No, Renoir’s paintings aren’t sexist

In “Renoir’s Problem Nudes,” the New Yorker’s art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes that Renoir has become known as a sexist artist. Why? Not for any indiscretions in his personal life (though there are reasons to believe he undershot innocence).

As critic Karen Wilkin wrote at the New Criterion, “Of course, his attitude towards women, by most reports, fell spectacularly short of present-day standards. His answer to a journalist who asked how he managed to paint with hands crippled by arthritis—‘I paint with my prick’—doesn’t help.”

But no, his personal life is not so much a problem, which is good news for artists from Caravaggio to Picasso. The problem is that his nude portraits, apparently, represent women in a patriarchal and sexist way.

Schjeldahl writes, first, that the paintings are not good because they’re not sexy:

Wait, the problem with the paintings isn’t that they’re objectifying? It’s that they don’t elicit enough desire? This is what critics sound like when they get tangled in too many strings of woke.

Next, Schjeldahl writes that the nude paintings aren’t good because their subjects look stupid:

That seems a little rude, to say the least. Finally, these paintings are bad because their subjects have, wait for it, realistic hands:

So Schjeldahl (a) assumes that the only thing a woman could do with her hands is housework, and (b) is bothered by any depiction of the working class.

Schjeldahl, who is “one of America’s most brilliant art critics” according to the New York Times, has a career full of insightful art criticism that spans decades. If even our shrewdest critics are dancing to the stilted and dissonant tunes of identity politics, there’s little hope.

One problem with this sort of zeroing in on Renoir’s alleged sexism is the way other artists get a pass, or they do for now, and they’ll be canceled when our perspectives evolve again over the next few decades.

Writing in the art website Hyperallergic, art critic David Carrier says, “Many, perhaps most of us, are willing to enjoy paintings of women by Pablo Picasso notwithstanding his obvious sadism; or by Gustave Courbet, allowing for his frankly salacious eroticism; or by Paul Cézanne, for their oddly gawky formal qualities.”

But not Renoir. Carrier writes: “The trouble, then, with Renoir’s female nudes, buxom stout young women, is that, the way he painted them, they look so … what’s the word I’m looking for? Vapid?”

Accuse Renoir’s nudes of looking “dumb” and “vapid” all you want. Modern sensibilities about the “male gaze” can’t minimize his contributions to art history. Schjeldahl says as much in his article, but his review of the Renoir exhibit currently at the Clark Art Institute gets muddied by his commitment not to understanding the art, but to elucidating its politics. “It feels wrong to term Renoir a misogynist, though he was certainly patriarchal,” he writes.

To modern eyes, Renoir’s art is no longer about its content, but about the “problematic” ways in which it could be received. If even Renoir is not safe from such criticism, expect to see more artists accused not of creating poor art, but of antagonizing our modern sensibilities.