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A robbery at the Louvre is easy enough to understand. Surely there isn’t a person alive who wouldn’t fancy hanging a Gericault or Leonardo in the guest bathroom. The same goes for the Musée d’Orsay and even the Centre Pompidou — French treasure houses crammed with extraordinary art practically begging for a daring heist. But the Renoir Museum? It is hard to imagine why anyone would bother, writes The Guardian.

As French art lovers recover from the news that two paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir were stolen from the museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer that bears his name, the rest of the art world is scratching its head: seriously? Renoir? But he’s… terrible. It’s like staging a bell-bottom heist in the age of skinny jeans.

Did the thieves know something we don’t? Or was this simply an opportunistic theft, exploiting weak security at a provincial museum?

The Age of Renoir Hate: Why Did They Turn Against Auguste?

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of the pillars of Impressionism, a key figure in one of the most important art movements of the 19th century. But time has been remarkably unkind to poor Pierre. While his contemporaries — Monet, Cézanne and Degas — have been hailed as modernist revolutionaries, the artists who shaped the future of Western painting, Renoir has faced fierce criticism, ridicule and protests in recent years.

In 2015, a group of activists calling themselves Renoir Sucks at Painting picketed the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before taking their campaign to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, carrying signs reading “God Hates Renoir” and “Re-NO-ir” and demanding that his paintings be removed from display.

They found plenty of support. The hashtag suddenly began trending, activists sold anti-Renoir T-shirts, and their social media feeds filled with photographs of people giving the finger to his paintings or pretending to vomit in front of them.

What Did He Do Wrong?

Kitsch and excessive sweetness. His paintings are rendered in a soft focus, his figures are plump and cheerful, and everything is enveloped in a haze of carefree happiness and evening revelry.

He lacks the uncompromising devotion to the angular, prismatic experimentation that made the Impressionists famous. He is the safest, most chocolate-box, most simplistic and… most sexually obsessed of the lot. That, apparently, is what made people hate him.

And this is hardly a recent phenomenon. Even his contemporaries had little love for the master. Édouard Manet reportedly said he had “no talent whatsoever,” while Mary Cassatt described his paintings of women as “the most terrible things in the world.”

Add a hefty dose of antisemitism — Renoir refused to take part in exhibitions where the Jewish Impressionist Camille Pissarro was also showing — and a generous helping of misogyny, and you have the recipe for centuries of aesthetic disdain.

A “Trash” Heist

From a publicity standpoint, however, the timing of the robbery is perfect. Next month, the National Gallery will open a major exhibition, Renoir and Love, hoping to replicate the blockbuster success of the artist’s show at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay last summer.

Frankly, I feel compelled to defend Renoir for the sake of an argument, but I have personally hated his work for decades. I only like him when he gets weird — when his nudes resemble a wildly psychedelic, hypersexual version of Rubens, with endless surreal waves of pinkish flesh.

I also have a soft spot for his misty, strange landscapes, although I value the work of virtually every other Impressionist more. But overall, the haters have a point.

Take a look at the paintings the burglars made off with after cutting through a wire fence with bolt cutters early in the morning.

• The first was Portrait of Madame Colonna-Romano: her tiny head looks positively dwarfed by enormous shoulders, broad enough for her to have played rugby for the Saracens. Behind her sits a tiny picture-within-a-picture featuring a baby who looks extremely constipated.
• The second was Young Woman at the Well (Jeune Femme au Puits), an unfinished smear of brushstrokes depicting a woman hauling up a bucket.

One art detective observed that the thieves “will have absolutely no idea what to do with these paintings.” Well, they surely have a plan — and it probably involves a rubbish bin.

The funniest thing about this French Riviera heist is that the criminals initially grabbed four paintings but abandoned two of them while making their getaway.

Among those left behind was a portrait of a little boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Boris Johnson.

In all my years as an art critic, I have never encountered such precise, devastating and brutally direct criticism as the gang’s decision to look at a painting they had already stolen and apparently think: “We’re leaving this one. It’s not worth it.”

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