Donald Trump has criminally bad taste in just about everything. He orders his steaks well done and drowns them in ketchup. His Manhattan penthouse is gold and famously gaudy. He wears shiny suits that never seem to fit properly. And then there’s his taste in art: the man loves himself a bit of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. For years, Trump had what he liked to boast was an “original Renoir” on his private jet. That has been proven to be nonsense: the original of the painting in question – Two Sisters (On The Terrace) – is in a Chicago gallery and Trump has a fake. Still, he likes it very much and has now relocated it to Trump Tower. Melania Trump also has a fake Renoir in her office.
The tasteless Trumps might enjoy Renoir, but so do a lot of people. Why am I slandering the French Impressionist? I’ll tell you why: I recently visited the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (home to the world’s single largest collection of Renoirs) and, after looking at 10 million pictures of dough-faced women, I had something of a revelation: Renoir is incredibly overrated.
This is not an original thought: poor Renoir has had haters for 150 years. Back in 1874 the critic Albert Wolff wrote: “Try to explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with green and purple spots that indicate the state of total putrefaction in a corpse!” In 1913 the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt complained about Renoir’s abominable pictures “of enormously fat red women with very small heads”. And, almost a decade ago, a provocateur called Max Geller went viral with a jokey moment called “Renoir Sucks at Painting”. People protested outside museums with signs like “God Hates Renoir.”
Renoir’s haters, of course, are balanced out by his adoring fans, which include the free market and a Guardian art critic. The former spends millions on his painting, the latter has defiantly declared: “Renoir does not suck.”
So who is right about the Frenchman? Everyone, obviously: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’m not trying to argue that Renoir is a terrible artist with no redeeming qualities. I’m just saying Trump really likes him. Make of that what you will.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
