The Commission: In 1914, the elderly painter Auguste Renoir accepted a commission from the Berlin art dealer Paul Cassirer to paint a portrait of his wife, the famous Austrian-born actress Tilla Durieux. Paul Durand-Ruel had represented Renoir over the years and was associated with this younger German colleague, who first showed Renoir’s work at his Berlin gallery in 1904–5. Later, in 1912, Cassirer presented Impressionism to the city in a major exhibition of works by Manet, Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir, who was represented by no less than forty-one pictures. Despite his ill health and concern for his two sons, who had joined the army, Renoir, with his gift for friendship and connection, may have felt he had little choice but to agree to Cassirer’s request. Early in July 1914, the couple arrived in Paris so that she could sit for Renoir at his studio in boulevard Rochechouart, usually, as she reported, for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. On July 20, shortly before the German declaration of war that began World War I, she and her husband left Paris, but without the picture, which was not yet dry. (It was finally forwarded to them by Durand-Ruel years after Renoir’s death.)
The Painting: According to Tilla Durieux, Renoir said that while for the most part he had given up portraiture, he was pleased to receive her. She admired his simplicity. He asked her to wear a rose in her hair. She brought with her a theatrical costume made for her by the Paris designer Paul Poiret for her recent transformational appearance as Eliza Doolittle in the fourth act of George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion, a sleeveless white gauze dress in a severe classicizing style and a jacket and half-skirt with borders embroidered in gold and bright colors. She observed that an assistant placed the artist’s palette and brush in his hands. The tonalities of the picture—typical of Renoir in old age—are warm and rosy. He depicts her as generously proportioned (though she was not) with full breasts and large hands (which she did possess), poised, calm, and sympathetic. Renoir captures but does not focus on her distinguishing features: slanting eyes, high cheekbones, and a strong jaw line. He presents her as a prominent society figure, engaging and successful. While in a photograph taken in the studio, she appears upright and distant, he emphasizes her femininity and allure. From the isolation imposed by his own disability, he sees the actress as larger than life.
Additional Portraits: Durieux was depicted in a variety of media by Austrian, Czech, and German artists; in the case of Franz von Stuck, on many occasions. Their portraits differ radically in style and expression—she appears thin, tense or wary, and egotistical—from Renoir’s 1914 canvas. Most date from the previous ten or twelve years. Broadly, there are two reasons for the differences: Renoir’s relaxed late manner is quite different from German Expressionist style, and he painted a successful woman in her private guise, while artists in the German-speaking world showed or strongly suggested her fiercely dramatic and erotic stage personalities. Among the latter are Eugen Spiro (drawing, 1902, location unknown), Emil Orlik (painting, 1905, location unknown, and drawings and prints, 1922, see The Met
24.12.3), Max Slevogt (painting, 1907, Zagreb City Museum, MGZ 4743), Lovis Corinth (painting, 1908, private collection), Oskar Kokoschka (painting, 1910, private collection), Max Oppenheimer (painting, 1912, Leopold Museum, Vienna, LM 443), and Franz von Stuck (paintings, 1912-14, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, F.V. 90, and elsewhere).
Tilla Durieux: She was born Ottilie Godeffroy in Vienna in 1880, later taking her grandmother’s name for the stage. She attended Karl Arnau’s theater school and made her professional debut in Olmütz (Olomouc) in 1901. Further appearances were in Stuttgart and Breslau (Wrocław), where she took supporting parts in plays by Shakespeare, Goethe, and various contemporary writers. The Berlin director Max Reinhardt, recognizing the erotic force and magnetism of her style, cast Durieux as the lead in Oscar Wilde’s
Salomé, a play thought scandalous by many which was received with acclaim at the Neues Theater, Berlin, in 1903. She was briefly married to the German Expressionist painter Eugen Spiro, whom she abandoned to wed Paul Cassirer in 1910. The couple entertained radical political and cultural leaders at their influential Berlin Salon. She was Circe in Calderón’s play of that name in 1912, and, again working with Reinhardt, in 1913 she made her acclaimed appearance as Doolittle in Shaw’s
Pygmalion. She was at the height of her fame when she sat for Renoir, but the elderly artist may have been largely unaware of her tremendous achievements on the German stage. Durieux enjoyed success in both the theater and on film. Her third husband was the influential industrialist Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, who died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II, while she joined the resistance, working from Zagreb, where they had settled in the mid-1930s. In 1951, she returned to Berlin to perform again, a celebrity in old age. She died there at the age of ninety-one.
Paul Cassirer: A writer, art dealer, and publisher, born in 1871 into a wealthy and distinguished Jewish family, he was educated in art history and opened his own gallery while in his twenties. In 1908, he established Pan Presse, a major Berlin publishing house. Cassirer was active in the Berlin Secession, providing financial help to many artists: he forwarded the careers of Oskar Kokoschka, Max Liebermann, and Max Slevogt, among others. From the turn of the century until the onset of World War I, Cassirer staged numerous exhibitions devoted to Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, to whom, in 1914, he devoted a retrospective of 146 works. In 1910, he married secondly Tilla Durieux. After service behind the lines early in the war, he developed pacifist sentiments, and the couple fled to Switzerland. Later, in Berlin, he returned to the publishing business. Durieux divorced Cassirer in 1926 and Immediately thereafter, in an adjoining room, he committed suicide. He was fifty-four.
Katharine Baetjer 2021
