Business Ideas

By ERIC FELTEN

The end of March saw two new albums by well-established (which is nicer than saying long-in-the-tooth) pop artists—Madonna’s “MDNA,” and Lionel Richie’s “Tuskegee.” Madonna’s disc of new rave electronica debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. Mr. Richie’s disc—a collection of his old hits, but now country-fried with Nashville stars—came in at No. 2. Then something remarkable happened. Madonna achieved a notoriety even more embarrassing than her commodified sexuality—her disc took one of the biggest tumbles ever for an album opening at the top. Second-week sales collapsed by more than 86%. And in the weeks since, the decline has only deepened, with “MDNA” now languishing at No. 34 on the chart. Mr. Richie’s record, by contrast, climbed to No. 1, where it has held pride of place for the last two weeks.

Eric Palma

What explains Madonna’s epic fail and Mr. Richie’s surprise success?

It can’t be entirely a matter of promotion. After all, in the lead-up to her disc’s release, Madonna had no less a showcase than the Super Bowl halftime. In a pageant that could have been choreographed by Caligula in collaboration with the Beijing Olympic committee, she featured the lead single from the new album (a song that enjoyed added attention thanks to the obscene gesture delivered by a guest rapper). Think of the show as an informercial for “MDNA”: Given what advertising time costs during the Super Bowl, it’s been estimated that Madonna’s halftime spot was a promotional opportunity worth more than $80 million.

Mr. Richie’s televised promotion was rather modest by comparison—he appeared for an hour on the Home Shopping Network.

Nor does the quality of the music explain it all. Those who go in for Madge’s sort of stuff haven’t been howling that her newest installment of computer-generated thumping isn’t up to snuff. As for Mr. Richie’s collection, though nothing extraordinary, it’s a pleasant reworking of his standard repertoire. (And before you scoff at an aging soul crooner trying twang on for size, keep in mind that the melodic pop Mr. Richie specializes in translates well to the melody-friendly language of country music.)

So what explains the dramatic divergence in the discs’s fortunes? The answer, I think, can be found in the basic question of old vs. new. Mr. Richie found a way to freshen up his “greatest hits.” Madonna is trying to sell new music. Fans of long-established artists may tolerate new works, may even buy them, but rarely do so with the enthusiasm they reserve for the back catalog. Typical is the friend who bragged to me last month she had scored good seats for a coming Bruce Springsteen concert—who then rolled her eyes and said with resignation, “Though, I hear he’s doing lots of material off his new CD….”

Why is it so hard for veteran stars to sell their abundant fans on new music?

Exceptions are rare—Cher scored No. 1 singles more than 33 years apart (“I Got You Babe” in 1965 and “Believe” in 1999). Louis Armstrong managed to keep adding hits to his catalog throughout his long career. Pops was well into his 60s when, in May 1964, he displaced the Beatles from the top of the Billboard singles chart, a spot they had owned for more than three months. Maybe Madonna should cut a cover of “Hello, Dolly.”

Even a songwriting performer of Duke Ellington’s stature and endurance saw his hit-smithing fizzle. When Ellington’s faltering career was revived at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, it was not because of the new suite he had written for the occasion, but thanks to a rollicking performance of a decades-old standby, “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.”

One would think that legendary artists would have every advantage needed to put across new hits—they are brands, after all, with large and loyal consumer bases. So why do they struggle so with new product lines? Is it that performers lose their knack for good new tunes? Or is the fault with us, the listeners, that as we get older we lose our ability to connect with new music? Maybe learning to like a song is like learning a new language—it gets harder as we age.

I suspect both play a part—the muse gets weary and the audience gets diffident. But there could also be a Catch-22 at work: If the established musician does something really fresh, her audience is unhappy she’s strayed from what they know and like. But if she keeps doing new songs in the same vein as the old, why should the listener bother with the new release, the old favorites being the perfect expression of the old style?

Mr. Richie managed to escape the conundrum by doing the old favorites in a new way. We’ll see if Madonna is ultimately driven to adopt the same strategy—though I shudder to think how “Like a Virgin” will sound with fiddle and steel guitar.

