A new movement born of an Instagram account has one central complaint: Pierre-Auguste Renoir - the French impressionist – was a terrible artist, and his paintings should be removed from museums.
Holding signs that said “ReNOir”, “Take ’em down! Renoir Sucks” and “God Hates Renoir”, members of the Renoir Sucks at Painting movement protested outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Monday. The group, led by organizer Max Geller, demanded the museum remove Renoir paintings – of which there are many, including the famous Dance at Boufival, 1883 – from its walls.
When the Guardian asked why he dislikes Renoir so much, Geller countered: “Why do so many people think he’s good? Have you looked at his paintings?
“In real life, trees are beautiful. If you take Renoir’s word for it, you’d think trees are just a collection of green squiggles,” Geller said.
The Renoir Sucks at Painting movement was inspired after Geller visited the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which houses a large collection of Renoir paintings, or, as Geller called them, “empty calorie-laden steaming piles”.
The Instagram account has more than 2,400 followers, and has even received the wrath of Genevieve Renoir, who says she is the painter’s great-great-granddaughter.
On one photo, Genevieve commented: “When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1m dollars … then you can criticize. In the meantime, it is safe to say that the free market has spoken and Renoir did not suck at painting.”
Geller, who turned her comment into its own post on the account, said: “I think that is one of the most absurd and insane arguments for anything, the idea that we should let the free market dictate quality.”
He replied to Genevieve on Instagram with a list of items that have “been unleashed upon us by the free market”, and, like Renoir, “decidedly suck”, including climate change, the prison industrial complex, slavery, settler colonialism, the destruction of sea otter habitats and TV commercials.
Other Instagram posts criticize the details of Renoir’s work.