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  • Renoir at the Theatre

  • Until May 25
    • Recommended
  • This event has finished
  • Somerset House, The Strand, London, WC2R 1LA
  • Rating:
  • Somerset House

    Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874. © The Courtauld Gallery, London

  • By Sandra Rehme

    Posted: Fri Feb 29

  • Renoir’s ‘La Loge’ is the centrepiece of this small but engrossing exhibition dealing with how painters of modern life employed the theatre box as social stage for Belle Epoch fashionistas, ogling gentlemen and the confident New Woman. With a focus on the interplay of gazes, genders and class, it brings together works by the usual suspects including Renoir, Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. What makes this show interesting is certainly not its comprehensiveness, but the effective staging of selected works within a framework of caricatures and images from the time.

    One is immediately captivated by the arrangement of Renoir, Cassatt and Degas on the first facing wall, which highlights three very different approaches to the same subject. While Renoir’s fashionable woman and male companion in their loge presents woman as object, Cassatt’s ‘New Woman’ in much simpler attire throws a confident pose, staring through her opera glasses. Degas’ view of a theatre box from a steep angle, on the other hand, is less concerned with theatre as society playground than with an investigation into compositional possibilities and form.

    The exhibition’s second focus on fashion (through countless bland illustrations) threatens to undermine the expressive rapport between the paintings by clumsily bringing up the old myth of female vanity, reiterated in a catalogue entry that reads, ‘the mind or essence of a woman can be seen in what she wears’.

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  • Details

  • Somerset House, The Strand, London, WC2R 1LA
  • 020 7848 2526
  • Category: Art museums & institutions
  • Times: £5, concs £4, under-18s, full time UK students and UK university staff, unwaged free; Mon (except bank holidays and special exhibitions)10am-2pm free to all
  • Tube: Charing Cross
  • Website: Website

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