Max Geller (provocateur)

[2] Part of the Jewish left, Geller is an organizer and activist for Palestinian human rights, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).

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

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.

[9] 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.

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.

[21] 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).

"[22] According to WBUR-FM, the campaign began after Geller visited the Barnes Foundation, which reportedly holds the largest Renoir collection in the world.

[23] In April 2015, Geller started the Instagram account and began posting images of paintings by Renoir, with captions criticizing both the artist and the institutions that hang his art.

[4] In May 2015, Renoir's great-great-granddaughter responded to one of the Instagram posts, entering into an argument with Geller, writing, "When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1 million, then you can criticize.

"[26] Protest signs read "God Hates Renoir," "Treacle Harms Society," "Aesthetic Terrorism," and "#rotting vegetation.

[29] 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.

"[27] Further, the painter Mary Cassatt wrote in 1913 that Renoir's art featured "enormously fat red women with very small heads.

"[31] Too, art writer Richard Whiddington has noted, "When times got financially tough, [Renoir] backtracked and began painting saccharine, bourgeois portraits.

"[4] Geller also uses Venmo transactions and memos as a form of comic performance, including a series of exchanges with Ben Affleck, charging and paying the actor small sums.