“Thought you were going up in the world, did you Salvo? Oh no, no Armand Guillaumin for you. The boss ain’t pleased and he wants you to know about it. One more screwup and you’ll end up with a face like that”
But also yes. When he was not doing paintings with lots of faces or naked ladies he was on slightly more solid ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Pierre-Au...
https://lastmuseum.com/artist/auguste-renoir
e.g. I like the Alfred Sisley painting and the more realist painting of his father, and Madame Clementine Valensi Stora which he apparently repudiated.
But I don't think he ever painted a truly good female nude, and some are just utterly reductive (as a photography nerd I find Torso Effect of Sunlight to be the most interesting but the face oh the face)
Loads of it is really rather Monkey Christ, on reflection, and after about 1905 nothing is great.
So I do sympathise with the joke.
Also those were artists deliberately breaking the rigid rules of realist classicism and finding inspiration on Asian art. Renoir was criticized by its figures "with skin and clothes obscenely stained with what seems dirty greasy oil spots" but the big point was to trigger controversy and to flip the bird to the classicism of the "real" professional artists.
But it’s not the shapes of the bodies that I have an issue with, in general. (Apart from the whole cherubic, gravity free aspect.)
It’s the fact that the faces are terrible, featureless, ugly, often scarily unsettling and clownish, the heads are poorly proportioned, the eyes often dead or doll-like.
He painted out the realism of women just as they were demanding equality, IMO. In the real world, women were demanding better pay, better work protection and votes; in Renoir’s world they were often overgrown insipid cherubs, no evidence of angst or really any kind of inner life. His paintings of male faces, largely, are grounded in more realism even into his late era.
But this is a painting of his own young son, Jean (who went on to be a legendary director, screenwriter, actor).
So one presumes there's a method in it, because nobody hates a kid that much.
It opens with a guy who's complaining to the police about the frequent robbery of his house. They view him as a nuisance and try to respond to his complaints as little as possible.
Eventually someone is apprehended committing a different crime in a different location. An officer visits him in the hospital (there was a mighty struggle before he was caught) and asks if he'd be willing to lower his sentence by potentially resolving some other outstanding crimes that the police are investigating.
She reads off a list of crimes, and he responds "yeah, that was me" to everything she says. One of the items is the several robberies of the guy we met earlier.
It's win-win; his sentence is lowered for doing the police a favor, and the police report a higher solve rate.
After that, the original guy who was always brushed off suffers another robbery. Since he happens to be home at the time of the latest one, he is severely beaten.
I wonder what victims have gotta say about that...
You only let them say anything every four years or so. And then you set aside their complaints by saying some of them are made up.