Renoir, Matisse and Kjartansson on the hard work of painting joy

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) will hang at London's National Gallery until 31 January 2027. The painting is one of the highlights of Renoir and Love, an exhibition built around a contradiction: the artist's happiness made him famous and made him an outcast.

Paul Perrin, co-curator, states the case in the catalogue. The "blissful couples and air of happiness" in Renoir's 1860s to 1880s paintings made them "immensely popular" and prompted "contempt for their apparent lack of complexity and depth".

Why does Renoir's happiness provoke contempt?

Three accounts of that hostility set the terms.

• John Elderfield, former curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, described to painter Howard Hodgkin what he called "the modern attraction to difficulty".
• Eddy Frankel, writing recently in The Guardian, said: "I've hated his work for decades." Renoir appeals to him "when his nudes look like a super-psychedelic, ultra-horny version of Rubens".
• Georges Rivière, Renoir's writer and champion, insisted on the simpler verdict: "They are happy," and these are the words that come to mind of all who see this charming painting. None has given me more pleasure than this one.

Rivière found the same point in the scene itself: "These young people are enjoying life, the beautiful weather, the morning sun shining through the foliage; what do they care about the rest of humanity?"

As the exhibition frames it, love carries several forms, and empathy ranks among them.

Takeaway: popularity and contempt have moved together since the 1860s.

Does Renoir's cheer ignore suffering?

Specialists suggest he did not. Renoir understood the "anguished or miserable" elements of life that Perrin calls essential to many conceptions of modernity, and he named the problem himself: "It's hard to get people to admit that a painting can be great painting and still be happy".

He also knew hardship from inside it. Unlike Degas and Manet, whose paintings and Baudelaire's writings record the visible poverty of the period, Renoir grew up in working-class Paris and acquired, Rivière wrote, "a keen sense of pity" for the poverty of "Montmartre families".

Then he made an editorial decision. "There are enough annoying things in life for us not to make more of them," he said.

Happiness, on this reading, lasts briefly and burns brightest at its shortest.

Takeaway: Renoir's cheer looks selective rather than innocent, because he knew exactly what his pictures leave out.

Where does Renoir's joy come from?

Its source is the Rococo, the golden age of French painting. Mary Morton, writing in the catalogue, notes that Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard "embodied graceful pleasure and a harmonious relationship between the human figure and nature".

Henri Matisse, Renoir's artistic heir, applied the same test to himself: "this happiness, this light and this serene wisdom that [have] seemingly become mine are sometimes earned through the harshness of adversity".

Takeaway: for both painters, serenity is the product of difficulty, not the alternative to it.

What does Ragnar Kjartansson add?

Ragnar Kjartansson comes closest of any contemporary to a great art of happiness. His Weekdays in Arcadia opens at the Goodwood Art Foundation in Chichester on 26 November and runs to 12 April 2027.

In a 2017 interview, he said his fascination with the period lies in the "contrast of really intellectual minds and… silly-billy nothingness".

The centrepiece is No Tomorrow (2022), a video installation extending his 2017 dance collaboration with choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir and composer Bryce Dessner. In the original ballet, female performers in jeans and white T-shirts danced with acoustic guitars throughout, arranged in a grid so every other dancer took turns leaping while the next stood still.

Kjartansson and Bjarnadóttir called the result "a Watteau painting in disguise". It extends The Visitors (2012), his best-known piece, in which he and his friends sing in different rooms of a half-derelict mansion in New York State and draw the same ecstatic response from viewers.

He knows the trap. With Renoir's reputation and the Rococo in mind, he was "in danger of becoming the feel-good artist". His answer at Goodwood is "the idea of encountering monuments to sorrow and shakiness in the woodlands". Expect the smile to survive the melancholy.

Takeaway: Kjartansson's cheer now carries a counterweight, located in trees rather than canvases.

What happens next?

Two tests run at once from 26 November. Chichester weighs joy against sorrow and shakiness; London weighs it against complexity, with Matisse supplying the standard that both must meet: happiness earned through hardship, or happiness merely displayed.

Achieving joy in art is a deadly serious business, as Renoir, Matisse and Kjartansson each understood. The National Gallery closes Renoir and Love on 31 January 2027. By then, Goodwood will have set a contemporary answer beside Renoir's dancers, and posed the harder question: can a smile be earned rather than performed?