So I have been busy with my Dad for a few days. He came to visit from London. I love to see family, not just for the company but also for the perspective it give me. A chance to look at ones own life as if from a balcony. Seeing through a loved ones eyes the trajectories of my life, like looking at the rows of a freshly planted field, the small plants lining up in spokes of burgeoning little green lines to different horizons.

We went to LACMAs Renoir exhibition, a show that I probably not choose to go to. I waddled through the tastefully painted rooms with adequately spaced out, gilded framed paintings. I felt like a plebeian looking at the big fat emperor, marching triumphantly with not a scrap of clothing on. Is there something that I am missing?

I find his work flaccid and amateur. I diligently read the writing on the wall, nodding respectfully as they explained his work. They explain his purposefully thin paint and unfinished portions of the canvas as tools of his greatness. I felt that they were just excuses for poor eyesight, arthritic hands, and bad draftsmanship.

He falls into some familiar painting flaws that I have battled only too well. His figures seem to lack a back bone; their heads are perched atop the bodies like a disarticulated doll. Their faces pulled forward like ET, and the shoulders look like they have suffered a dislocation following an unfortunate horse riding accident. Some of the early portraits lips looked like the women in Beverly Hills who have undergone too many appointments with the cologne man.

I was trying to piece it together; by the middle of his life he was quite rich. He had glowing accolades from masters such as Matisse and Picasso. He bought himself a mansion in the South of France but the work he did there reminds me of oil paintings that hang in Italian restaurants, alongside floral patterned wall paper and brass and lace table lights. Thick formulaic tree leaves, acrid colors and no structure or contrast.

By room three, I was much more interested in the clientele that milled around me. The well healed middle class with cashmere cardigans, the elderly in wheelchairs and the scowling docents.

But once I stopped looking I started to see a pattern in the paintings. I am not sure if it was Renoir who influenced, or was influenced, but I started to see the future in his chocolate box past. Matisse’s bathers, their orange skin and rotund thighs; Henry Moore’s proportions and even the blotchy obesity of Jenny Savel’s self. I started to drop my disregard for his nostalgia, realize my prejudice for his style, and I started to see some great painting.

There was such tenderness in the way he painted his son and nanny, with whom he was undoubtedly having an affair. There was great strength in the composition in Gabrielle and Jean; hidden in the washy brush strokes; in the way he fondly represents motherhood in the echoing of their right hands. And his professionalism, the way he circumvents his own soporific style to portray this stunning and powerful woman in a commissioned portrait.

I grew from the exhibition like an old soak at an alcoholic’s anonymous meeting. I can stand up and say I am a hipster.  I am trendy and I like Contemporary Art. But I can see some good things in this middle class kitsch. If I met Monsieur Renoir at a bar in Silverlake, I would be polite, and maybe even intrigued.

But I still probably wouldn’t want to swap emails with him.