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Pierre-Auguste Renoir is best remembered as the master of bright Impressionist snapshots of real life, but an exhibition opening in Paris this week highlights his switch in style in his later years.
He was 72 and well-established when he famously said in 1913 "I'm starting to know how to paint. It has taken me over 50 years' work to get this far."
"Renoir in the 20th Century", a highlight of this season's Paris arts calendar, runs from Wednesday to January 4 at the Grand Palais before travelling to museums in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
"The show seeks to explore a period and aspects of Renoir's works that are neglected and often ridiculed," curator Sylvie Patry told AFP.
On display are 100 oils, many rarely seen, as well as sculptures dating from the last three decades of Renoir's 1841-1919 life when his art evolved from light-dappled Impressionism to figure studies inspired by old-school painters such as Titian and Rubens.
Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley revolutionised European painting by transforming the treatment of light and form in art.
Seen as one of the fathers of modern art, Renoir came to challenge the movement in the 1880s to concentrate instead on drawing and studio work, in reference to the old masters.
As a self-styled figure painter, he concentrated on female nudes, portraits and studies from models, testing himself against past greats.
"He progressively gave up subjects on modern life that the Impressionists loved to instead evoke a timeless world, a sort of classical Greece reinvented in southern France," Patry said.
In the first decade of the 20th century his work inspired by the south of France and from models led to new compositions such as the "Odalisques" and, above all, the "Bathers" of 1918-1919.
Renoir described the "Bathers" as "a springboard for future research". Patry said it was "the sum of all his admiration" for Ingres, Titian and Raphael.
Also on show are rarely-seen sculptures by the elderly Renoir, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and worked in collaboration with young artists able to carry out the physical work.
