“If Cézanne is right, then I am right,” Matisse consoled himself in periods of doubt. He also turned to Renoir: “His nudes, the loveliest nudes ever painted: no one has done better . . . Renoir’s work rescues us from the sterility of abstraction.” 

Those responses illustrate Cézanne’s and Renoir’s standing in the early 20th century. A presentation at Paris’s 1904 Salon d’Automne claimed them as equals heralding modernity.

Today, they are seen as opposites: pioneering Cézanne, reactionary Renoir. So unfashionable is Renoir that his last full-scale retrospective was in 1985 at the Grand Palais and London’s Hayward Gallery. The Musée de l’Orangerie’s touring exhibition Cézanne Renoir, installed next week at Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny, Switzerland, then travelling to Asia, is therefore very welcome.

From its own significant collection, largely amassed by dealer Paul Guillaume and his wife, plus key loans from the Musée d’Orsay, come varied paintings from every period and genre: Renoir’s early Impressionist experiment of lush riverbank and flickering reflections “Barges on the Seine” and his masterly orchestration of rhythmic gestures and chromatic harmonies “Two Young Girls at the Piano” (1892); Cézanne’s eye-popping golden fruit as stylised forms in “Still Life of Apples and Biscuits” (1880) and mighty compressed cliff landscapes “The Grounds of the Château Noir” and “The Red Rock”, declaring nature solemn and eternal. They build a drama of contrast and convergence, similarity within difference, individual trajectories fascinatingly contextualised.

The animating distinction is Cézanne’s order and rigour versus Renoir’s soft caressing touch. Renoir’s resplendent, sensuous “Reclining Nude (Gabrielle)” (1903) in luminous creamy flesh tones, celebrates the model, also his children’s nanny, whom he adored. Cézanne’s “Portrait of Madame Cézanne” (1880) in hieratic pose, a weighty presence against a lively blue-green background haloing the head, is restrained, balanced.

You almost feel Renoir’s feathery, delicate “Peaches” (1881) in their shiny porcelain bowl — the sparkle a life-long benefit from his teenage apprenticeship as a porcelain painter, working in crystalline hues. It gave him mastery of dappled light: “English Pear Tree” (1873), sun glinting through foliage rustled by the breeze, painted in near-transparent brushstrokes, marks the first moment of Impressionism in 1873 with a scintillating spring scene. Renoir makes winter shine too: bluish shadows of the sky and rust-coloured tree trunks on bright white ground in “Snowy Landscape” (1875).

Cézanne is cooler, more deliberate. The stunning “The Blue Vase” (1887) is a formal arrangement of vertical vase and rigidly placed fruits, plate and bottles in refined gradation of tones — yet how lyrically the sway of the bouquet challenges the strict architecture.

In landscapes, Cézanne constructs rather than dissolves a scene in light. In the overcast “A Village Road Near Auvers” (1872-73), a path among shuttered houses, he embarks tentatively on plein air painting with Pissarro. He learnt fast: by 1875, home in Provence, he abbreviates buildings into thick dabs, foliage as lively comma strokes, fields as swaths of rectangles under the glaring southern sun of “Landscape with Red Roof” (1875-76). 

Impressionism began in Paris as a northern art, forged from the experience of changing light and weather effects. Cézanne the southerner, accustomed to constant Mediterranean sun, embraced it uneasily: he valued its spontaneity and freshness but wanted to “make of Impressionism something solid like the art of the museum”.

Initial attempts to set classical figures en plein air, as in “Three Bathers” (1879-82), met with ridicule; you see how he stumbles with the pyramid of ungainly women, drawn from imagination and study of the antique, because — unlike the hedonistic Renoir — Cézanne was uncomfortable with female models. But by 1885 in the frieze-like, schematic “Trees and Houses Near the Jas de Bouffan” (1885-86) he combined intense expression of heat, light and atmosphere with architectonic splendour. 

Renoir was among the very few admirers of such paintings in the 1880s, when the two artists were closest. Cézanne gained practically from the friendship — through Renoir’s efforts, he finally, aged 56, achieved his first exhibition, in 1895. Renoir, however, gained artistically.

In the early 1880s, Impressionism hit an impasse, its breezy brilliance dwindling to formulaic repetition. “I had gone to the end of Impressionism and was reaching the conclusion that I didn’t know how either to paint or to draw,” Renoir said. He turned up the high-key palette — “Algerian Landscape” (1881), the turquoise-flecked swirling seas in “Marine, Guernsey” (1883) — studied Ingres in the Louvre, Raphael in Rome, and stayed chez Cézanne in l’Estaque. From there he wrote in 1882: “While warming myself and observing a great deal, I shall have acquired the simplicity and grandeur of the ancient painters.”

In 1883 came the monumental classicised “Nude in a Landscape”, firm contours rendered with Ingresque linearity, background in vibrant fragmented Impressionist brushstrokes. “Bather with Long Hair” (1895), golden tresses echoing the movement of vegetation behind her, and the lush, less distinct “Seated Bather Drying Her Leg” (1914) are typical of what followed. In 1907 Renoir moved south, to Cagnes-sur-Mer.

Today, late Renoir — those pneumatic fleshy nudes with exaggerated breasts and hips — means problematic (misogynist, sentimental) Renoir. These nudes divided his friends at the time. Monet bought “Young Girl Bathing” (now at the Metropolitan Museum) and hung it over his bed. Mary Cassatt described “huge red-haired women with very small heads . . . the most awful imaginable”. 

Cassatt was assuming representational aims. Perhaps we should consider them rather, like Cézanne’s bathers, as mythological, emblematic, stylised. The show includes Cézanne’s ethereal 1899-1900 “Bathers”, where the figures, merged with iridescent landscape, become the structure of the painting. Cézanne treated these bodies, Kazimir Malevich said, “as nothing but pictorial surfaces and volumes”. But surely they are also nostalgic Arcadian idylls.

Even though this exhibition does not include Paris’s greatest Renoir and Cézanne hits — no “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, “Mont Sainte-Victoire” or “Card Players” — it unfolds at every turn how each artist strives for richness in different ways.

Compare, say, “The Artist’s Son”, Cézanne’s beautifully simplified pattern of curving hairline, neck, shoulder and armchair playing around the eight-year-old intent on maintaining a serious look, with “Claude Renoir in Clown Costume” (1909), also aged eight. The latter is posed anachronistically like Watteau’s Pierrot against a marble column, his shimmering red outfit offset by white collar and stockings which the child recalled as unbearably uncomfortable. Picasso followed Cézanne’s modern, flattened, cropped composition and blue tonality in his own 1906 “Self-portrait”. Yet later he depicted his son in Pierrot costume, like Renoir.

Two Picassos conclude the show: “Large Still Life” (1917), Cubist homage to the tilting equilibrium of Cézanne’s table-top paintings, and “Large Nude with Drapery” (1923), whose pose and heavy forms recall Renoir’s late nudes.

Matisse’s tribute was to send Renoir one last model, Andrée “Dédée” Heuschling, depicted here in “Blonde Girl with a Rose”. “How beautiful she is! I have worn out my old eyes on her young skin,” the crippled, emaciated, dying Renoir said. “As his body was going into decline,” Matisse observed, “his soul seemed . . . to express itself with a more radiant facility.”  

Fondation Gianadda, Martigny, July 13-November 19, gianadda.ch; then touring to Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul

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