Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Birth name	Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Born	(1841-02-25)25 February 1841 Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France
Died	3 December 1919(1919-12-03) (aged 78) Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France
Nationality	French
Field	Painting
Movement	Impressionism
Works	Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876 Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880 Nude, 1910

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (US  /rɛnˈwɑr/ or UK /ˈrɛnwɑr/; French: [pjɛʁ oɡyst ʁənwaʁ]; 1841–1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau."^[1]

Pierre-Auguste was the father of actor Pierre Renoir and filmmaker Jean Renoir.

Biography[link]

Youth[link]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china.^[2] He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school.^[3] During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.

The Theater Box, 1874 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London

In 1862, he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet.^[4] At times during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864,^[5] recognition did not come for another ten years, due, in part, to the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.

During the Paris Commune in 1871, while he painted on the banks of the Seine River, some Communards thought he was a spy, and were about to throw him into the river when a leader of the Commune, Raoul Rigault, recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion.^[6]

In 1874, a ten-year friendship with Jules Le Cœur and his family ended,^[7] and Renoir lost not only the valuable support gained by the association, but a generous welcome to stay on their property near Fontainebleau and its scenic forest. This loss of a favorite painting location resulted in a distinct change of subjects.

Maturity[link]

Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings were hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year, two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London.^[7]

The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix,^[8] then to Madrid, to see the work of Diego Velázquez. Following that, he traveled to Italy to see Titian's masterpieces in Florence and the paintings of Raphael in Rome. On 15 January 1882 Renoir met the composer Richard Wagner at his home in Palermo, Sicily. Renoir painted Wagner's portrait in just thirty-five minutes. In the same year, Renoir convalesced for six weeks in Algeria after contracting pneumonia, which permanently damaged his respiratory system.^[9]

In 1883, he spent the summer in Guernsey, creating fifteen paintings in little over a month. Most of these feature Moulin Huet, a bay in Saint Martin's, Guernsey. Guernsey is one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, and it has a varied landscape that includes beaches, cliffs and bays. These paintings were the subject of a set of commemorative postage stamps issued by the Bailiwick of Guernsey in 1983.

While living and working in Montmartre, Renoir employed as a model Suzanne Valadon, who posed for him (The Bathers, 1885–87; Dance at Bougival, 1883)^[10] and many of his fellow painters while studying their techniques; eventually she became one of the leading painters of the day.

In 1887, the year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and upon the request of the queen's associate, Phillip Richbourg, he donated several paintings to the "French Impressionist Paintings" catalog as a token of his loyalty.

In 1890, he married Aline Victorine Charigot, who, along with a number of the artist's friends, had already served as a model for Le Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881), and with whom he already had a child, Pierre, in 1885.^[9] After his marriage, Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life, including their children and their nurse, Aline's cousin Gabrielle Renard. The Renoirs had three sons, one of whom, Jean, became a filmmaker of note and another, Pierre, became a stage and film actor.

Girls at the Piano, 1892, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Later years[link]

Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of "Les Collettes," a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast.^[11] Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to adapt his painting technique. It has often been reported that in the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers,^[12] but this is erroneous; Renoir remained able to grasp a brush, although he required an assistant to place it in his hand.^[13] The wrapping of his hands with bandages, apparent in late photographs of the artist, served to prevent skin irritation.^[13]

During this period, he created sculptures by cooperating with a young artist, Richard Guino, who worked the clay. Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to facilitate painting large works with his limited joint mobility.^[13]

Renoir's portrait of Austrian actress Tilla Durieux (1914) contains playful flecks of vibrant color on her shawl that offset the classical pose of the actress and highlight Renoir's skill just 5 years before his death.

In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with those of the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, on 3 December.

Artworks[link]

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette), 1876, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Renoir's paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated colour, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of colour, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.