A version of this article appeared May 4, 2012, on page D10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: When Old Stars Try to Be New Again.

Liz Lauren

Kevin Gudahl, Bruce A. Young and Ian McDiarmid in ‘Timon of Athens.’

Timon of Athens

Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Courtyard Theater, Navy Pier, Chicago

($44-$75), 312-595-5600

closes June 10

Chicago

Most modern-day Shakespeare stagings start with an animating premise that is dreamed up by the director, then applied more or less rigorously to every aspect of the resulting production. “Henry VI” performed in a bloody butcher’s shop, “As You Like It” turned into a bottom-of-the-bill B-movie western, “Macbeth” transplanted from ancient Scotland to the Soviet Union in the days of the Great Terror…you name it, somebody’s tried it somewhere or other. What’s more, all of the aforementioned high-concept stagings were exceptionally effective. The trick is to come up with a concept that sheds new light on the play in question (usually by underlining its relevance to contemporary life) and is sufficiently flexible to cover every twist of the plot. Then you work through its implications in a way that makes self-evident visual and dramatic sense to the audience—excessive cleverness is almost always a recipe for confusion—and you’re off and running.

None of this, of course, guarantees a good show. That requires verve and imagination, both of which Chicago Shakespeare’s Barbara Gaines possesses in hyperabundance. In her version of the rarely performed “Timon of Athens,” the title character (played with coolly arrogant panache by Ian McDiarmid) becomes a high-rolling futures trader who gets caught in a credit crunch and finds one day that his closest “friends” have stopped returning his calls. What brings Ms. Gaines’s idea to life is the boldness of her theatrical gestures, coupled with the clarity of her thinking. For her, Timon is a vain, self-centered fool who makes the mistake of thinking that the smooth sycophants who surround him like blood-sniffing sharks care for him, not his money. Give them iPads and put them in bespoke suits and you get a “Timon of Athens” that plays like a cross between “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Citizen Kane.”

The comparison to “Kane” is of the utmost relevance, not only because the fast-moving crosscutting of Ms. Gaines’s staging is conspicuously cinematic but because she and Mr. McDiarmid have trimmed Shakespeare’s text as ruthlessly—and creatively—as did Orson Welles, the maker of “Kane,” when he edited “Julius Caesar” for his 1937 Broadway production. This “Timon” has been similarly compressed and reshaped in such a way as to give it the shadowless simplicity of a fable. Subtle it’s not, but when Flavius (Sean Fortunato, who is admirably direct and sincere) informs his deluded master that “when the means are gone that buy this praise, / The breath is gone whereof this praise is made,” you’ll feel it like a sucker punch.

Kevin Depinet, who also designed the sets for the Goodman Theatre’s revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” has outdone himself, setting the first half of the show in Timon’s ultramodern corporate offices and keeping an eye-popping visual ace up his sleeve for the top of the second half, in which the ex-tycoon becomes a crazed, Lear-like beachcomber. Don’t ask—you’ll want to be surprised—but make sure that you get back to your seat on time.

***

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Classic Stage Company,

136 E. 13th St., New York

($75-$80), 212-677-4210

closes May 20

New York

When high-concept Shakespeare stagings go astray, you get something not unlike the scattershot first part of Tony Speciale’s up-to-the-second modern-dress version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which feels more like a bag of tricks than a carefully thought-out production. It also feels like a vehicle for two biggish stars, Christina Ricci (as Hermia) and Bebe Neuwirth (doubling as Titania and Hippolyta), neither of whom appears to be at ease with the unsparing demands of classical acting. On the other hand, just about everybody in the cast is trying way, way too hard, going for easy laughs the way a purse-snatcher goes for little old ladies with great big handbags.

Be patient: Things start looking up as soon as the sleeping lovers are discovered in the enchanted wood and Puck (Taylor Mac) pulls the donkey’s head off Bottom (Steven Skybell) and turns him back into a human being. Mr. Skybell describes Bottom’s dream with sweetly wide-eyed bemusement, after which he and his fellow “rude mechanicals” enact “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe,” Shakespeare’s brutal parody of a rustic staging of a classical tragedy, with a gentle gravity that is surprising in just the right way. For once, you see the rude mechanicals as human beings, not half-wits, hopelessly deluded but endearingly sincere.

