The expected "dozens" of protesters turned out to be like six people, but a dedicated group of Renoir haters and anti-fans still turned heads when they showed up to picket Boston's Museum of Fine Arts yesterday.
"Put some fingers on those hands! Give us work by Paul Gaugin!" and "Other art is worth our while—Renoir paints a steaming pile!" the protesters reportedly chanted, along with other rhymes calling Renoir a #steamingpile.
How did society come to this?Max Geller is the creator of Renoir Sucks At Painting, an Instagram account devoted to inflaming haters across the globe with anti-Renoir passion. (It also has 87 followers on Twitter.)
Surely Geller doesn't mean Pierre-Auguste Renoir, famed artist of such French Impressionist masterpieces as The Luncheon of the Boating Party and the Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise?
The very same. Geller argues, for example, that the aforementioned portrait is really just a blob with "sharpie eyes":
Geller has systematically been building his following over the past year, urging others who are fed up with the sociocultural polemic that aids and abets Renoir's awful aesthetic to speak out and take action—namely by making faces in art museums.
The "Renoir Sucks" crusade includes lawyers, artists, and Harvard researchers, as well as Internet randos finally happy they have a place to belong."I've been waiting decades to find people who agree with me about Renoir!!" wrote one Instagram user last week on a post pointing out that one of Renoir's famed portraits of young French women appeared to have just three marsupial-like fingers on her left hand. "THANK YOU."
"Never will you walk alone," Geller responded.
As his movement has grown, so has Geller's call to action, and over the weekend he announced the protest:
Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to personally hate Renoir (and many of the other French Impressionists). As Geller notes, "His antisemitism, pederasty, orientalism, racism, chauvinism et al ad nauseum, are all paths that get us to [the] answer of how Renoir sucked."
But ultimately it's about aesthetics. "I definitely think Renoir is the worst painter," Geller told the Boston Globe.
Whether or not you agree (we think Gaugin's work is pretty fug, for the record), it's hard not to admire this movement's passion—and their dedication to ripping a 19th-century "master" a new one.
Photo via rokurumoramuseum/Instagram