In our series Why Is This Famous?, we aim to answer the unanswerable: How does a work actually enter the public consciousness? (See all installments.)

The most well-known narrative of the French Impressionists is that they rebelled against the art world’s traditional standards by not just painting outdoors, but using a wide array of color and loose brushstrokes to capture light and moment. (The French establishment preferred finely glazed history paintings made in a studio using models, and dozens of studies.) In comparison to other Modernist movements, like Expressionism, Impressionism is colorful and bright, full of nature, children, and light. There is, of course, more to the story; otherwise, art historians and critics wouldn’t still be dissecting the movement. One of the Impressionism’s greatest claims to fame, Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, may help shine a light on what the movement was all about—by sticking out like a sore thumb.

Departing from academia, and Impressionism itself

Bal du moulin de la Galette translates to “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette,” and represents a typical Sunday afternoon at the Moulin de la Galette, a windmill in Paris that served bread and wine to middle-class patrons, sometimes with live music and dancing. The chaotic, constantly moving, outdoor scene is a perfect example of the Impressionist’s rebellion. In it, we find Renoir thoroughly rejecting the refined nature of academic painting. Just compare Bal du moulin de la Galette to The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1879), a darling of the Academy. While Renoir avoids a cohesive composition, Gérôme expertly moves the viewer’s eye in a circular motion around the canvas. Renoir seems to have captured an arbitrary moment while Gérôme clearly staged models to create a dramatic scene, almost like a play for the viewer. Renoir makes no effort to disguise his brushstrokes or artistic hand while Gérôme carefully glazed layers of oil paint to create a smooth, seamless surface.

While Renoir’s departure from academic painting is in line with Impressionism as a whole, the specificity with which he renders his figures and faces deviates from the movement. The figures in Bal du moulin de la Galette include notable and recognizable Parisian artists and models who were friends of Renoir. In this way he strays far away from the other notable Impressionists, who often painted subjects far in the distance, a freckle on what is otherwise a landscape painting, rendered with just one to three brushstrokes, such as in Claude Monet’s The Marina at Argenteuil or Ladies in Flowers. Even Edgar Degas’ dancers and bathers are painted with a striking lack of specificity.

Everything’s political

If we choose to see Impressionism through a political lens—and yes, this is a subjective choice—things become more interesting. We can begin to understand Renoir’s commitment to specificity by comparing it to Georges Seurat’s departure from specificity in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. That is, as a reaction (or, in Renoir’s case, potential indifference) to the rapid modernization of late 19th–century France.

As industry grew in cities across Europe (especially in Paris), a growing middle class found they had more time to spend on leisure activities, like spending the day at the river, or dancing by a windmill. Many art historians see the art of this era as a critique of this new aimlessness, or an expression of nostalgia for the past that capitalism was destroying. For example, there was an influx of restoration projects of old cathedrals (most notably of Notre Dame, in 1875), which became one of Monet’s favorite subjects. The vagueness of the figures in the work of Monet, Degas, Seurat, and Camille Pissarro (an outspoken anti-capitalist) can be read as an unfavorable diagnosis of modern society’s middle-class sameness. The subjects blend into each other just as they did in real life: they all worked in similar factories, passive to the power structures developing around them, and then on nights and weekends they all took part in the same sort of leisure.

But this is not the case in Renoir’s work. He seems to all but embrace the easy interpretation of Impressionism—that of a joyful rendering of life. Critics have never understood Renoir as displaying any kind of analysis of the world around him. Unlike van Gogh’s The Dance Hall at Arles, Bal du moulin de la Galette shows no sign of angst or criticism of society. It is instead a celebration of the state of the modern middle class Parisian.

“Joyous and pretty, yes pretty!”

Since the late 19th century, and especially in the 1980s, many art critics and historians have deemed Renoir the “worst” Impressionist, deeming his work “kitsch” and unthoughtful. Renoir didn’t seem to attempt to eschew this analysis. He once said, in 1919, “Painting was intended, was it not, to decorate walls. Therefore it should be as rich as possible. For me a painting … should be something to cherish, joyous and pretty, yes pretty!” It may be his technique that some find lacking (this seems to be the central critique of the ”Renoir Sucks at Painting” movement). But it may also be that the (albeit subtle) irreverence evident in other Impressionists’ work is completely missing in Renoir’s.

If anything, we should be aware of easy interpretations. Like criticisms of Norman Rockwell, problematizing Renoir for creating work that fits his (perhaps unsophisticated) goal can easily be read as old school art history elitism. (Just look to the renowned critic Clement Greenberg, who said that Renoir “verged on prettiness, but it is perhaps the most valid prettiness ever seen in modernist art.”) What matters is that we continue to reevaluate our conception of artists and their output. And, in the case of Renoir, for better or worse, that seems inevitable.