Like Picasso’s work, Renoir’s paintings, 1841-1919, are doing some hard traveling around the country this year too.
There was an exhibit at LACMA/Los Angeles County Museum of Art earlier this year and now to the Philadelphia Museum of Art presenting “Late Renoir”: 
“Late Renoir follows the renowned painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir through the final—and most fertile and innovative—decades of his career. At the height of his creative powers and looking toward posterity, Renoir created art that was timeless, enticing, and worthy of comparison to the greatest of the old masters, such as Raphael, Titian, and Rubens. He devoted himself to joyful subjects—frolicking bathers, domestic idylls, the drama of classical mythology, and the brilliance of Mediterranean landscape and sea. His fluid brushstrokes and masterful use of color won the admiration of the emerging modernist avant-garde, who considered Renoir one of the greatest living artists. Approximately eighty paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Renoir are being displayed alongside twenty works by younger artists—Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso among them—to illustrate, illumine, and celebrate Renoir’s legacy.”
“Late Renoir” * until September 6 , 2010
(Images: Girl in the Red Ruff, 1896 and Self Portrait, 1919)
July 11, 2010
The Philadelphia Museum of Art on their website would have the admission paying public believe that the “Late Renoir follows the renowned painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir through the final—and most fertile and innovative—decades of his career. [with] Approximately eighty paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Renoir.”
The only problem is there are -no- “sculptures by Renoir” in The Late Renoir exhibition.
The art dealer Vollard and the artist Renoir decided to cash in by misrepresenting bronze forgeries, cast from plasters reproduced from clay models forged by Richard Guino and others, as authentic Renoir sculptures.
Vollard, and too many others to mention, have perpetuated the myth that Renoir actually directed the creation of these so-called sculptures when in fact Renoir himself admits they were -forged- in his absence.
Then to add insult to injury, the so-called “Late Renoir” exhibition contains work, attributed to Renoir, that was so late, he was actually -dead- when it was forged.
The dead don’t sculpt.
Gary Arseneau
artist, creator of original lithographs & scholar
Fernandina Beach, Florida
SOURCES:
http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/359.html
page 75 of the “Renoir in the 20th Century” catalogue
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/… "