His initial paintings show the influence of the colourism of Eugène Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, and his early work resembles theirs in his use of black as a color. As well, Renoir admired Edgar Degas' sense of movement. Another painter Renoir greatly admired was the 18th century master François Boucher.^[14]

A fine example of Renoir's early work, and evidence of the influence of Courbet's realism, is Diana, 1867. Ostensibly a mythological subject, the painting is a naturalistic studio work, the figure carefully observed, solidly modeled, and superimposed upon a contrived landscape. If the work is still a 'student' piece, already Renoir's heightened personal response to female sensuality is present. The model was Lise Tréhot, then the artist's mistress and inspiration for a number of paintings.^[15]

In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (in the open air), he and his friend Claude Monet discovered that the colour of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them, an effect today known as diffuse reflection. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes (La Grenouillère, 1869).^[16][17]

One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette). The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre, close to where he lived.

On the Terrace, oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of Chicago

The works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By the mid 1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women, such as The Bathers, which was created during 1884–87. It was a trip to Italy in 1881, when he saw works by Raphael and other Renaissance masters, that convinced him that he was on the wrong path, and for the next several years he painted in a more severe style, in an attempt to return to classicism.^[18] This is sometimes called his "Ingres period", as he concentrated on his drawing and emphasized the outlines of figures.^[19]

After 1890, however, he changed direction again, returning to thinly brushed colour to dissolve outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated especially on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are Girls at the Piano, 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, 1887. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir's late, abundantly fleshed nudes.^[20]

A prolific artist, he made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir's style made his paintings some of the most well-known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art. The single largest collection of his works—181 paintings in all—is at the Barnes Foundation, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Posthumous prints[link]

In 1919, Ambroise Vollard, a renowned art dealer, published a book on the life and work of Renoir, La Vie et l'Œuvre de Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in an edition of 1000 copies. In 1986, Vollard's heirs started reprinting the copper plates, generally etchings with hand applied watercolor. These prints are signed by Renoir in the plate and are embossed “Vollard” in the old fashion low margin. They are unnumbered, undated and not signed in pencil.

Posthumous sales[link]

Two of Renoir's paintings have sold for more than US$70 million. Bal au moulin de la Galette sold for $78.1 million in 1990.

Gallery[link]

• 

  Lise Sewing, 1866, Dallas Museum of Art

• 

  La Grenouillère, 1868, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden

• 

  Portrait of Alfred Sisley, 1868

• 

  Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, 1873, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

• 

  Portrait of Claude Monet, 1875, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

• 

  Jeanne Durand-Ruel, 1876, Barnes Foundation Merion, Pennsylvania

• 

  A Girl with a Watering Can, 1876, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

• 

  Mme. Charpentier and her children, 1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  By the Water, 1880, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

• 

  Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–1881, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

• 

  Portrait of Charles and Georges Durand-Ruel, 1882

• 

  Dance at Bougival, 1882–1883, (woman at left is painter Suzanne Valadon), Boston Museum of Fine Arts

• 

  Dance in the City, 1882–1883, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

• 

  Dance in the Country (Aline Charigot and Paul Lhote), 1883, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

• 

  Pencil study for Dance in the Country 1883, Honolulu Museum of Art

• 

  Children at the Beach at Guernsey, 1883, Barnes Foundation Merion, Pennsylvania

• 

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, "Jeune garçon sur la plage d'Yport" (1883), Barnes Foundation Merion, Pennsylvania

• 

  In the Garden, 1885, Hermitage St. Petersburg

• 

  Girl With a Hoop, 1885, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

• 

  Girl Braiding Her Hair (Suzanne Valadon), 1885

• 

  Julie Manet with cat, 1887

• 

  Portrait of Berthe Morisot and daughter Julie Manet, 1894

• 

  Gabrielle Renard and infant son Jean Renoir, 1895

• 

  The Artist's Family, 1896, The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania

• 

  Graziella, 1896,The Detroit Institute of Arts

• 

  Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1908

• 

  Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel, 1910

• 

  Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1917

Self-portraits[link]

• 

  Self-portrait, (1875)

• 

  Self-portrait, (1876)

• 

  Self-portrait, 1910

• 

  Self-portrait, (1910)

Nudes[link]

• 

  Diana the Huntress, 1867, The National Gallery of Art Washington, DC

• 

  Nude In The Sun, 1875, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

• 

  Seating Girl, 1883

• 

  The Large Bathers, 1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pa.

