Symbolic immortality
In June, our museum opened an exhibition called Namedropping. David says that what he’s trying to do in this show is figure out what status is and why it is useful, in a deep sense—as part of our evolved biology. Namedropping is a light-hearted look at all that, with a few pauses for self-scrutiny. What follows is from the exhibition. Read more about Namedropping here.
Symbolic immortality
By David Walsh
Towards the end of Renoir’s life he developed rheumatoid arthritis, but he kept painting. When asked why, he said, ‘The pain passes, but the beauty remains.’ That could mean that he wanted to look at his paintings tomorrow, but I take it to mean he wanted to perpetuate some sort of life after life: an opportunity for others to continue to enjoy his paintings, a form of symbolic immortality. That’s something I’ve been trying to understand recently. I keep building Mona, despite constant back pain (but unlike Renoir, I don’t have to do it myself) and despite a potentially unsustainable financial burden.
I read a wonderful thesis about the nature of legacy, by Brett Waggoner from the University of Otago.1. He hypothesised, among other things, that the desire for post-mortem legacy would be greater in those who believe in an afterlife. It isn’t. We humans are complex organisms and our motives and foibles are biologically based; and they transcend our beliefs, even if one of those beliefs is that we are rational. Apparently, my social status is more important to me than not being in constant pain. To put this another way, I wouldn’t accept being pain-free in return for a significant loss of status. Would that work in reverse? If someone who seeks fame was offered fame in return for a life of chronic pain, would they accept that deal? Anecdotally, the answer would often be ‘yes’. People take risks to be noticed; for example, being instagrammed on rock ledges.
Symbolic immortality matters to me. Nevertheless, I would take no such deal. Yet all the while I spend my self-certainty on Mona. I could have a plane and an island and a bevy of beach babes. But they wouldn’t have been through the sieve of common interest: things like the Basel Art Fair, and Heide, and Life is Art, which identified the likelihood that the woman who became my wife, Kirsha, and I would be compatible. A large component of this type of legacy-building can be building an artefact that broadcasts a message to those with common interests who might provide status support (and sexual and social and child support). I might be planning for a notional life after death, but an immediate consequence of that is attracting an in-group that serves my immediate biological and cultural needs. Renoir did that. His kids were well served with status opportunity, and they all, in turn, generated a significant level of symbolic immortality through their own creative efforts.
There are immediate benefits of legacy-building, of course. Without Mona, I wouldn’t have Kirsha. And we wouldn’t have Sunday. I might well have someone, and some child, but the selection mechanism that the quest for symbolic immortality supports makes successful partnering slightly more likely. And, of course, it’s an uncounterfeitable fitness marker, a signal that I’m able to provide and support. And, to reiterate, it signals more effectively to those who are more useful to me.
Status support also extends to future generations. Kirsha and I, with Mona curator Olivier, visited and sucked up to Marina Picasso solely because of her grandfather’s status. Similarly, it’s likely that Sunday will enjoy some status enhancement (again, from those who are most relevant to her), because of her father’s symbolic immortality. So, symbolic immortality provides status, and thus evolutionary outcomes, for current and future generations. A subtle point is that my children, due to cultural assimilation, are likely to have interests correlated with mine (again, that correlation supported the children of Renoir). That means the sieve that’s selected those with a common interest to support me (let’s call it a mateship sieve) will also provide support to those with common interests, and thus to my children. My children don’t merely enjoy higher status due to my symbolic immortality, they get that status recognition from those who can provide the most benefit. The selection pressure in favour of legacy-building seems evident.
Status recognition generates a more potent symbolic immortality if the work of your life displays that nebulous thing called talent. Renoir made a name for himself at the various impressionist and Salon exhibitions in Paris. Those who identified his talent had already achieved a reputation, and so their namedropping Renoir enhanced his reputation. He thereby became huge, and so his reputation, in turn, enhanced those of his admirers.
Thus a bubble is inflated, and now Renoir is one of the biggest names in art, as are many of his colleagues. When we put him on the wall we might enhance our reputation and, with enough reputation enhancement, my immortality might be symbolically achieved.
My friend and colleague Zeljko bought this Renoir at auction. Although he has been a long-term Renoir fan (he said that Luncheon of the Boating Party is his favourite work of art), I was astonished when he spent $10 million on this one. It’s a nude but it isn’t sexy. What he wants is not what I want. But this painting is now part of his legacy. Eventually it’ll become his daughter’s property, and then, perhaps, her family’s. When they think of Renoir, they’ll think of him. And his symbolic immortality will bind them.
Whatever the evolutionary perspective, I’m thinking about post-mortem Mona more and more, and I derive pleasure from it, in prospect. It means a great deal to me now that Mona will likely give joy to people in the future. And you, you may be reading this brief note after the blubber vehicle that supports my aspirations is reduced to ashes. That I can contemplate this eventuality now is probably just evolution repeatedly playing the red queen card in the game of life, but some particle of my presence is serving you. At least it is if you’re enjoying sharing my whimsy. I hope you are.
1. Brett Jordan Waggoner, ‘Legacy: Motivations and mechanisms for a desire to be remembered’, PhD thesis, University of Otago, New Zealand, 2022, ourarchive. otago.ac.nz/handle/10523/14115.
Image: Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Oil on canvas
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
On Renoir’s reputation
By Jane Clark
I was interested, reading David on Renoir’s symbolic immortality, to find that he doesn’t address the steady stream of ink that art historians, feminists, journalists and other artists have spilled through at least the last forty years on his purported immorality. Reputations can rise and fall and there’s really nothing we mortals can do about it once we’re gone.
