Max Geller

Max Geller (born 1984) is an American performance artist and activist. Part of the Jewish left, Geller is an organizer and activist for Palestinian human rights, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). Geller is the founder of Renoir Sucks At Painting, a "trolling" social movement to remove the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir from museums around the world.

Early life and education

Geller grew up in Massachusetts, where his family participated in the secular Workmen's Circle community and where he celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.

While in college, Geller and a friend conned their way into an appearance on the television arbitration show Judge Mathis, which aired in 2005. Geller wrote a script for their disagreement, which the show presented at face value.

Anti-Zionist activism

Geller has said that he became an activist during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and began questioning Zionism because of George W. Bush's support for the State of Israel. Geller has been a member of many groups organizing on behalf of Palestinian liberation, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Palestine Action, and the New Orleans Palestinian Solidarity Committee (NOPSC) and he has been a frequent contributor to a variety of conferences and journals. He has also presented at a conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, now the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Students for Justice in Palestine A Palestinian flag presented on the Temple of Giza, a 2009 stunt which Geller claims to have been a part of.While Geller was a student at Northeastern Law School, he was president of the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). In 2013, the group staged a walkout of a presentation by Israeli soldiers, leading the school to put them on administrative probation. SJP then delivered mock eviction letters to students, which resulted in the group's suspension. Geller defended the incident in an op-ed in the Boston Globe and an appearance on Democracy Now!. Geller told Chris Hedges that his SJP activism led to death threats and threats of disciplinary measures, which further catalyzed his activism.

New Orleans City Council Israel protest bill In 2017, Geller was involved with the New Orleans Palestinian Solidarity Committee (NOPSC), which lobbied the New Orleans City Council to pass a Boycott Divestment and Sanctions bill that they helped draft. The bill passed, but was met with counter-lobbying by Zionist groups. The wording of the bill had not explicitly named Israel, opting instead to target "human-rights violators," but was nonetheless called anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. The city council claimed they were unaware of NOPSC's political stances and rescinded the bill.

Palestine Action Geller is a former spokesperson for Palestine Action, an activist group which organizes direction action to protest Israeli-owned weapons company Elbit Systems. The goal of these direct action tactics is to prevent their manufacture of military technologies. He left the group in 2025.

Campaign against Renoir Geller has organized a satirical campaign, Renoir Sucks At Painting (RSAP), against the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir since 2015, both online and through various protests. The campaign challenges Eurocentrism and demands that museums remove Renoir paintings from display, and show more work by women and artists of color; Geller says that Renoir is his focus because "if the problems with Eurocentricity were personified in a man, Renoir would be the disgusting" embodiment. RSAP has received coverage from a range out outlets including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Le Monde (France), The Forward, El País (Spain), Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil) and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany).

According to WBUR-FM, the campaign began after Geller visited the Barnes Foundation, which reportedly holds the largest Renoir collection in the world. Part of his criticism is aesthetic: "When you look at a Renoir painting," Geller said, "you feel nothing at all. It's just so unnourishing." However, Geller also criticizes Renoir because of the painter's well known Antisemitism. Geller also hoped to make larger critiques of money in the art world, including the role risk-averse curators and wealthy museum trustees play in choosing the art people see. He also believes that investors use collecting art as a way to whitewash of their controversial business decisions. At the event, Geller led protestors in chants like "Other art is worth your while, Renoir paints a steaming pile." Protest signs read "God Hates Renoir," "Treacle Harms Society," "Aesthetic Terrorism," and "#rotting vegetation." (A reporter for HuffPost noted that dueling is illegal in Massachusetts. Geller also clashed with New York critic and art historian Jerry Saltz. After a protest at the Art Institute of Chicago, Geller was a guest on WGN-TV where he expanded the focus of his movement from Renoir's paintings themselves to the misogyny and white supremacy of the canon at large. "At the end of the day," he said, "it's about access, who has access to our museums... I think the Art Institute should sell some of these Renoirs...and instead buy some art that is painted by women or people of colour."

Writer Kriston Capps contexualized hating Renoir in The Atlantic, writing that the painter's contemporaries also complained that Renoir, like other Impressonists, "was promiscuous with color [and] he paid no heed to line and composition." In 1874, Albert Wolff (journalist) wrote in Le Figaro that Renoir's use of color and composition bordered on obscene: "Try to explain to M 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!" Too, art writer Richard Whiddington has noted, "When times got financially tough, [Renoir] backtracked and began painting saccharine, bourgeois portraits. It made him rich, an international star even. In short, he’s seen as a sellout."

In 2020, Geller planned to hold a similar protest during the Kimbell Art Museum's exhibit Renoir: The Body, The Senses.

Political analysis The Forward wrote that the campaign was "one-third a joke about applying the language of political protest to art criticism, one-third a gleeful slaughter of sacred cows and one-third a serious argument about how high culture is defined and policed." He has been featured in a Vice Media documentary about Venmo and is participating in a project with documentary filmmaker Jess Pinkham.