Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Groundbreaking Artist or Misogynist Perv? (Patreon)

I never complained much when my parents dragged me to art museums as a kid.  Sure, I would rather have been playing video games with my buddies (or tag, or G.I. Joe, or hide-and-seek), but it wasn't a horrible way to spend a Saturday.  I liked to draw, and even though the paintings on the walls were worlds beyond what I doodled on the reams of pin-fed paper my Dad brought home from his computer company, I felt a certain kinship with the masters.

Of course, this kinship had less to do with the act of painting and more to do with a mutual love of the subjects in many of their compositions: Big Beautiful Women.  Yes, way before the Internet or size-oriented fetish magazines, the museum was one of the few places people like me could get their fatty fix.  (You can read more about the dearth of BBW-oriented material in the 1970s and 80s here) 

Unfortunately, while many masters painted larger women, most stylized away the eroticism.  Picasso was too garish and abstract.  Reubens was too opulent and busy.  Titian was too staid and religious.  The early Impressionists; however, were just right.  They painted women the way I liked them: Soft.  Soft features. Soft colors.  Soft focus.  Soft.  Soft.  Soft.  And not only did they paint their doughy dames "au naturel," but they painted them nestled in nature from the perspective of a lucky bloke who stumbled upon them while wandering through the woods.  (Something I'd like to think happened regularly in the 19th century.)  The classicists bathed their nudes in holy light and surrounded them with cherubs, the Impressionists bathed theirs in streams and surrounded them with other BBW!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was my favorite.  I loved his vibrant colors and the way he utilized light and shadow to create compositions that seemed alive.  The Impressionists were all about capturing the essence of a scene.  Its mood.  Take the painting below for example:

There's no real nudity to speak of.  Heck, you can't even see the girl's face.  But it's nevertheless alluring.  Maybe even more so.  It's all about the pose.  The perspective.  The Impressionists weren't about details, they were about hints.  That makes for compelling compositions and good visual storytelling.

As I grew older, I didn't think much about Mr. Renoir, especially once I no longer needed fine art for a BBW fix.  However, I rediscovered his work while looking for nudes to include in "The Harem on the Hill" and thought it might make for a good musing.  Initially, I hoped my return trip down the Renoir rabbit hole would unearth evidence of his depictions of weight gain.  He utilized a lot of the same models over the course of his career, some of whom he was romantically linked with, and I posited that if he enjoyed painting large women, he might have enjoyed the process of making them larger!  Or, at the very least, some models might have naturally added a few pounds between their first pose and their last.  Unfortunately, most of his nudes, like the one above, are fairly ambiguous.  It's hard to make much correlation between them.

What I did discover was that Renoir has become the recent target of cancel culture, mostly because of his lurid late-period work.  Near the end of his life, Renoir was badly crippled by arthritis and required a wheelchair.  He was confined to his room for weeks at a time, and could barely hold his brushes.  Rather than simply wait to die, as it seems art critics would have preferred, he found the will to continue his life's passion by tapping into that most timeless of motivations: sex.

"I paint with my prick," the master famously said to an interviewer who had the impertinence to ask how he painted with mangled hands.  "A painter who has the feel for breasts and buttocks is saved.”

I believe it was Renoir’s unrepentant attitude that rankled critics even more than his art.  How else can you explain a painter of pretty girls in forests being labeled "sexist" or "misogynist," while rabblerousing artists like Picasso, who frequently drew squatty models spread-eagled on sofas, or Willem de Kooning, who composed nightmare-inducing subversions of femininity, are given a pass?  Maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand. Or maybe the answer is they won't be for long.

If folks want to criticize the quality of Renoir's late-period oeuvre (as cruel as that may be considering his failing health) they'll get no argument from me.  The nudes he painted during his sunset years are cartoonish when compared to his early works.  However, if they're going to cancel artists for objectifying women, then we might as well close The Louvre.  And the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  And this site.

Personally, I applaud Renoir.  As a man approaching the mid-century mark, I find it easier to get up (so to speak) for writing about BBW than just about anything else.  A passion for BBW is no perversion. And if Renoir's passion for them helped him channel his creative energies and forget his physical ailments, even momentarily, then it was as much of a blessing as his beautiful paintings.

Enjoy!

Maverick