Bal du moulin de la Galette), 1876, Musée d'Orsay (Public Domain)
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In 2015, however, the group of protesters that picketed outside Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had a simpler, less lofty target: Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Their demand? That museums remove his paintings from their walls. Their reasoning was rather straightforward: they argued Renoir was bad at art. (A protest at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was soon to follow.)
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. Its central outlet is an Instagram account that features close-ups of Renoir paintings accompanied by satirical, often long-winded critiques.
Armed 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 none from the institutions it was heckling. Fellow Renoir haters expressed their aesthetic sympathy online by posting photographs of themselves giving the middle finger to Renoir paintings, often accompanied with the hashtag #renoirsucksatpainting. (Read more.)
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