I mean, who wouldn’t want a Géricault or Leonardo to hang in the downstairs loo? Same for the Musée d’Orsay too, even the Pompidou – they’re French museums absolutely rammed full of stunning art, all just begging to be audaciously heisted. It’s hard to see why anyone would bother.
As French art fans reel at the news that two Renoir paintings were stolen from the Cagnes-sur-Mer museum that bears his name this week, the rest of the art world has been saying really? It’s like doing a heist of flares in the era of skinny jeans. Did the thieves know something the rest of us don’t?
Or was this just a crime of opportunity, taking advantage of a regional art museum with shonky security? Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of impressionism’s head honchos, a leading figure in one of 19th-century art’s most important movements. But time hasn’t been too kind to poor old Pierre.
Where his contemporaries like Monet, Cézanne and Degas have been heralded as modernist revolutionaries, artists who shaped the future of western painting and helped set the path that all of their successors would soon follow, in recent years Renoir has been denigrated, mocked, protested and hashtagged. In 2015, a group who called themselves Renoir Sucks at Painting picketed the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and then protested outside the Met in New York, with placards that read “God Hates Renoir” and “ReNOir”, demanding the museums remove his work from display. And they had their sympathisers: the hashtag #RenoirSucksatPainting trended soon after, they sold hundreds of anti-Renoir T-shirts, and their Instagram was full of photos of people giving the finger to Renoir paintings or pretending to vomit in front of them.
His work is soft focus and gentle, his figures are plump and joyful, it’s all happy haze and night-time revelry. He lacks the hard-edged absolute dedication to angular, prismatic experimentation that made the impressionists so famous. He is the safest of the group, the chocolate boxiest, the easiest, the horniest.
And that has made him the most hated. Even his contemporaries disliked him. Édouard Manet said he had “no talent” and Mary Cassatt described his paintings of women as “the most awful of all”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
