Book Explores Tragic Fate Of Renoir's“Pink And Blue” Subjects

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A new book by author Catherine Ostler, titled The Renoir Girls, explores the lives of Alice and Elisabeth, the daughters of banker Louis Cahen d'Anvers and socialite Louise Cahen d'Anvers, who were immortalized in Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1881 painting“Pink and Blue, the Misses Cahen d'Anvers.” The book traces their opulent lives as members of the Jewish elite in fin-de-siècle Paris and their tragic deaths during the Holocaust.

Renoir's 1881 oil on canvas portrait depicts four-year-old Alice and six-year-old Elisabeth in a lavish salon, holding hands. Ostler's extensively researched account also features“La Petite Irène” (1880), Renoir's earlier portrait of their older sister, Irène Cahen d'Anvers. Louise Cahen d'Anvers, a prominent art patron, maintained a famed salon frequented by figures like Marcel Proust, artists, writers, and members of the conservative Catholic aristocracy. The art critic and collector Charles Ephrussi, her alleged lover, arranged for Renoir to paint the girls and was suspected of being Alice's biological father.

Despite their privileged existence, the sisters' lives were affected by growing antisemitism and political instability in Paris, culminating in the Dreyfus Affair between 1894 and 1906. While the Cahen d'Anvers family supported Alfred Dreyfus, some members of the Jewish elite remained focused on their extravagant lifestyles. This period saw 21-year-old Elisabeth convert to Catholicism and marry a penniless aristocrat in 1895, whom she later divorced. Alice, an adventurous anglophile, married British Colonel Charles Townshend in 1898 in an Anglican ceremony after meeting him in Egypt. Irène, the only one to enter an arranged marriage, left her husband, Moïse de Camondo, for the head of his stables.

The family's love for France and efforts toward assimilation, including adapting their surname to sound more aristocratic, could not protect them from the events of the 1930s. Ostler's narrative details the harrowing persecution during the Nazi occupation. Four family members perished in concentration camps, including Elisabeth, who was betrayed in 1944 while hiding and died in or en route to Auschwitz.

Today,“Pink and Blue” is a popular work at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand.“La Petite Irène,” however, was looted by the Nazis, restituted to Irène, and then acquired by the Swiss arms dealer Emil Georg Bührle. It is now displayed at the Kunsthaus Zürich, representing a story of devastation and betrayal, which Ostler's book brings to light.

Source: Hyperallergic

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