Protesters picket Boston art museum … because ‘Renoir sucks’

Renoir did not leave much of an impression on a group of art lovers in Boston.

Reportedly chanting “Put a few fingers on those hands!”

The small group, rallied by Max Geller (the owner of the @Renoir_sucks_at_painting Instagram account himself) picketed yesterday with signs that read “Renoir Sucks at Painting”, “ReNOir”, and, as you can see below, “God Hates Renoir”.

“It’s not a misunderstanding of the ethos of Impressionism”, Geller told NPR, when it called to find out why he questioned the artistic judgment of the museum and all who’ve gone before. Give us work by Paul Gauguin!” and “Other art is worth your while!

The Boston protestors also accused the MFA (along with other Renoir-displaying museums) of “aesthetic terrorism”, which Geller defines as “acts that harm the collective cultural wealth of everybody”.

The museum isn’t commenting, and the demonstrators acknowledge they were just trying to be ironic.

“Pierre-Auguste Renoir was not, as they say, ‘a very nice person.’ He was an anti-Semite who, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, renounced his Jewish patrons – the very families who had helped lift him out of crushing poverty”, Sebastian Smee, the Boston Globe’s art critic, writes today.

Ewen-Campen said: “Seeing Renoirs in the MFA makes me sad”. But then we get exposed to Renoir’s deformed pink fuzzy women and scary looking babies.

Renoir, who died in 1919, was a leading member of the Impressionist movement and is one of the best-known and widely reproduced painters in the history of art.