The facts that Renoir enjoyed painting naked women and that art collectors enjoyed owning those paintings have been variously celebrated and condemned over time. He exhibited successfully as a founding member of the radical young group who became the French Impressionists, as well as at the official Salon exhibitions and the ostentatious new Galerie Georges Petit (described by Émile Zola as an art department store, ‘a stock exchange of paintings, a syndicate for driving up picture prices’).1 The first owner of Jeune femme se baignant, a Paris-based Romanian homeopathic doctor named Georges de Bellio, also owned Claude Monet’s famously eponymous Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1874—the painting that gave the Impressionist movement its name. In the early years of the twentieth century, when both Picasso and Matisse admired Renoir’s increasingly fleshy late nudes (though Mary Cassatt called them ‘enormously fat red women with very small heads’), he was admired as a painter of uncomplicated timeless beauty in a troubled modern world.2 But by mid-century his production was considered ‘problematic’ by modernists; in the sixties and seventies ‘bourgeois’ by Marxists; and ever since then—despite his acknowledged symbolic immortality as a Great Artist in public and private collections, blockbuster exhibitions and salerooms—labelled kitsch or misogynist or both. ‘Rarely have women been more available. Content in a state of original innocence, woman is powerless, she exists only for her flesh. Her nakedness is an expression of her submission to the viewer,’ wrote art historian Tamar Garb in 1985.3
Since the exhibition Renoir: The Body, The Senses in 2019–20, some commentators have really piled on, with descriptors bandied about including sexist, woman-hater, controlling oppressor and moral failure. I wondered whether, as an art museum curator in 2024, and a woman, I should join the fray. If I don’t, am I condoning the objectification of women and the reduction of human beings to some sexualised essence? Renoir certainly didn’t do himself any favours with the present-day by remarking at one point that he painted ‘with his prick’; and ‘My models don’t think at all’ (in fact, I think, ironic when read in context). Or that he found women ‘disagreeable’ and only fit for home duties (despite his fruitful marriage, and his career-long friendship with the artist Berthe Morisot). If I do, would that be virtue signalling to academia and its current preoccupations (and probably to people who haven’t really looked at his fifty-years-worth of work)? As Geoffrey Miller explains in detail, virtue signalling is a shortcut to the costly kind of signalling for status that’s based on real effort, and I believe Renoir’s art deserves more than that—all of it, not just the post-1900 nudes made when he was disabled by rheumatoid arthritis.4
There’s no doubt that Renoir was a product of his patriarchal time and place. I agree with Chris Riopelle when he writes that subjects such as the Jeune femme ‘can be seen as a deeply defensive representation of female passivity and unself-consciousness, painted at a moment when, to Renoir’s dismay, political feminism was emerging as a force in French life’.5 His wealthy patrons may have felt the same, and would have appreciated his conscious references here to ancient Roman Venuses, Botticelli, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens and Boucher. Renoir never claimed that his art was about much more than pleasure: his own—‘If painting were not a pleasure to me I should certainly not do it’—and that of those who paid his bills (though he did once say, ‘I believe I am going to beat Raphael’).6 I’m also with Martha Lucy, who suggests that the ‘current Renoir aversion, more than reflecting the actual goodness or badness of his art, reflects shifting cultural politics … and a change in our attitude towards pleasure in art. Pleasure, once celebrated, now sets off alarm bells. It must mean kitsch, or misogyny, or bourgeois blandness, or, even worse, that we are not serious viewers of art.’7 I love Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, his dances, theatre outings and family portraits—even though I know that enjoying such enjoyable subjects is judged by some as rookie. And I take great curatorial pleasure in having this 136-year-old painting of his pretty sun-dappled skinny-dipping model here on loan at Mona.
Image: Jeune femme se baignant (Young woman bathing), 1888, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Oil on canvas
Private collection
1. Quoted from Émile Zola’s research notebooks (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), in Christopher Riopelle, ‘Renoir: The Great Bathers’, Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, Autumn 1990, vol. 86, no. 367/368, p. 32. Renoir began his career as a working-class boy painting ceramics and was always very conscious of his need to earn money.
2. Picasso, Braque and Bonnard all hung Renoirs in their studios; Picasso owned seven.
3. See, among other things, Clement Greenberg, ‘Renoir’, Art and Culture—Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1961, pp. 46–49; Tamar Garb, ‘Renoir and the natural woman’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 8, no. 2, 1985, p. 7; Linda Nochlin, Peter Schjeldahl et al., ‘Renoir: A symposium’, Art in America, vol. 74, 1986, pp.102–23; Esther Bell and George T.M. Shackelford (eds), Renoir: The Body, The Senses, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 2019; Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Renoir’s problem nudes’, The New Yorker, 19 August 2019.
4. Geoffrey Miller, Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics and Free Speech, Cambrian Moon, Albuquerque, 2019. Miller argues that virtue signalling is not just a derogatory term to throw at others but should be a neutral scientific term for an instinct that we all have, that we all use to some degree, in at least some domains of life (p. 12). I’m not offering rheumatoid arthritis as an excuse for sexism, but it may explain the uneven quality of Renoir’s late work. It’s not an excuse for his anti-Semitism.
5. Riopelle, ‘Renoir: The Great Bathers’, p. 6.
6. Quoted in Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir, His Life, Art and Letters, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1984, p. 166; see also her Renoir: An Intimate Biography, Thames & Hudson, New York, 2017.
7. Martha Lucy, ‘The trouble with Renoir’, lecture at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 24 August 2019, online at youtube.com/watch?v=H3tnzOxFgxk.
Header Image: Jeune femme se baignant (Young woman bathing), 1888, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Oil on canvas
Private collection