Would that this “Midsummer” found its center sooner, since there is much to like about it, not least Mark Wendland’s hall-of-mirrors set and the fresh-sounding incidental music of Christian Frederickson and Ryan Rumery. What’s more, the second part is so sure in tone that it just about redeems the excesses of all that precedes it. By evening’s end you won’t be even slightly sorry that you came.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

Put down that smartphone; pick up that crayon.

Employees at a range of businesses are being encouraged by their companies to doodle their ideas and draw diagrams to explain complicated concepts to colleagues.

Put down that smartphone; pick up that pencil. Employees are being encouraged by their companies to try visual note-taking to explain complicated concepts to colleagues and clients. Rachel Silverman explains on The News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.

While whiteboards long have been staples in conference rooms, companies such as Facebook Inc. are incorporating whiteboards, chalkboards and writable glass on all sorts of surfaces to spark creativity.

Firms are holding training sessions to teach employees the basics of what’s known as visual note taking. Others, like vacation-rental company HomeAway Inc. and retailer Zappos, are hiring graphic recorders, consultants who sketch what is discussed at meetings and conferences, cartoon-style, to keep employees engaged.

Doodling proponents say it can help generate ideas, fuel collaboration and simplify communication. It can be especially helpful among global colleagues who don’t share a common first language. Putting pen to paper also is seen as an antidote to the pervasiveness of digital culture, getting workers to look up from their devices. And studies show it can help workers retain more information.

Even with advanced gadgets such as smartphones and tablets, “the hand is the easiest way to get something down,” says Everett Katigbak, a communication designer at Facebook. Most of the walls at the company’s offices around the country have been coated with dry-erase or chalkboard paint or a treatment for glass to allow employees to sketch ideas whenever they arise. The company’s offices are filled with jottings, from mathematical equations to doodles of cats and dollar signs.

IdeaPaint Inc., which makes a paint that turns a surface into a whiteboard, says its sales have doubled annually since the product was introduced in 2008. The Ashland, Mass., company says more than half of its business is in the workplace.

Taking notes and drawing may help workers stay more focused, too.

A 2009 study published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology found that doodlers retained more than nondoodlers when remembering information that had been presented in a boring context, such as a meeting or conference call. The logic, according to Jackie Andrade, a psychology professor at the University of Plymouth in England, is that doodling takes up just enough cognitive energy to prevent the mind from daydreaming.

Last summer, software maker Citrix Systems Inc.

opened a “design collaboration” workspace at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters. The facility was designed to encourage the company’s gadget-obsessed engineers and other employees to let loose and sketch ideas, says Catherine Courage, the company’s vice president of product design.

Whiteboards cover almost every wall and table. Markers, sticky notes and construction paper are readily available. There are also pipe cleaners and foam balls for 3-D models, and employees make props like hats and glasses to help them act out concepts. Employees use the materials mainly at project kickoffs or when trying to define a project or new process.

To loosen up employees, meetings sometimes begin with participants sketching self-portraits. Although some engineers are skeptical and say they can’t draw, “it gets them in the mood,” Ms. Courage says.

Audra Kalfass, a Citrix software-development engineer, says when she meets with her team and there is a technical issue, “it’s natural to start drawing stuff.” Since nearly every surface in design meeting rooms can be written on—even the tables are made of whiteboards—”you just grab a marker and you start drawing,” she says.

Ms. Kalfass says she is a “horrible” artist. Nevertheless, “it doesn’t take much artistic ability to communicate visually. You don’t have to be amazing artists… It’s mostly boxes and lines and stuff like that to get your point across.”

At Spectrum Health System, a Grand Rapids, Mich., health-care provider and insurer, technology managers took a workshop with Dan Roam, a San Francisco “visual problem solving” consultant, on using images like stick figures and arrows to explain the complexities of the health-care industry to Spectrum employees.

After the workshop, Chief Information Officer Patrick O’Hare helped create a presentation featuring cartoonlike sketches for the chief executive. In one, the company’s three business branches—health insurance, hospitals and physician clinics—were depicted as a body, representing the consumer, divided into three parts. Mr. O’Hare’s presentation was a hit, he says, much better than the PowerPoint presentation he had delivered a few weeks earlier.