• 

  After The Bath, 1888

• 

  Three Bathers, 1895, Cleveland Museum of Art Cleveland, Ohio

• 

  Nude (Renoir, Belgrade, 1910) National Museum of Serbia Belgrade

• 

  After The Bath, 1910, Barnes Foundation, Merion Pennsylvania

• 

  Woman At The Well, 1910

• 

  Seated Bather Drying Her Leg, 1914, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, France

• 

  Women Bathers, 1916, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden

• 

  Bathers, 1918, Barnes Foundation, Merion Pennsylvania

Selected works[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Claude Roger-Marx (1952). Les Lithographies de Renoir. Monte-Carlo: Andre Sauret. 
• Joseph G. Stella (1975). The Graphic Work of Renoir: Catalogue Raisonne. London: Lund Humphries. 
• Jean Leymarie et Michel Melot (1971). Les Gravures Des Impressionistes, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley. Paris: Arts et Metiers Graphiques. 
• Michel Melot (1996). The Impressionist Print. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
• Theodore Duret (1924). Renoir. Paris: Bernheim-Jeune. 
• Paul Haeserts (1947). Renoir Sculpteur. Bruxelles: Hermès. 

See also[link]

Biography portal

• History of painting
• Western painting
• Gabrielle Renard
• Jean Renoir
• Renoir, a 2012 French film

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (category)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Pierre-Auguste Renoir

• Pierre-Auguste Renoir Biography, Style and Critical Reception
• Renoir at biography.com
• The Story Behind the Masterpiece... The Luncheon of the Boating Party
• Suburban Pastoral, The Guardian, 24 Feb 2007
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir at the Museum of Modern Art
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir paintings, media & interactive timeline
• Review of recent Renoir exhibition
• Avant-Gardist in Retreat, Holland Cotter, The New York Times, 17 June 2010
• Timeline of French Artists

v t e Impressionism Originators Frédéric Bazille Eugène Boudin Gustave Caillebotte Mary Cassatt Paul Cézanne Edgar Degas Armand Guillaumin Édouard Manet Claude Monet Berthe Morisot Camille Pissarro Pierre-Auguste Renoir Jules Ernest Renoux Alfred Sisley Patrons Gustave Caillebotte Henry O. Havemeyer Ernest Hoschedé Dealers Paul Durand-Ruel Georges Petit Ambroise Vollard American Artists William Merritt Chase Frederick Carl Frieseke Childe Hassam Willard Metcalf Lilla Cabot Perry Theodore Robinson John Henry Twachtman J. Alden Weir Other artists Lovis Corinth Max Liebermann Max Slevogt Konstantin Korovin Valentin Serov Francisco Oller Laura Muntz Lyall Władysław Podkowiński Nazmi Ziya Güran Chafik Charobim Ernest Jean-Marie Millard de Bois Durand Other media Music Literature French Impressionist Cinema See also Decorative Impressionism Post-Impressionism

Jean Renoir
Born	(1894-09-15)15 September 1894 Paris, France
Died	12 February 1979(1979-02-12) (aged 84) Beverly Hills, California, United States
Occupation	Actor, director, screenwriter, producer, author
Years active	1924–1978
Spouse	Catherine Hessling (1920–1930) Dido Freire (1944–1979)

Jean Renoir (French pronunciation: [ʁənwaʁ]; 15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His pictures Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Renoir, My Father (1962). Jean Renoir was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics as the fourth greatest director of all time.^[1]

Early life and career[link]

The young Renoir with Gabrielle Renard in a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Renoir was born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France. He was the second son of Aline Charigot and the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was also the brother of Pierre Renoir, a noted French stage and film actor; the uncle of Claude Renoir, a cinematographer; and the father of Alain Renoir^(fr), professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

As a child, Renoir moved with his family to the south of France. He and the rest of the Renoir family were the subjects of many of his father's paintings. His father's financial success ensured that the young Renoir was educated at fashionable boarding schools, which, as he later wrote, he continually ran away from.^[2]

