I'm a longtime fan of "Renoir Sucks at Painting," and now here comes the New Yorker art critic, Peter Schjeldahl with "Renoir's Problem Nudes"...

... subtitled "An argument is often made that we shouldn’t judge the past by the values of the present, but that’s a hard sell in a case as primordial as Renoir’s." And I can see people at Instapundit getting exercised about about the political judgment of high art.

First, I must observe that Schjedahl doesn't mention Max Geller, called "the leader of a group called Renoir Sucks at Painting" in the 2015 Atlantic article "Why Absolutely Everyone Hates Renoir/The protestors in Boston who declared even God despises the maligned Impressionist might be on to something."

Schjedahl is speaking out now — 4 years after "Renoir Sucks" peaked — because there's a new exhibit, "Renoir: The Body, the Senses." He writes:

The reputation of the once exalted, still unshakably canonical, Impressionist has fallen on difficult days. Never mind the affront to latter-day educated tastes of a painting style so sugary that it imperils your mind’s incisors; there’s a more burning issue. 

The art historian Martha Lucy, writing in the show’s gorgeous catalogue, notes that, “in contemporary discourse,” the name Renoir has “come to stand for ‘sexist male artist.’ ” Renoir took such presumptuous, slavering joy in looking at naked women—who in his paintings were always creamy or biscuit white, often with strawberry accents, and ideally blond—that, Lucy goes on to argue, the tactility of the later nudes, with brushstrokes like roving fingers, unsettles any kind of gaze, including the male. I’ll endorse that, for what it’s worth.

Lucy makes the painting sound better than it is.  I don't see what's bad about a painter of nudes being sensuously involved with the fleshly characters he's depicting. Why leap to calling it sexist? My guess? It's way to justify the exhibition of this insipid stuff. It's not bad painting; it's bad politics — and that infuses the show with modern-day relevance.

Here, take a look:

Schjedahl writes, "Renoir’s women strum no erotic nerves in me," and he complains about "the carnal tapioca, the vacant gazes, the fatuous frolic." But:

Everything in Renoir that is hard to take and almost impossible to think about, because it makes no concessions to intelligence, affirms his stature as a revolutionary artist. 

"Almost impossible." The reason I find it hard to think about is that I'm not sure what is meant by making "no concessions to intelligence." It cannot be that Renoir is intellectually challenging! I think it must mean the opposite, that Renoir didn't have any intellectual aspirations.

He stood firmly against the past in art and issued a stark challenge to its future. 

Renoir doesn't seem firm and stark at all. He's more... gelatinous. But Schjedahl is probably just saying that Renoir distinguished himself from the earlier academic style and later artists distinguished themselves from Renoir.

You can’t dethrone him without throwing overboard the fundamental logic of modernism as a sequence of jolting aesthetic breakthroughs, entitled to special rank on the grounds of originality and influence. 

He belongs on the time line. That doesn't mean he belongs on a throne.