Renoir (Auguste) - Lot 24

Renoir (Auguste) Society of Irregularists. Project. (1884). Lithographically autographed text. One sheet (41 x 31 cm) printed on both sides, forming a publication of 4 numbered pages. Shirt case. A rare copy of this confidential publication by Auguste Renoir - apparently absent from museums and libraries. A few copies were printed for close friends: Durand-Ruel, Monet, Pissarro... whose copy is shown here. This one was folded in six to be sent by post - one side bears Renoir's handwritten name and address: Monsieur Camille Pissarro, à Eragny-sur-Epte par Gisors. Eure. Postal cancellations show that the envelope was sent from Paris to Gisors in May 1884. Between 1882 and 1884, Renoir had imagined creating an association of artists (painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, architects, chiselers, etc.) whose aesthetic principle would have been irregularity - hence the name Société des Irrégularistes - a highly original association whose aims were to organize an exhibition (as much to free itself from the official Salons as from the events of the Impressionist group) and to publish a grammar of the arts. The initiative came at the same time as the Salon des Indépendants (a salon finally free of the admission jury), but was never followed up. All that remains is the manuscript preserved in the Louvre and this Project reserved for the painter's entourage, of which no specimen has ever been known. Nature's essential principle is irregularity: "( . .) it abhors a vacuum, say the physicists, and they could complete their axiom by adding that it abhors regularity no less. (...) The two eyes of the most beautiful face will always be slightly dissimilar; no nose is exactly placed above the middle of the mouth; the segments of an orange, the leaves of a tree, the petals of a flower are never identical. It even seems that beauty of every kind draws its charm from this diversity. (...) every truly artistic production has been conceived and executed according to the principle of irregularity, in a word (to use a neologism that expresses our thought more fully) that it is always the work of an irregularist." Renoir's text is known today exclusively from the original manuscript acquired by the Musée du Louvre in 1935 at the sale of Théodore Duret's books and documents. First published in 1939 in Les Archives de l'Impressionisme (by Lionello Venturi), it was republished in 2002 and 2009 in Écrits et propos sur l'art de Renoir, assembled and presented by Augustin de Butler. Renoir decided not to publish the text ("it's too short and nobody understands"), and at the same time abandoned his project for a society. We don't know what happened to the copies of the program Renoir sent to Durand-Ruel and Monet. Our copy is the only one known to date.