Five essays on MASP – Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir

MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand will be exhibiting all the works of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) in its collection. Five essays on MASP – Renoir presents 12 paintings and a sculpture on the fifth floor of the Pietro Maria Bardi Building. This group of works was last exhibited in 2002 in the show Renoir – The Painter of Life, held at the museum itself.

Curated by Fernando Oliva, curator at MASP, the selection covers almost the entire career of the French artist. Among the paintings is the famous Pink and Blue – The Cahen d’Anvers Girls (1881), which depicts Elisabeth and Alice, daughters of the banker Louis Cahen d'Anvers (1837-1922), a family that belonged to the Jewish community of the nineteenth century. Alice lived to the age of 89 and died in Nice in 1965. Elisabeth’s fate was tragic. During the exhibition of MASP works at Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Switzerland in 1987, her nephew Jean de Monbrison wrote to the museum that Elisabeth had been sent to Auschwitz during the Second World War and died on the way to the concentration camp at the age of 69.