Stealing from the Louvre you can understand. 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. But the Renoir Museum? 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? Him? Renoir? He’s … awful. 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.
And his crime? Kitsch and chintziness. 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.
It’s not a new thing. 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”. Add to all of that a hefty dose of antisemitism (he refused to take part in exhibitions that featured Jewish impressionist Camille Pissarro), a big pinch of misogyny, and you’ve got a recipe of aesthetic distaste that can last centuries.
However in PR terms, the timing of this latest in a long string of French art robberies couldn’t be better. The National Gallery is opening their major Renoir and Love exhibition next month, a show they hope will have the same blockbuster success it had at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris this summer.
I want to defend Renoir, if only for the sake of debate, but I’ve hated his work for decades. I like him when he’s weird, when his nudes look like a super-psychedelic, ultra-horny version of Rubens with endless, surreal, undulating rolls of pink flesh. And I like a lot of his hazy, strange landscapes, though not as much as the work of any other impressionist. But for the most part, the haters are right.
I mean look at the works the thieves made off with after cutting through the fence with bolt cutters in the early hours of the morning. The first is Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano, her tiny head dwarfed by shoulders so vastly broad she could play rugby for Saracens, all watched over by a tiny painting-within-a-painting of a constipated looking baby. The other, Jeune Femme au Puits, is an unfinished smudge of a woman pulling a bucket out of a well. An art detective said the thieves would “have no idea what to do” with the paintings, well, they probably have some idea, and it involves the dustbin.
The best bit about this week’s heist on the Côte d’Azur is that the thieves actually took four paintings, but decided to leave two behind as they ran for it, including a portrait of a little boy who looks almost exactly like Boris Johnson. In all my years as an art critic, I’ve never managed a piece of criticism as incisive, cutting and direct as a bunch of criminals looking at a painting that they’d already nicked and thinking “leave it – it’s not worth it”.