At the outbreak of World War I Renoir was serving in the French cavalry. Later, after receiving a bullet in his leg, he served as a reconnaissance pilot.^[3] His leg injury left him with a permanent limp, but allowed him to discover the cinema, where he used to recuperate with his leg elevated while watching the films of Charlie Chaplin and others.^[4][5] After the war, Renoir followed his father's suggestion and tried his hand at making ceramics, but he soon set that aside to make films, inspired, in particular, by Erich von Stroheim's work.^[6][7]

In 1924, Renoir directed the first of his nine silent films, most of which starred his first wife, who was also his father's last model, Catherine Hessling.^[8] At this stage his films did not produce a return, and Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.^[9]

International success in the 1930s[link]

During the 1930s Renoir enjoyed great success as a filmmaker. In 1931 he directed his first sound films, On purge bébé (Baby's Laxative)^[10] and La Chienne (The Bitch).^[11] The following year he made Boudu Saved From Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux), a farcical sendup of the pretensions of a middle-class bookseller and his family, who meet with comic, and ultimately disastrous, results when they attempt to reform a vagrant played by Michel Simon.^[12]

By the middle of the decade Renoir was associated with the Popular Front, and several of his films, such as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1935), Life Belongs to Us (1936) and La Marseillaise (1938), reflect the movement's politics.^[13][14]

In 1937 he made one of his most well-known films, Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion), starring Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin. A film on the theme of brotherhood about a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I, it was enormously successful but was also banned in Germany, and later in Italy after having won the "Best Artistic Ensemble" award at the Venice Film Festival.^[15] It was the first foreign language film to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. This was followed by another cinematic success: The Human Beast (La Bête Humaine) (1938), a film noir tragedy based on the novel by Émile Zola and starring Simone Simon and Jean Gabin.^[16]

In 1939, now able to co-finance his own films,^[17] Renoir made The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast.^[18] Renoir himself played the character Octave, a sort of master of ceremonies in the film.^[19] The film was met with derision by Parisian audiences upon its premiere and was extensively reedited, but without success.^[20] It was his greatest commercial failure.^[21] A few weeks after the outbreak of World War II, the film was banned. The ban was lifted briefly in 1940, but after the fall of France it was banned again.^[22] Subsequently the original negative of the film was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid.^[22] It was not until the 1950s that French film enthusiasts Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, with Renoir's cooperation, were able to reconstruct a near-complete print of the film.^[23][24] Today The Rules of the Game appears frequently near the top of critics' polls of the best films ever made.^[25][26]

Hollywood years[link]

A week after the disastrous premiere of The Rules of the Game, in July 1939, Renoir went to Rome with Karl Koch and Dido Freire, subsequently his second wife, to work on the script for a film version of Tosca.^[27][28] This he abandoned to return to France in August 1939, to make himself available for military service.^[29] At the age of 45, he became a lieutenant in the French Army Film Service, and was sent back to Italy, to teach film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and resume work on Tosca.^[27][30][31] The French government hoped this cultural exchange would help maintain friendly relations with Italy, which had not yet entered the war.^[27][30][32] As war approached, however, he returned to France^[27][33] and then, after Germany invaded France in May 1940, he fled to the United States with Dido.^[34][35]

In Hollywood, Renoir had difficulty finding projects that suited him.^[36] In 1943, he co-produced and directed an anti-Nazi film set in France, This Land Is Mine, starring Maureen O'Hara and Charles Laughton.^[37][38] Two years later, he made The Southerner, a film about Texas sharecroppers that is often regarded as his best work in America and one for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing.^[39][40][41]

In 1945 he made Diary of a Chambermaid, an adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel, Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, starring Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith.^[42][43] The Woman on the Beach (1947) starring Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan was heavily reshot and reedited after it fared poorly among preview audiences in California.^[44] Both films were poorly received and were the last films Renoir made in America.^[45][46][47] At this time, Renoir became a naturalized citizen of the United States.^[48]

A transatlantic life[link]