Mr. O’Hare says he isn’t a good artist but the workshop taught him it was “OK to stand up in front of a group and draw stick figures. It doesn’t have to be so pristine.”

HomeAway, an Austin, Texas, vacation-rental company, hired a graphic facilitator to help train a dozen employees—including senior managers and training and human-resources staff—to use visual shorthand and sketching to help guide meetings, says Lori Knowlton, the company’s vice president of human resources. The aim was to better “capture ideas using images,” she says. Plus, it is more fun than “being surrounded by spreadsheets and emails.”

The company also brought in graphic recorder Sunni Brown to help sketch, in real time, what was discussed at a large company meeting on HomeAway’s strategy. The resulting cartoonlike image, which serves as the meeting’s minutes, hangs framed at the company’s headquarters.

At Turner Broadcasting System Inc. in Atlanta, a strategy-development team recently drew tree branches and placed sticky notes on the branches to explore ways to extend the Turner Classic Movies brand, says Jennifer Dorian, a senior vice president.

The exercise yielded more than 200 promising ideas, some of which are in development, says Amy Zehfuss, vice president of network strategy for the Time Warner Inc.

unit. “Seeing all the stickies on the tree is a really powerful visual,” she says.

Even PowerPoint software developers do their share of doodling.

Jeffrey Murray, principal test manager for the Microsoft Corp.

unit, says his team often starts with whiteboard sketches and cartoonlike storyboards when considering new product features.

Sketches help “get everyone on the same page and can convey the emotion and experience of the user,” he says. Eventually, the images are transferred to PowerPoint decks, he says. Inevitably, developers sketch and scribble over the deck’s whiteboard projections.

Write to Rachel Emma Silverman at rachel.silverman@wsj.com

Correction & Amplification

Zappos.com took a photograph of Sunni Brown sketching a company meeting. A previous credit with the image online incorrectly attributed a photo to Sunni Brown. The credit has been corrected.

A version of this article appeared April 25, 2012, on page B1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Doodling for Dollars.

By CRAIG KARMIN

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., one of the original buyout shops, has long resisted getting into real estate. But after years of watching rivals invest billions of dollars in property, KKR finally is making its own big push.

The firm’s $196 million acquisition last week of a Chicago-area shopping mall kicked off what is expected to be a flurry of deals in the months ahead.

KKR recently paid $60 million for part of a real-estate-related loan from a European financial institution, and it is in contract to provide a $25 million mezzanine loan to a hotel operator for a property renovation.

It also is close to taking an equity stake of as much as $100 million in a venture to develop 1,000 acres of land for office and industrial use, though it declined to say where the land was located.

KKR, which manages assets valued at about $59 billion, has dabbled in real estate over the years since its founding in 1976. The firm, whose stock trades publicly as KKR

& Co., made a number of hotel acquisitions in the 1980s, including the Motel 6 and Red Lion Hotels chains.

But the firm never felt comfortable devoting significant resources to building a real-estate team. And it has remained on the sidelines during the downturn while some of its competitors have jumped in looking for bargains.

Now, as part of a broader plan to diversify beyond its stock-in-trade leveraged buyouts, it is gearing up. The firm last year hired Ralph Rosenberg, an industry veteran who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Mr. Rosenberg has assembled a real-estate team of 10 people in New York and London and is talks for an additional half-dozen real-estate deals. “We believe there’s a logical and important position [in real estate] for KKR,” said Mr. Rosenberg, who worked at Eton Park Capital Management before joining KKR.

The cast of financial players in the real-estate world has changed since the recession. Some of the biggest companies, like Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., collapsed. Others, like Goldman Sachs’ s Whitehall funds division, haven’t been raising money.

Mr. Rosenberg said those pullbacks have created opportunities for firms like KKR. “We have the benefit of access to capital and no legacy of real-estate-related problems to manage our way out of,” he said in an interview.

