OWhether you see the Eiffel Tower in Paris as a technical masterpiece or as a neo-rococo gimmick makes a big difference. However, both views are not mutually exclusive. In its design it is an engineering avant-garde, but in its ornamental forms it is retrospective. In the eighteenth century, for example in Paris, Nancy, but also in Augsburg (as the German center of the finest silversmith work), garden pergolas were created that taper and are so finely chiselled from the precious metal that they are still offered as souvenirs in Paris today Miniature Eiffel Towers might hold – if they didn’t just date from around 1770.
The Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir was certainly familiar with these rococo turrets, just as he was familiar with almost every famous painting that had existed since the accession of Louis XV to the throne. and thus the beginning of the flamboyant rococo style, with which he wanted to make people forget his father’s pompous and heavy late baroque style. When the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated for the World’s Fair in 1889, Renoir was forty-eight years old. The museum does not go so far as to include the tower in the Frankfurt Städel’s surprisingly large special exhibition “Renoir – Rococo Revival” with 120 works for Corona times. For the first time, however, it comprehensively illuminates the little-known references of Renoir’s art to Rococo painting. One of the most beautiful image comparisons shows this in a nutshell: next to Renoir’s “Madame Monet” in a blue dress with a fragrant japoné finish, François Boucher’s “Madame de Pompadour” is hanging in a similar one.
Nostalgia for the good old days
But where does Renoir’s rococo fever come from? Initially he was a trained porcelain painter and had worked for four years in the Lévy brothers’ manufactory in the Marais, which specifically meant transferring templates for gallant celebrations by Antoine Watteau as well as lewd works by Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard onto white gold. Above all, he learned to paint flowers. Renoir wrote the astonishingly modern-sounding sentence “I can draw flowers and I only have to call them ‘flowers’ without them having a story” – such self-referential logic might also have come from Hockney.
Renoir’s answer to Boucher: “Madame Monet” from 1874 also poses in the blue dress.
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Image: Clark Art Institute
Magnificently illuminated in the Städel is how the “Second Rococo” as a retro style in Renoir’s time spread socially – feudal total works of art from apartment interiors with stuccoed and carved rocailles were suddenly present and popular all over Paris. Under lunettes and curved coffered ceilings, men in ruffled retro fashion sat in Neo-Rococo studies, while women in sweeping crinoline skirts stood in the boudoir in front of inlaid pastoral idylls in shimmering summer landscapes. The Restoration Empress Eugenie even dared to collect and wear the fashion of her decapitated predecessor Marie-Antoinette once more. Mind you, rococo blooms rarely have anything to do with actual economic booms – much of this bubble was built on debt. In any case, the wealthy bourgeoisie re-enacted the luxurious furnishings of the rococo nobility. Almost a hundred years following the fall of the Ancien Régime and under the shock of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, no small proportion of the French projected themselves nostalgically back to the times of the Grande Nation.
Hated in the past, now good for surprises
Renoir senses these longings. Unlike his friends Manet, Monet or Degas, the painter, who comes from the humblest circumstances, has to orientate himself towards what sells. With his advanced neo-rococo paintings, he serves the market without having to bend in the slightest. “I am one of theirs,” he writes to his gallery owner Durand-Ruel – meaning Fragonard, Watteau and Hubert Robert. Durand-Ruel, on the other hand, sells Renoir’s Impressionist paintings and entire room decorations with a sure commercial flair in original or following-carved Rococo frames.
