« Reinterpreted in light of today's social values, Renoir's Le Bal du moulin de la Galette appears surprisingly timely. The painting celebrates conviviality, inclusion, and the need for connection in a shared public space—themes that resonate strongly in a present marked by isolation, social fragmentation, and the technological mediation of human relationships. The scene proposes a model of sociality based on physical presence, mutual listening, and the joy of being together—values that are now being rediscovered as essential to collective well-being. Renoir's depiction of relationships between men and women also engages with contemporary sensibilities. The couples are not dominated by obvious hierarchies or dramatic tensions, but rather move in an atmosphere of respect, complicity, and individual freedom. This vision, far removed from both the repressive morality of its time and the spectacularization of feelings, anticipates a concept of relationships based on balance and reciprocity, central themes in today's debate on gender equality. Finally, Renoir's painting invites us to rethink the value of happiness as a shared experience, not an individual consumption. In an age where joy is often associated with performance or image, the painting proposes a simple, everyday happiness, built through relationships and community. It is precisely in this human and accessible dimension that the work continues to speak to the present, offering a vision of modernity that still inspires. » Marika Lion
The bright and vibrant paintings of Auguste Renoir, with their iconography of taverns, popular dances and scenes of entertainment, have earned him the nickname of “painter of happiness”This reputation, however, has sometimes contributed to his marginalization within the canon of modernity, often interpreted as necessarily melancholic, ironic, or disenchanted. "I know well how difficult it is to make people accept the idea that a painting can be great painting while remaining joyful," Renoir stated. Yet his work offers an original reflection on modernity, placed under the sign oflove: understood both as a force that regulates human relationships and as a feeling that guides the artist's gaze on his models, on the world and on painting itself.
The early years of his career
The exhibition brings together for the first time the fundamental corpus of the so-called “scenes of modern life”: multi-figure paintings representing contemporary subjects, distinct from portraits and landscapes, created by Renoir during the first twenty years of his career (1865–1885). During this period the artist actively participates in the collective invention of a “new painting”, alongside figures such as Manet, Monet, Morisot, Degas and Caillebotte. Within this context, Renoir stands out for a singular sense of empathy and for a capacity for wonder that leads him to choose only happy subjects, always valorizing the people depicted. His profoundly "loving" gaze is manifested in a particular attention to human bonds, visible in the recurring motifs of conversations, shared meals, dance, and collective life. In these works, modernity is experienced not as loss or alienation, but as a space for connection, pleasure, and communion, offering an alternative and luminous vision of the modern experience.
Almost erotic novelistic narration
The exhibition also highlights the Renoir's predilection for the representation of the young couple, with the aim of dismantling a cliché that his painting was simply "sentimental." On the contrary, his works avoid the direct and emphatic expression of emotions, romantic narratives, and any overtly erotic staging. A deep admirer of the French painters of the early eighteenth century - from Watteau a Butcher e Fragonard – Renoir evokes the atmosphere of the gallant fêtes, promoting a vision of society based on greater freedom of customs and a more balanced idea of relations between the sexes, in the context of Paris at the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic.
His bohemian life
This iconographic choice must also be read in the light of the artist's biography, which in those years was leading a bohemian life and engaged in relationships considered "illegitimate" according to the moral canons of the 19th century, dominated by marriage, bourgeois norms, religious morality, the widespread presence of prostitution and profound gender inequalities. In this context, Renoir's large paintings dedicated to happiness of the couple, “camaraderie” – as his friend Georges Rivière defined it – and conviviality takes on the value of real pictorial posters against violence in relationships between men and women, class antagonisms and the growing loneliness of modern urban life.
Co-organized with the National Gallery of London and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition offers a renewed look on works so famous that it is difficult to fully grasp their innovative significance today. For the first time since 1985, the year of the last major Parisian retrospective dedicated to Renoir, an exhibition brings together a select but highly significant group of approximately fifty paintings made in the early phase of his career. Among these are some of his greatest masterpieces: from The Romper (1869, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) a The Parapluies (1881–1885, London, The National Gallery), passing through La Promenade (1870, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum), The Dance at Bougival (1883, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) e Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881), exceptionally loaned by the Phillips Collection in Washington.
