'Renoir sucks at painting' movement demands removal of artist's works

A new movement born of an Instagram account has one central complaint: Pierre-Auguste Renoir - the French impressionist – was a terrible artist, and his paintings should be removed from museums.

Holding signs that said “ReNOir”, “Take ’em down! Renoir Sucks” and “God Hates Renoir”, members of the Renoir Sucks at Painting movement protested outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Monday. The group, led by organizer Max Geller, demanded the museum remove Renoir paintings – of which there are many, including the famous Dance at Boufival, 1883 – from its walls.

When the Guardian asked why he dislikes Renoir so much, Geller countered: “Why do so many people think he’s good? Have you looked at his paintings?

“In real life, trees are beautiful. If you take Renoir’s word for it, you’d think trees are just a collection of green squiggles,” Geller said.

Renoir is considered a good painter because his work is featured in museums, Geller added. But upon further inspections of his paintings, that line of argument “seems pretty fallacious”.

Geller hates Renoir so much, he started an Instagram account also called Renoir Sucks at Painting, which shows closeups of certain Renoir paintings with criticism in the comments, as well as photos of Geller and others gesturing angrily in front of various Renoir works.

The Renoir Sucks at Painting movement was inspired after Geller visited the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which houses a large collection of Renoir paintings, or, as Geller called them, “empty calorie-laden steaming piles”.

The Instagram account has more than 2,400 followers, and has even received the wrath of Genevieve Renoir, who says she is the painter’s great-great-granddaughter.

On one photo, Genevieve commented: “When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1m dollars … then you can criticize. In the meantime, it is safe to say that the free market has spoken and Renoir did not suck at painting.”

Geller, who turned her comment into its own post on the account, said: “I think that is one of the most absurd and insane arguments for anything, the idea that we should let the free market dictate quality.”

He replied to Genevieve on Instagram with a list of items that have “been unleashed upon us by the free market”, and, like Renoir, “decidedly suck”, including climate change, the prison industrial complex, slavery, settler colonialism, the destruction of sea otter habitats and TV commercials.

Other Instagram posts criticize the details of Renoir’s work.

Geller said he felt “pretty agnostic” toward other artists; hating Renoir is his movement’s main passion, and he said every other painting at the Museum of Fine Arts is “overwhelmingly beautiful”. He suggested the museum replace its Renoir collection with work that reflects more diversity rather than “just white males and their white male gaze”.

“The decision to hang Renoir by the Museum of Fine Arts when there are literal masterpieces by true masters in museum storage represents an act of aesthetic terrorism,” he said.

The Museum of Fine Arts did not respond to Guardian requests for comment.