In 1949 Renoir traveled to India and made The River, his first color film.^[49] Based on the novel of the same name by Rumer Godden, the film is both a meditation on human beings' relationship with nature and a coming of age story of three young girls in colonial India.^[50] The film won the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.^[51]

After returning to work in Europe, Renoir made a trilogy of Technicolor musical comedies on the subjects of theater, politics and commerce:^[52] Le Carrosse d'or (The Golden Coach) (1953) with Anna Magnani,^[53] French Cancan with Jean Gabin and María Félix (1955)^[54] and Eléna et les hommes (Elena and Her Men) with Ingrid Bergman and Jean Marais (1956).^[55] During the same period, Renoir produced in Paris the Clifford Odets play, The Big Knife, and wrote and produced in Paris for Leslie Caron his own play, Orvet.^[56][57]

Renoir's next films were made in 1959 using techniques Renoir adapted from live television at the time.^[58] Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Picnic on the Grass), starring Paul Meurisse and Catherine Rouvel, was filmed on the grounds of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (The Testament of Doctor Cordelier), starring Jean-Louis Barrault, was made in the streets of Paris and its suburbs.^[59][60]

In 1962 Renoir made what was to be his penultimate film, Le Caporal épinglé (The Elusive Corporal) with Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claude Brasseur.^[61] Set among French POWs during their internment in labor camps by the Nazis during World War II, the film explores the twin human needs for freedom, on the one hand, and emotional and economic security, on the other.^[62][63]

In 1962, Renoir published a loving memoir of his father, Renoir, My Father, in which he described the profound influence his father had on him and his work.^[64] As funds for his film projects were becoming harder to obtain, Renoir continued to write screenplays and then wrote a novel, The Notebooks of Captain Georges, published in 1966.^[65][66] Captain Georges is the nostalgic account of a wealthy young man's sentimental education and love for a peasant girl, a theme also explored earlier in his films Diary of a Chambermaid and Picnic on the Grass.^[67]

Last years[link]

Renoir made his last film in 1969, Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir).^[68] The film is a series of three short films made in a variety of styles and is, in many ways, one of his most challenging, avant-garde and unconventional works.^[69][70]

Thereafter, unable to find financing for his films and in declining health, Renoir spent the last years of his life receiving friends at his home in Beverly Hills and writing novels and his memoirs.^[71]

In 1973 Renoir was preparing a production of his stage play Carola with Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer when he fell ill and was unable to direct. The producer Norman Lloyd, a friend and actor in The Southerner, took over the direction of the play, which was broadcast in the series program Hollywood Television Theater on WNET, Channel 13, New York on February 3, 1973.^[72]

In his memoirs My Life and My Films (1974) Renoir wrote of the influence exercised upon him by his cousin, Gabrielle Renard, the woman seen in the portrait by his father above. Shortly before his birth, she came to live with the Renoir family, and helped raise the young boy.^[73] She introduced him to the Guignol puppet shows in the Montmartre of his childhood: "She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes", he wrote. "She taught me to detest the cliché."^[74] He concluded his memoirs with the words he had often spoken as a child, "Wait for me, Gabrielle."^[75]

In 1975 he received a lifetime Academy Award for his contribution to the motion picture industry and that same year a retrospective of his work was shown at the National Film Theatre in London.^[76] Also in 1975, the government of France elevated him to the rank of commander in the Légion d'honneur.^[77]

Jean Renoir died in Beverly Hills, California on February 12, 1979. His body was returned to France and buried beside his family in the cemetery at Essoyes, Aube, France.^[78]

Legacy[link]

On his death, fellow director and friend Orson Welles wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times, "Jean Renoir: The Greatest of all Directors".^[79]

Jean Renoir has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6212 Hollywood Blvd.^[80] Several of his ceramics were collected by Albert Barnes and can be found on display beneath his father's paintings at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania.^[81]

Filmography[link]

Selected writings[link]

