​PHILADELPHIA, PA.- On view now at the Barnes Foundation—home to the world’s largest collection of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir—is a major exhibition examining the artistic exchange between the renowned impressionist painter and his son, celebrated filmmaker Jean Renoir. Renoir: Father and Son/Painting and Cinema brings together over 120 works, including paintings, films, drawings, ceramics, costumes, photographs, and posters—many never before shown in the US—for an illuminating exploration of Pierre-Auguste’s role in his son’s oeuvre and the relationship between painting and cinema. The exhibition is curated by Sylvie Patry, Consulting Curator at the Barnes and Chief Curator/Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Collections at the Musée d’Orsay, and is organized by the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the Musées d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie, Paris, in collaboration with La Cinémathèque française, Paris. 

Acclaimed director Jean Renoir (1894–1979) is perhaps best known for such films as La Grande illusion (The Grand Illusion) (1937), Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country) (shot in 1936, released in 1946), and La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939), all of which are considered milestones in the history of 20th-century art. Jean Renoir embraced cinema as a genuine form of artistic expression. In Jean’s films, as in his father’s paintings, the sense of informality or feeling of improvisation was in fact the result of an exacting and deliberate approach. 

Ensconced in a spacious suite on the top floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that opens onto a grand balcony overlooking Central Park—and the Fifth Avenue apartments of several major museum patrons—Daniel Weiss sits behind one of the most august desks in the cultural world.
Befitting the office of the CEO of the Met, the room is decorated by a personalized assortment of treasures from the collection. Alfred Sisley’s delicately hued Rue Eugène Moussoir at Moret: Winter (1891) and Andreas Achenbach’s dramatically Romantic Sunset After a Storm on the Coast of Sicily (1853) are joined on the walls by a violin borrowed from the musical instruments department—a reminder of the “feeble attempt” Weiss once made to play one—as well as the original typewritten copy of a famous Vietnam War poem by Major Michael Davis O’Donnell, a helicopter pilot who was shot down and went missing in action for 29 years. Weiss is currently writing a book about the poem. ​

For the past year, Daniel H. Weiss’s official title at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been president and CEO. But one might say that his functional role has really been RAF: as in, Responsible Adult, Finally.

Originally brought on in 2015 as the successor to the redoubtable Met president Emily Kernan Rafferty, Weiss was first charged with helping then-director Thomas Campbell chart the museum’s choppy financial and administrative waters. Then, when the board decided last year that Campbell—a tapestry expert who suffered a staff mutiny after trying to push through a new $600 million Modern and contemporary wing amid cuts to traditional sectors—was overmatched by the job, Weiss became charged with righting the institution’s finances and finding a new director.

Now, in the months since Campbell’s departure, Weiss has launched an across-the-board revamp of the museum’s revenue streams—including a vastly controversial elimination of pay-what-you-wish admission for out-of-town visitors—and hired a man he sees as a dream director: Max Hollein, an Austrian-accented five-tool player who has made high-caliber contemporary and classic art programming generate revenue for institutions in both Europe and America.