hich took place in 1907-1908, during Picasso's "cordée" with Braque, when the two painters produced a number of different Cubist paintings.
The relevance of these details to the influence of Pierre-Auguste Renoir on Picasso's work is that by the time of the Great War, Renoir, who had been born in 1841, was something of an elder statesman of avant-garde art. An Impressionist who had turned away from Impressionism at the very time it was beginning to be accepted by the aesthetic mainstream, Renoir had been part of the bohemian art world in Paris in the 1860s (Schneider 21-2). From Impressionism, which valorized color over line, Renoir looked backward to the neoclassicism of Ingres, and devoted more attention to formalism and line (Schneider 71). Toward the end of his life he also drastically reduced the range of his palette to "a few colours only--cinnabar, ochre, Naples yellow, black, and some white" (Schneider 88). The point is that Renoir's approach to art did not remain static, even though rheumatoid arthritis crippled him severely, including his hands. By the 1900s, when Picasso was developing the techniques of Cubism, Renoir was focusing on composition and a refined technique. Schneider says that Renoir "thought conscientiously about problems of craftsmanship" and quotes his comment that he "tried every kind of technique" (82).
Picasso's approach to artistic innovation in some ways parallels that of Renoir. Like Renoir, Picasso was influenced artistically by travel to Italy. Renoir had revised his palette after his journey south; Picasso embarked on a series of experiments with color, form, proportion, and line after travel to the Côte d'Azur in 1915. Daix refers to "the truly experimental works" that Picasso produced in the years following, which included "aggressively Cubist" paintings as well as "Cézanneesque still lifes" (167).
As to the direct influence that Renoir might have had on Picasso's oeuvre, it is tempting ...