NOTE: MAY 12 2020

I was facilitated and encouraged to travel to Paris to further understand “art.”

The result was a deconstruction of all of this European conflict! (The racial, sexual.)

And the strange schizomania of gods that infected Europeans from the Greco-Romans.

All of this left a last mark on our collective psyche (especially in conflict with the strange asceticism of the Christianized folk, Puritanical settlers). After all, It seemed I went to Paris to confront my own shadow, which was the European (Roman) man — since I am a Jew.

If this piece is an Ode to anything at all, it is to the demise of such confusions, which, more than not, came flooding into our psyches from movies, and through porcelain dreams that rise from the dark sea, across the millennia.

The hidden value is this: the French and the the Avant-Garde artists made completely naked, what was the “Lost Value” of the European Diaspora — The Woman, and underneath the Woman, the Negress (Shamaness).

It is a cultural recognition of this symbolic element, and the values that stem from it that represent our collective recovery — which is an eternal effort, from the dawn of man, through the end of civilization.

Now I see that this is what I have been working towards.

L’Orangerie: The School of Paris Muse

It is Monet’s epic “Water Lillies” that sits, undoubtedly, as the centerpiece of Museé l’Orangerie, in Paris. However, by chance or by serendipity, it was several other objects that struck up observations worth sharing.

Renoir

After posting a reclining nude Renoir painting on my Instagram story with the caption, “Misogyny or beauty? A subjective view,” several people (both men and women) responded that they only saw beauty, and didn’t understand the reference to misogyny. To one viewer, I noted that the model for the painting, Gabrielle Renard, was one of Renoir’s favorite muses. A much younger woman, Renard was the nanny of the Renoir family, aged 28 when the painting was completed.

The details of this history are interesting, but not precisely what I mean by misogyny. Art expresses ideals of beauty. What is deemed beautiful over time changes dramatically over the course of generations. However, for Renoir, the woman, especially the voluptuous nude, was an incessant subject. From this obsessive desire to paint women as passive objects of physical adoration, one might gleam Renoir’s own “adolescent” view of the feminine.

So, what I mean by “misogyny” is a reference to the psychology of the artist — how he saw women, as expressed in his art. Surely, as a European trope, a sign more than a symbol, the representation of woman as a passive, inviting, enticing and curvaceous image evokes the fecundity of nature, of Eros-love.

However, Renoir may also have seen these models as mere indicators to this ideal, rather than as a nuanced individual. It is this interest in a sign, an aesthetic object, versus the character and qualities of an individual which point towards “misogyny” as a psychological idea.

In the end, the judgement as to whether the painting is toned with misogyny has to do with the viewers own internal relationship to the feminine. This just to say: the viewer’s psychology informs their reading of the subject. If interested, I have written extensively on the disposition of the male psyche, regarding woman and the feminine elsewhere. All this said, it may still be “beauty” for a viewer today, as it was to Renoir and his cohort a century ago.