But it isn’t going to be easy. Competitors said KKR is arriving late to the game. Blackstone Group LP already had $43 billion in assets under management as of year-end and has raised more than $10 billion for its current real- estate fund. Carlyle Group LLC closed last year on a $2.3 billion fund, its sixth for U.S. real estate.

At the same time, the institutions that typically invest with private-equity firms remain gun-shy of risky real-estate deals after getting clobbered by investments that soured during the downturn. Many have gravitated toward the kind of conservative investments that buyout shops typically don’t do.

That has made it difficult for some financial firms to raise money. This year, J.P. Morgan Chase

& Co. suspended efforts to raise a new $750 million real-estate fund named after Junius Morgan, John Pierpont Morgan’s father. Apollo Global Management LLC

has faced headwinds trying to hit its $650 million target for a new property fund.

KKR also has no immediate plans to raise a dedicated real-estate fund. Rather, it plans to make investments from its balance sheet and from existing funds, including the firm’s $2 billion special-situations fund.

But not all institutional investors applaud this approach. William Atwood, executive director of the Illinois State Board of Investment, has invested in a KKR buyout fund. He said he wouldn’t want to see KKR’s other funds putting too much money in real estate because that isn’t why his fund picked them.

“You can wind up with a different exposure to real estate than you anticipated,” he said. “It can upset our asset allocation.”

KKR said its funds have limits on real-estate exposure and much of its real-estate investing will be done from the firm’s balance sheet or its specialty-finance company. The firm declined to say how much money will be available for real estate, but the firm said the number likely would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The value of some individual transactions could exceed $1 billion, including debt, the firm said.

Mr. Rosenberg said KKR has a competitive advantage in real estate because of the firm’s large staff and the numerous companies it owns through its buyout portfolio. He said he can call on executives at these companies to help his team size up possible acquisitions.For example, before buying the suburban Chicago retail property, named the Yorktown Center, Mr. Rosenberg said his team spoke with executives at more than 100 companies, including Toys ‘R’ Us, which KKR acquired in 2005 as part of a consortium. Because the toy retailer is a tenant at the Yorktown mall, it was able to provide KKR with insight into the area’s household income and consumer-purchasing habits, he said.

The mall has 1.5 million square feet of retail space and more than 150 stores. KKR’s co-investor in the deal is YTC Pacific, which will manage the property. With an occupancy rate of about 85%, KKR aims to improve mall conditions to attract new and higher-paying tenants.

Write to Craig Karmin at craig.karmin@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 25, 2012, on page C8 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: KKR Joins Rivals With Real-Estate Push.

By KAREN WILKIN

London

Art, even the most original, tends to be about other art—except for the work of “outsider” artists, although some of them turn out to be less innocent than presumed. It’s hardly news that adventurous early 20th-century innovators looked to Pablo Picasso for direction and confirmation. (Picasso, of course, looked to Paul Cézanne.) American museum-goers are well aware of the importance of the Spanish master to artists on this side of the Atlantic, thanks to shows such as the Whitney’s 2006-07 “Picasso and American Art,” which traced his impact on modernists from Max Weber and Stuart Davis to Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns. More recently, surveys of David Smith and Arshile Gorky have revealed how firmly their distinctive, individual languages were rooted in Picasso’s example. And more.

But if Picasso’s significance to American modernism is well documented, his influence on English-speaking painters and sculptors elsewhere has been a less familiar story—that is, until “Picasso & Modern British Art,” at Tate Britain. Surprisingly, the exhibition, which, the wall texts announce, was designed to examine “Picasso’s evolving critical reputation” in the U.K., as well as “British artists’ responses to his work,” is the first to explore “Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain.” (“Britain’s connections with Picasso” might be more accurate, since, despite his well-known friendships with British critics such as Douglas Cooper and John Richardson, the artist was in London only in 1919, designing sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.)

The installation, arranged chronologically, presents works by Picasso that were exhibited, collected or reproduced in Britain (or were seen abroad by British artists), alternating with works by seven of those artists, chosen as exemplars of response over seven decades: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. Some Picassos on view were those actually exhibited in influential shows or seen in collections; others represent types of works. Some connections are conjectural, based on purely visual evidence. Moore almost certainly never saw the Neo-Classical goddess by Picasso that is paired with one of the British sculptor’s abstracted reclining figures, yet there are startling similarities between them, suggesting awareness even without a direct encounter. Other relationships are fully documented. Grant knew Picasso and, introduced by Gertrude Stein, even saw “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in the artist’s studio. Nicholson described the impact of the green planes in a Picasso seen in Paris.

