Femme En Bleu 

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted "Femme en bleu" in France towards the end of the 19th century, a period marked by rapid social and artistic change. Paintings like this were shown at the annual Paris Salon, but the depiction of female nudes had been a tradition of academic painting since the Renaissance. It’s worth noting that Renoir and his Impressionist colleagues had initially been excluded from this institution, creating their own independent exhibitions that challenged the Salon's authority. What do we make of this nude now? Is it conservative, in its debt to older traditions? Or progressive, in its looser brushwork? What is the public role of paintings like this? To answer these questions, the art historian turns to exhibition reviews and cultural documents of the period to reveal the contested meanings of art and the politics of imagery.