[imagesource:renoirsucksatpainting/instagram]

It’s not only the ‘Just Stop Oil’ movement that seems to think that art museums are the perfect target for ‘high-minded’ protests.

In 2015, a group of protesters picketed outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with a simple, albeit less lofty aim: The group demanded that museums remove paintings by Renoir from their walls.

Their reasoning was however more straightforward than the oil guys, and calling themselves Renoir Sucks at Painting, they argued Renoir was just a terrible artist.

The Renoir Sucks at Painting movement (if one can call it that) was the brainchild of Max Geller, and came to life after he encountered the sizable collection of Renoir paintings at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. Geller’s dislike of Renoir led to the creation of an Instagram account that featured close-ups of Renoir paintings accompanied by satirical, often long-winded critiques.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Renoir Sucks At Painting (@renoir_sucks_at_painting)

With snobbish hipster fury and signage that read “God Hates Renoir,” “ReNOir,” and “We’re Not Iconoclasts, Renoir Just Sucks At Painting,” the group briefly received considerable media attention — though the institutions it was heckling mostly ignored them.

Fellow Renoir haters expressed their sympathy online with the group by posting photographs of themselves giving the middle finger to Renoir paintings, often accompanied with the hashtag #renoirsucksatpainting.

The ‘movement’ gained so much attention at one point that Renoir’s great-great-granddaughter Genevieve Renoir eventually chimed in. She argued the free market had clearly spoken in favour of her ancestor’s talent, which she expressed as “$78 million at Sotheby’s for Bal du moulin de la Galette na na na-na na.”

Geller responded by saying the free market ‘lacked judgement and taste’, citing TV commercials, climate change, and the destruction of sea otter habitats as evidence.

Geller claimed that he wasn’t trying to censor Renoir through ridicule, but was hoping to force museums into reconsidering the artistic merits of the paintings on their walls and make a change, ideally in favour of non-white male painters. He called it “cultural justice.”

Despite the humorous way he went about it, Geller is not the only person to hate Renoir.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Renoir Sucks At Painting (@renoir_sucks_at_painting)

Renoir’s ‘dumb-faced, unflattering female nudes’ have seen him posthumously charged with sexism as well as anti-Semitism for his stance in the so-called Dreyfus affair.

In 1900, the sons of respected Parisian art dealer Alexandre Bernheim wanted to celebrate their engagement to two sisters by asking Renoir to paint their fiancées’ portraits. The problem was that the Bernheims and their fiancées were Jewish, and Renoir’s willingness to accept a commission from Jewish patrons was in some doubt.

Although Renoir did eventually complete the paintings over ten days at their home, the artist, fellow painter Edgar Degas, and their dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, expressed wild anti-Semitism both publicly and privately. The portraits were however described as “charming, bearing no trace of the artist’s prejudice”, and Renoir remained friendly with both couples for years afterwards.

Renoir was also often seen as a ‘sell-out’, mostly for doing paintings that are ‘pretty’. Good art, of course, cannot simply be pretty. There has to be more to it.

Geller’s Renoir Sucks at Painting movement obviously fizzled into the background, and today Renoir is still seen as one of the top Impressionists of his time. Even Trump likes him, and claims to own his Two Sisters (On the Terrace) – although experts have noted that it’s a fake.

[source:artnet]