Cumulatively, the exhibition offers a capsule history of the British taste for modernism—or, at least, for a particular aspect of modernism—beginning with the controversial exhibitions organized by the critic Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912, for the Grafton Galleries, London, which introduced Picasso and other radical modern painters to a resistant British public. Picasso’s 1912 show of Rose and Blue period drawings—his first solo in London—is evoked, as is his commercially disastrous 1921 survey at Leicester Galleries, which included Blue and Rose period works, Cubist paintings, and Neo-Classical images, some borrowed from early British supporters, such as Fry and the painter and theorist Clive Bell, a fellow member of the progressive Bloomsbury set. The 1921 exhibition was so poorly received that a full decade passed before another gallery—not a museum—presented “Thirty Years of Pablo Picasso,” a gathering of important canvases accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Maud Dale, the critic wife of the American collector and later benefactor of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Chester Dale.

Tate/Succession Picasso/DACS 2011

‘The Three Dancers’ (1925), by Pablo Picasso.

In the 1930s, only a handful of daring British collectors paid attention to Picasso. Their importance to British modernism is emphasized by a gallery devoted to some of these bold patrons’ most significant acquisitions, such as the stellar works once owned by Roland Penrose, a painter, poet and writer about art. Penrose’s selections include a well-known collaged “Head” (1913), a triangle brought to life by a curved line and some pasted diagonals, and the celebrated sculpture “Still Life” (1914)—the shelf with the projecting wooden knife, fictive bread and sausage, and real ball fringe. A brave few acquired Cubist works; others chose large, seductive paintings of the pneumatic Marie-Thérèse Walter. (Generally, American Picasso collectors, such as the Steins, bought earlier and more adventurously, perhaps because, as citizens of a much younger country, they felt less constrained by tradition.)

Watching British artists try to come to terms with the irrepressible, protean Picasso is fascinating. While the show includes some impressive works—and some terrifying ones, such as Lewis’s grim, red-faced figures, charitably interpreted as a deliberate challenge to Picasso’s Neo-Classicism—British painters can seem polite in comparison to the brash Spaniard. Hung near a bright, aggressively patterned 1924 Picasso still life with a guitar, Nicholson’s elegant explorations of similar motifs read as subdued and tasteful.

In the 1940s and ’50s, British artists struggling with painful memories of World War II and the deprivations of the postwar years found clues to an expressive formal language in Picasso’s “Guernica,” his weeping women, and his bony, Surrealist-inflected bathers—all exhibited in Britain. Witness Sutherland’s and Bacon’s gnarled, ambiguous figures, with their wormy appendages or threatening spikes. A more playful response, from a member of the Swinging London generation, is signaled by Hockney’s tongue-in-cheek “homage” paintings and drawings, allusive stage designs, and “Cubist” photo collages.

The exhibition ends with Picasso’s “The Three Dancers” (1925), which Penrose helped the Tate to buy from the artist in 1965. Picasso, we are told, thought the work one of his best. Allowing it to go to London was “emblematic of the artist’s affection for Britain.” Alas, we are not shown evidence of the effect of this daring, ambiguous trio of prancing figures on postwar painters in the U.K. Can we hope for a second installment of “Picasso & Modern British Art”?

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared April 18, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The English Channel Picasso.

By ERIC GIBSON

New York

Prospective visitors to the Frick Collection can be excused for looking askance at the title of its latest exhibition, “Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting.” Given that Impressionism is a style associated primarily with landscapes and vistas of Paris, it may seem like another attempt to squeeze one more drop from that old reliable cash cow, like the book published a few years ago titled “Impressionist Cats and Dogs.”

