Here is the latest in the Exhibition on Screen series, this time designed to allow us to step inside the celebrated Barnes collection of modern French art – and specifically its mammoth Renoir holdings – as it is unlikely to ever travel away from its Philadelphia HQ. Barnes’s predilection was for Renoir’s “late” period – those fleshy, soft-focus nudes which, to put it mildly, haven’t aged well – and Phil Grabsky’s film deserves points for tackling the issue head-on: distinguished art critics queue up to explain how “weird” and “strange” they find them. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of insight here and plenty of context, with Renoir’s enduring influence on the next generation – Picasso and Matisse – stressed. An interesting film.
