Why Would Anyone Steal a Renoir?

As French art lovers reel at the news that two Renoir paintings were stolen from the Cagnes-sur-Mer museum that bears his name this week, much of the art world has been asking: really? Him? Renoir? He is … awful. It is like carrying out a heist of flares in the era of skinny jeans.

How did it happen?

Did the thieves know something the rest of us do not? Or was this simply a crime of opportunity, taking advantage of a regional art museum with poor security?

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of the leading figures of Impressionism, one of the most important movements in 19th-century art. But time has not been kind to him. While contemporaries such as Monet, Cézanne and Degas have been celebrated as modernist revolutionaries who helped shape the future of Western painting, Renoir has, in recent years, been denigrated, mocked, protested and hashtagged.

In 2015, a group calling themselves Renoir Sucks at Painting picketed the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and then protested outside the Met in New York, with placards reading “God Hates Renoir” and “ReNOir”, demanding that the museums remove his work from display. They had supporters too: the hashtag #RenoirSucksatPainting soon trended, hundreds of anti-Renoir T-shirts were sold, and their Instagram was full of images of people giving the finger to Renoir paintings or pretending to vomit in front of them.

His supposed crime? Kitsch and chintziness. His work is soft-focus and gentle, his figures are plump and joyful, full of happy haze and nocturnal revelry. He lacks the hard-edged commitment to angular, prismatic experimentation that made the Impressionists so famous. He is the safest of the group, the most chocolate-box, the easiest, the horniest. And that has made him the most hated.

That is not a new phenomenon. 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 that a heavy dose of antisemitism, a big pinch of misogyny, and you have a recipe of aesthetic distaste that can last for centuries.

However, in PR terms, the timing of this latest in a long string of French art robberies could hardly be better. The National Gallery is opening its major Renoir and Love exhibition next month, a show it hopes 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 argument, but I have hated his work for decades. I like him when he is strange, when his nudes look like a super-psychedelic, ultra-horny version of Rubens, with endless, surreal, undulating rolls of pink flesh. I also like some 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.

Look at the works the thieves took 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 broad she could play rugby for Saracens, 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 from a well. An art detective said the thieves would “have no idea what to do” with the paintings. Well, they probably do, and it involves the dustbin.

The best thing 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, including a portrait of a little boy who looks almost exactly like Boris Johnson. In all my years as an art critic, I have never managed criticism as incisive, cutting and direct as a bunch of criminals looking at a painting they had already nicked and thinking: “leave it – it’s not worth it”.