• 1955: Orvet, Paris: Gallimard, play.
• 1962: Renoir, Paris: Hachette (Renoir, My Father), biography.
• 1966: Les Cahiers du Capitaine Georges, Paris: Gallimard (The Notebooks of Captain Georges), novel.
• 1974: Ma Vie et mes Films, Paris: Flammarion (My Life and My Films), autobiography.
• 1974: Écrits 1926-1971 (Claude Gauteur, ed.), Paris: Pierre Belfond, writings.
• 1976: Carola, in "L'Avant-Scène du Théâtre" no. 597, November 1, 1976, screenplay.
• 1978: Le Coeur à l'aise, Paris: Flammarion, novel.
• 1978 Julienne et son amour; suivi d'En avant Rosalie!, Paris: Henri Veyrier, screenplays.
• 1979: Jean Renoir: Entretiens et propos (Jean Narboni, ed.), Paris: Éditions de l'étoile/Cahiers du Cinéma, interviews and remarks.
• 1979: Le crime de l'Anglais, Paris: Flammarion, novel.
• 1980: Geneviève, Paris: Flammarion, novel.
• 1981: Œuvres de cinéma inédités (Claude Gauteur, ed.), Paris: Gallimard, synopses and treatments.
• 1984: Lettres d'Amérique (Dido Renoir & Alexander Sesonske, eds.), Paris: Presses de la Renaissance ISBN 2-85616-287-8, correspondence.
• 1989: Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks (Carol Volk, tr.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 1994: Jean Renoir: Letters (David Thompson and Lorraine LoBianco, eds.), London: Faber & Faber, correspondence.

Awards[link]

• Prix Louis Delluc, for Les Bas-Fonds (The Lower Depths), 1936^[82]
• Chevalier de Légion d'honneur, 1936^[82]
• National Board of Review, Top Ten Foreign Film, for The Lower Depths, 1937^[83]
• International Jury Cup, Venice Film Festival, for La Grande Illusion, 1937^[84]
• National Board of Review, Best Foreign Language Film, for La Grande Illusion, 1938^[85]
• National Board of Review, Top Ten Film and Best Director, for The Southerner, 1945^[86]
• Best Film, Venice Festival, for The Southerner, 1946^[87]
• National Board of Review, Top Ten Film, for The Diary of a Chambermaid, 1946^[88]
• Venice Film Festival: International Award The River, 1951^[89]
• National Board of Review, Top Five Foreign Films, for The River, 1951^[90]
• Grand Prix de l'Academie du Cinéma for French Cancan, 1956^[91]
• Selznick Golden Laurel Award for lifetime work, Brazilian Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro, 1958^[92]
• Prix Charles Blanc, Académie française, for Renoir, My Father, biography of father, 1963^[93]
• Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, University of California, Berkeley, 1963^[94]
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1964^[94]
• Best European Film (Bedste europæiske film), Bodil Awards, for The Rules of the Game (Spillets regler), 1966^[95]
• Osella d'Oro as a master of the cinema, Venice Festival, 1968^[96]
• Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Royal College of Art, London, 1971^[72]
• Honorary Academy Award for Career Accomplishment, 1974^[97]
• Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur, 1975^[77]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Jean Renoir at the Internet Movie Database
• Jean Renoir: A Bibliography of Materials in the University of California at Berkeley Library.
• Interview conducted in 1960 with Columbia University's Oral History Research Office.
• Je m’appelle Jean Renoir. Site at the University of Nancy, France. (In French)
• Faulkner, Christopher. "An Archive of the (Political) Unconscious" Canadian Journal of Communication [Online], 26 1 Jan 2001 — analysis of Renoir's FBI files.
• Jean Renoir at Find a Grave

Francesco De Gregori
Francesco De Gregori in 2008
Background information
Born	(1951-04-04)4 April 1951 Rome (Italy)
Genres	Folk rock
Occupations	Singer-songwriter
Instruments	Vocals, Guitar
Years active	1972-today
Labels	RCA Italy, CBS
Website	www.francescodegregori.net

Francesco De Gregori Officer OMRI (born 4 April 1951) is an Italian singer-songwriter. He is popularly known as "Il Principe dei cantautori" ("The Prince of the singer-songwriters"), a nickname referring to the elegance of his lyrics.