As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. This is a solid, groundbreaking exhibition that takes us into a byway of Impressionism we knew little about—and makes us want to linger. It’s also a show that, despite its modest size, goes a long way to rehabilitate Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s reputation. If your view of him is a shallow, facile artist partial to abundantly fleshy nudes painted in vivid pinks and purples—Rubens in the ice-cream parlor—you’re in for a surprise. This Renoir is an artist of depth and a probing artistic temperament.

Organized by Colin B. Bailey, the Frick’s deputy director and chief curator, the show consists of just nine pictures, most depicting one or two full-length, canvas-filling figures. The Frick’s own “La Promenade” (1875-76), of a mother out in the park with her two young daughters, anchors the selection, which includes “The Umbrellas (Les Parapluies)” (c. 1881-85) from London’s National Gallery; “La Parisienne” (1874) from the National Museum of Wales, of a woman decked out, head to toe, in a magnificent blue dress and hat; and three paintings of dancing couples, two from the Museé d’Orsay in Paris and one, “Dance at Bougival” (1883), from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Once the Frick’s show closes, these last three will be exhibited together in Boston from May 26 through Sept. 3.) It is an intriguing group of pictures, one with enough similarities and differences that rather than fixating on a single one, you will find it almost impossible to keep still, your eyes and, when necessary, your whole body shifting from one to another, back again, and then on to still another as you compare details large and small.

Renoir’s paintings here illustrate the paradoxical notion that it’s possible to be a great painter without necessarily being a good one. Take “The Dancer,” his 1874 portrait of a young ballerina turning to look out at us while adopting a dance pose. Renoir has composed his figure as if he believed a corkscrew, rather than the spinal column, is the main structural element around which the human body is organized. Everything rotates around the center—the head, the torso, the legs—yet none of it makes anatomical sense. Indeed it’s almost painful to imagine how the dancer’s legs might attach to her invisible pelvis underneath her tutu. We’re a long way from Edgar Degas’s images of ballerinas, so accurate that they can instill in us the same sensations of physical strain his dancers are shown experiencing.

Yet such technical limitations don’t diminish the picture; they simply make you see that Renoir’s mastery lies elsewhere. The girl’s tutu is rendered in a lush shimmer of blues and whites, with Renoir capturing through that narrow tonal range the garment’s form, texture and, in particular, tulle’s characteristic mix of stiffness and fluffiness.

Clothing, in fact, is one of the main themes of this show. In “La Parisienne,” Renoir captures the complex architecture of his subject’s blue dress by varying color, light and his brushstrokes. So engaged is he by his task—and so accomplished is he at it—that the outfit becomes as much of a “subject” as the sitter herself. Renoir revels in fabrics and materials of all kinds—fur, silk, swansdown, lace, cotton. In every case, he rises to the challenge of finding a pictorial language to convey their physical reality. It is a language that forswears meticulous description for the Impressionist aesthetic of painterly suggestion, where pure color and free paint-handling are allowed to play an independent role in the overall descriptive effect.

The other theme here is psychology. We aren’t used to thinking of Renoir as an artist much interested in the inner life of his fellow man. But these subjects aren’t just foils for his eye and his brush; they’re real people. This becomes evident in the three dance pictures that are juxtaposed on one wall, where Renoir deftly and touchingly captures varying degrees of amorous engagement—or diffidence.

Renoir’s larger achievement here, however, is to have linked Impressionism with the European tradition of monumental figure painting. Paul Cėzanne once famously said he wanted to “make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of the museums.” Renoir here does just that. There’s no mistaking these as anything other than Impressionist pictures. Yet they have something more, a presence and a gravitas we associate with Old Master paintings that is in many ways antithetical to Impressionism’s in-the-moment aesthetic of color and light. They feel completely at home in the most unforgiving context you could ask for: the Frick Collection itself, with portraits by El Greco, Ingres, Velázquez, to name just a few, and its Rembrandt self-portrait.

The comparison would have quickly destroyed a lesser artist. Not Renoir. At one point when you turn in the exhibition, you look past two of his paintings down the length of the Frick’s Long Gallery and see, on the very farthest wall in the distance, Piero della Francesca’s somber, inward portrait of St. John the Evangelist. The early Renaissance at one end, the early modern period at the other. The effect is one of a natural continuity, not a rupture.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.