Whack Job

Here we go again.

The New Yorker ~ Barry Blitt

Robbie Robertson – The Weight

Playing for Change . . . Song Around the World.

I'm Not On Your Vacation

The New Yorker ~ David Borchart

Which reminds me of this bumper sticker one finds on occasion on Martha's Vineyard.

Renoir's Nudes in the #MeToo Era

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ~ Blonde Bather, 1881

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute at Williams College in Massachusetts has long been one of my favorite museums – small, intimate, uncrowded, lovely grounds, and most important, world-class art. Now known as The Clark, our last visit was two years ago after a week of yoga at Kripalu in nearby Stockbridge.

Sterling Clark was an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and used this good luck to live in Paris in the early 1900s, where he and his wife Francine became admirers and investors in French Impressionist artists, especially Pierre-Auguste Renoir, acquiring more than 30 of his works.

On the centenary of Renoir's death, The Clark is featuring an exhibition Renoir: the body, the senses, comprising some 70 paintings, drawings, pastels, and sculptures, mostly nudes.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ~ Bather with Blonde Hair, 1903

And there's the rub. While Renoir's nudes have historically been revered as adoring, modest, beautiful, and innocent, today's critics tarnish history with contemporary political grievances. Martha Lucy, author of the exhibit's catalog, sets the tone with her description of Renoir as a "sexist male artist."  Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker, kicks the #MeToo door wide open in his review - Renoir's Problem Nudes.

"Who doesn't have a problem with Pierre-Auguste Renoir? A tremendously engaging show that centers on the painter's prodigious output of female nudes, "Renoir: The Body, the Senses," at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, sparks a sense of crisis. The reputation of the once exhalted, 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, unsetttles any kind of gaze, including the male. I'll endorse that, for what it's worth."

Roving fingers? Unsettles?

For what it's really worth, this is little more than a couple of art critics conspiring to create some attention, controversy, and ticket sales. Though the risk, of course, is that Williams College students will swallow the #MeToo bait, protest, boycott, and demand the college sell off the collection, or worse, burn them in a censorial bonfire.