He is often referred as singer-songwriter and poet, although he prefers to be identified simply as "artist".^[1][2]

Biography[link]

1970s[link]

De Gregori was born in Rome to a middle-class family, and spent some of his youth in Pescara before returning to the capital. His elder brother, Luigi, was a musician and had a personal career with the name of Luigi Grechi (the mother's surname), chosen later in order to avoid confusion with the more famous Francesco.

Influenced by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and the Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio de André, De Gregori started to perform his songs (mainly personal translations of American folk songs) at the Folkstudio, in Rome, which was already frequented by his brother. On one occasion De André himself is said to have listened to De Gregori's work and appreciated it.

Later De Gregori formed a band with his friends Antonello Venditti, Mimmo Locasciulli and Giorgio Lo Cascio, who all had success as singer-songwriters in the following years. De Gregori made his debut as a professional singer in 1972 with Theorius Campus, in collaboration with Venditti. The LP included the early masterpiece "Signora Aquilone" ("Kite Lady"), but Venditti had more songs and, having a better voice, earned better consideration by the label. The duo subsequently broke up.

De Gregori's next album, Alice non lo sa (1973), was a commercial failure. However, the title-track, the mysterious "Alice", scored some success in several popular music shows and is still included amongst his best works today. The 1974 album Francesco De Gregori (also known as the "Sheep" due to the unusual cover by Gordon Fagetter) showed even more experimental and sometimes obscure lyrics, and again was a failure. RCA Music, however, continued to trust in De Gregori's qualities: this trust was repaid the following year, when De Gregori released one of the most successful Italian LPs of the 1970s, Rimmel. This work contained several of his most famous songs: this time De Gregori's talent for unusual and poetic lyrics intermingled in a more mature way with the music. Lucio Dalla provided musical ideas for "Pablo", the unusual story of an Italian immigrant in Switzerland. Jazzy themes were present in songs like "Quattro cani" ("Four Dogs") and "Le storie di ieri" (The Stories of Yesterday"). The latter, a song about the years of Fascism, had been already released on De André's 1974 album Volume 8, as it had been co-written during a stay in the Genoese singer's Sardinian estate.

Bufalo Bill (1976) confirmed De Gregori's qualities, and contained at least two classics: the eponymous song and "Santa Lucia", the singer's own favourite. However, during a concert held in Milan in 1977, De Gregori, who had always declared his inclination to left-wing ideas and ideals, was fiercely contested by a group of extreme left agitators. In a mock "trial", they accused him of using a left-wing message solely to sell records and insisted that music should be free. De Gregori was at risk of injury in the fray, and decided to quit his musical career. During the following two years he therefore worked as a bookstore and music shop clerk. The episode, known as the "Palalido incident", influenced several works by other Italian singer-songwriters, such as Roberto Vecchioni's "Vaudeville". The "Palalido incident" was one of a number of such incidents. At this time, De Gregori married Alessandra Gobbi whom he had known since High School,and they had two sons, Marco and Federico.

In 1978, however, he returned with another inspired album, De Gregori, containing one of his most famous songs, "Generale". He declared that he felt this song much too important for him to continue staying away from the music world. The following year he joined his old friend Lucio Dalla with a highly successful live tour, entitled Banana Republic, and published a studio LP, Viva l'Italia featuring American musicians. The title track was later adopted as the Italian Socialist Party song, but De Gregori always opposed this choice.

1980s[link]

After a pause of several years, De Gregori returned with the album Titanic, the first part of which was like a concept album devoted to the famous episode of the sinking of the eponymous liner. The ballad "San Lorenzo", with a rare piano performance by De Gregori, concerns the dramatic episode of the bombing during World War II of the quarter in Rome by Allied planes. The freshness of the music and lyrics made this an outstanding commercial success, as well as earning the praise of critics. Titanic has been recently declared the best Italian LP of the period 1975-2005, in a poll conducted for the authoritative Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.

The following year de Gregori released a mini-LP containing his most long-standing success, La Donna Cannone. The 1985 album Scacchi e tarocchi ("Chess and Tarots"), was not as successful, but contained another classic, "La Storia" ("History"). De Gregori's new melancholic inspiration was confirmed by the subsequent Terra di nessuno ("Nobody's Land"). On the other hand, Miramare 19-4-89 showed a more bitter mood, but again was not as successful as his albums of the 1970s and early 1980s.

