1924 silent, is called "Catherine, Or A Life Without Joy." There were other differences, as well as similarities. In a memoir, Jean wrote, I have spent my life trying to determine the extent of the influence of my father upon me. The Barnes demonstrates the influence by projecting a clip from a film Jean made in 1936 on a wall near an oil Auguste created 60 years earlier. The father paints a pretty, sun-dappled young blonde standing on a swing.
CINDY KANG: She's wearing a white dress.
STAMBERG: Associate curator Cindy Kang.
KANG: ...A long white dress that has a row of blue bows that are descending down the middle of the dress. And we read it as white even though when you actually look at the colors of the paint, they are not white.
STAMBERG: They're quick strokes of yellow, pink, blue, greenish.
PATRY: It's so, so very much about light, colors and the impact of natural light on the colors and on the shapes.
STAMBERG: A girl, sunshine, colors.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A DAY IN THE COUNTRY")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (Speaking French).
JACQUES BRUNIUS: (Speaking French).
STAMBERG: Curator Sylvie Patry says Jean Renoir's film "A Day In The Country" has a similar summertime scene. Jean's camera follows a girl happily swinging in a garden.
PATRY: It is an outdoor scene, as the painting was.
STAMBERG: And she's wearing a dress much like the one in the color-drenched painting. But Jean's movie is black and white, and unlike the radiant painting, the cinema sunshine doesn't last.
PATRY: It's the beginning of a love story between two characters. It will go nowhere. I mean, she will not be happy. I mean, she will get married to somebody she doesn't like.
STAMBERG: No happy ending?
PATRY: No, no happy ending.
STAMBERG: You have to go, for that, to the Renoir paintings.
PATRY: Absolutely.
STAMBERG: Clearly, his father's painting "The Swing" influenced this scene, but Jean made some changes. There are no bows on the slim young swinger's dress. The director moved the bows over to the girl's portly mother. What was he thinking? Cindy Kang has a theory.
KANG: In the context of this exhibition, this move that Jean does with transposing the bows from the dress of the young woman in the white dress to that of the mother next to her, it's such an obvious - you know, I'm going to evoke my father's works, and then turn them around and turn them on its head. I'm going to subvert your expectations - because this is how he was dealing with his father's legacy.
STAMBERG: And deal he did. Jean Renoir set many of his films in his father's century, with its lovely long dresses, the long leisurely days, but Jean told modern stories with moving pictures that often appear on lists of the greatest films of all times. The legendary French directors who followed him - Truffaut, Godard - called him Le Patron, the boss, just what painters called his father. Film curator Matthieu Orlean heard a revealing story about legacy, father and son. In the 1950s, an actor went to Jean's Hollywood house. The director offered to show one of his movies. Something pretty symbolic happened. An oil by Jean's father hung on one wall. Jean pushed a button, and just in front of the painting, a screen came down from the ceiling.
ORLEAN: ...Hiding Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting.
STAMBERG: So the Jean Renoir film covers...
ORLEAN: Exactly.
STAMBERG: ...The Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting.
ORLEAN: Exactly.
STAMBERG: But still, on the wall just across from the film screen, another Renoir, a glorious painting, remained in full view. Growing up in the shadow of genius, loving the genius, extending it into a modern medium - that's the theme of "Renoir: Father And Son" at Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation through early September. I'm Susan Stamberg, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF TAKENOBU'S "CANALES (DREAMS ADAPTATION)")
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