Renoir’s Surprising Experiments in Perception

You’re reading the Goings On newsletter, a guide to what we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

Colin B. Bailey is the director of the Morgan Library & Museum, and has been for ten years now. Under his stewardship, the adventurous exhibition space has put on a number of utterly fascinating, gorgeous shows, and now with the terrific—and surprising— “ Renoir Drawings ,” Bailey has curated his first show for the Morgan (through Feb. 8), and it’s a rich one. I say surprising because, of course, when it comes to Renoir, we think almost at once of his paintings: all those apple-cheeked ladies and children living in a kind of bourgeois haze of comfort. But what Bailey shows us here is Renoir’s process as an artist, one who was seriously en