1990s and 2000s[link]

De Gregori in concert, March 2008

De Gregori recovered his bestseller status in 1992 with Canzoni d'amore ("Love Songs"). In the 1990s he released fewer studio albums than collections and live albums. His next original work was Prendere e lasciare ("Take and Leave", 1996): from this point his song and his musical performance were marked by an increasing Bob Dylan influence.

Il bandito e il campione of 1993 was a live collection that had remarkable success: the title track, its only studio song, was sung by De Gregori but the lyrics were by his brother Luigi Grechi. The title track of La valigia dell'attore ("The Actor's Suitcase", 1998) showed De Gregori at the best of his poetical and emotional capabilities again. The rest of the album, however, contained old pieces, plus some Dylan covers.

In 2001 De Gregori released his next studio album, Amore nel pomeriggio ("Love in the Afternoon") which is unanimously included amongst his best works. The song "Il cuoco di Salò" ("The Cook of Salò"), arranged by Franco Battiato, is one of De Gregori's best^{[citation needed]} and shows his typical attention to "everyday" figures (including outcasts and underdogs) and lives while dealing with historical themes.

Il fischio del vapore ("The Whistle of the Steam", 2002) was a collaboration with the folksinger Giovanna Marini, who had already worked with De Gregori in a song for Titanic. The album is a collection of old popular and social Italian songs from the 19th and the early 20th centuries.

A biography of Francesco De Gregori, "Quello che non so, lo so cantare" ("What I Don't Know, I Know How to Sing"), edited by Enrico Deregibus, was published by Giunti in 2003. In 2005, De Gregori won the Targa Tenco for the best Italian album of the year with Pezzi, an album with strong rock elements. In February 2006, only eleven months after the release of Pezzi, De Gregori released a new studio album, Calypsos, with nine previously unreleased tracks. Amongst these was "Cardiologia" ("Cardiology"), a song where the Roman singer-songwriter returns to using the words "Ti amo" ("I love you"), more than thirty years after "Pezzi di Vetro", and the song "Per le strade di Roma" ("By the Streets of Rome"), which outlines a merciless picture of the Rome of the third millennium, archetypical of the Italy of today.

In November 2006 a triple CD Tra un manifesto e lo specchio that collected together his most representative tracks was released. As well as the celebrated track "Diamante" ("Diamond"), this contained pieces written by Zucchero and included on his album Oro incenso e birra ("Gold, Incense and Beer"), a demo of "Mannaggia alla musica" ("Damn to the Music") from 1979, originally written for Ron and previously presented on the live album Bootleg, and the B-side of the single "Viva l'Italia" ("Long Live Italy"), the celebrated "Banana Republic", sung without Lucio Dalla.

2010s[link]

Dalla-De Gregori in 2010

2010 opens with the news (given on 2 January) of a new set of concerts with De Gregori and Lucio Dalla, over thirty years since the splendor of Banana Republic, at the Vox Club Nonantola, with the name "Work in progress".

The concert, which becomes sold out in advance, opens another series of concerts that are announced on the occasion of the date of Nonantola, and that will be held in May in Milan and Rome; during the evening the two presented, in addition to known songs, a new song called "Non basta saper cantare" and announce also the release of their new album called "Work in Progress".

On 22 March 2010, Dalla and De Gregori lead the new TV show on Rai 2, entitled Due, during which they perform individually and in duets, covers and songs from their repertoires. On 1 May 2011 the duo played at the May Day Concert in Rome.

Awards[link]

• 1988 - Targa Tenco: best album for Terra di nessuno
• 1989 - Targa Tenco: best album for Mira Mare 19.4.89
• 1998 - Targa Tenco: best song for La valigia dell'attore
• 1999 - Targa Tenco: best singer (with Giovanna Marini) for Il fischio del vapore
• 2005 - Targa Tenco: best album for Pezzi

Discography[link]