LuxArtAsia

Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) Renoir’s reputation for prettiness can make it easy to miss how ambitious his paintings are. Renoir and Love , running at the National Gallery Oct 3 to January 31, 2027, makes the case for taking his pursuit of pleasure seriously: not as an escape from modern life, but as a conscious choice to paint the ways people relate to one another. Sociability runs through the exhibition — friendship, family, flirtation, companionship — but also the relationship between Renoir and his sitters, and between his paintings and the people looking at them. Self-portrait That emphasis helps explain why the artist has been underrated in recent decades. Much of the story of modern art is told through painters who faced the anxieties and harsher realities of their time. Renoir painted people eating, dancing, talking, looking and being looked at, and the ease of it can pass for lightness. In Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876), one of the highlights of the exhib...