Academic art

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Academic art

The Birth of Venus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879); Phaedra by Alexandre Cabanel (1880); The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888)

Academic art, academicism, or academism, is a style of

Although production continued into the 20th century, the style had become vacuous, and was strongly rejected by the artists of set of new art movements, of which Impressionism was one of the first. By World War I, it had fallen from favor almost completely with critics and buyers, before regaining some appreciation since the end of the 20th century.

Although smaller works such as portraits, landscapes and still-lifes were often produced (and often sold more easily), the movement and the contemporary public and critics most valued large history paintings showing moments from narratives that were very often taken from old or exotic areas of history, though less often the traditional religious narratives. Orientalist art was a major branch, with many specialist painters, as had scenes from classical antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Origins and theoretical foundations

The first art academies in Renaissance Italy

The first academy of art was founded in

In 1582, the painter and art instructor Annibale Carracci opened his very influential Accademia dei Desiderosi (Academy of the Desirous) in Bologna without official support; in some ways, this was more like a traditional artist's studio, but that he felt the need to label it as an "academy" demonstrates the attraction of the idea at the time.^[7]

Standardization: French academicism and visual arts

The Accademia di San Luca later served as the model for the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, founded in France in 1648 by a group of artists led by Charles Le Brun, and which later became the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Its objective was similar to the Italian one, to honor artists "who were gentlemen practicing a liberal art" from craftsmen, who were engaged in manual labor. This emphasis on the intellectual component of artmaking had a considerable impact on the subjects and styles of academic art.^[8][9][10]

After an ineffective start, the Académie royale was reorganized in 1661 by King Louis XIV, whose aim was to control all the country's artistic activity,^[11] and in 1671, it came under the control of First Minister of State Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who confirmed Le Brun as director. Together, they made it the main executive arm of a program to glorify the king's absolutist monarchy, definitively establishing the school's association with the State and thereby vesting it with enormous directive power over the entire national art system, which contributed to making France the new European cultural center, displacing the hitherto Italian supremacy.^[12]

During this period, academic doctrine reached the peak of its rigor, comprehensiveness, uniformity, formalism and explicitness, and according to art historian Moshe Barasch, at no other time in the history of art theory has the idea of Perfection been more intensely cultivated as the artist's highest goal, with the production of the Italian High Renaissance as the ultimate model. Thus, Italy continued to be an invaluable reference, so much so that a branch was established in Rome in 1666, the French Academy, with Charles Errard as its first director.^[12]

At the same time, a controversy occurred among the members of the Académie, which would come to dominate artistic attitudes for the rest of the century. This "battle of styles" was a conflict over whether

After the end of Louis XIV's reign, the academic style and teachings strongly associated with his monarchy began to spread throughout Europe, accompanying the growth of the urban nobility. A series of other important academies were formed across the continent, inspired by the success of the French Académie:

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1754, may be taken as a successful example in a smaller country, which achieved its aim of producing a national school and reducing the reliance on imported artists. The painters of the Danish Golden Age of roughly 1800–1850 were nearly all trained there, and drawing on Italian and Dutch Golden Age paintings as examples, many returned to teach locally.^[17] The history of Danish art is much less marked by tension between academic art and other styles than is the case in other countries.^{[citation needed]}

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the model expanded to America, with the

Since the onset of the Poussiniste-Rubeniste debate, many artists worked between the two styles. In the 19th century, in the revived form of the debate, the attention and the aims of the art world became to synthesize the line of Neoclassicism with the color of Romanticism. One artist after another was claimed by critics to have achieved the synthesis, among them Théodore Chassériau, Ary Scheffer, Francesco Hayez, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Thomas Couture. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a later academic artist, commented that the trick to being a good painter is seeing "color and line as the same thing." Thomas Couture promoted the same idea in a book he authored on art method—arguing that whenever one said a painting had better color or better line it was nonsense, because whenever color appeared brilliant it depended on line to convey it, and vice versa; and that color was really a way to talk about the "value" of form.

Historicism

Another development during this period, called historicism, included adopting historic styles or imitating the work of historic artists and artisans in order to show the era in history that the painting depicted. In the history of art, after Neoclassicism which in the Romantic era could itself be considered a historicist movement, the 19th century included a new historicist phase characterized by an interpretation not only of Greek and Roman classicism, but also of succeeding stylistic eras, which were increasingly respected. This is best seen in the work of Baron Jan August Hendrik Leys, a later influence on James Tissot. It is also seen in the development of the Neo-Grec style. Historicism is also meant to refer to the belief and practice associated with academic art that one should incorporate and conciliate the innovations of different traditions of art from the past.

Allegory in art

The art world also grew to give increasing focus on

Idealism

The trend in art was also towards greater idealism, which is contrary to realism, in that the figures depicted were made simpler and more abstract—idealized—in order to be able to represent the ideals they stood in for. This would involve both generalizing forms seen in nature, and subordinating them to the unity and theme of the artwork.

Hierarchy of genres

Because history and mythology were considered as plays or

All of these trends were influenced by the theories of the German philosopher Hegel, who held that history was a dialectic of competing ideas, which eventually resolved in synthesis.

Apotheosis: Parisian salons and further influence

In England, the influence of the Royal Academy grew as its association with the State consolidated. In the first half of the 19th century, the Royal Academy already exercised direct or indirect control over a vast network of galleries, museums, exhibitions and other artistic societies, and over a complex of administrative agencies that included the Crown, parliament and other state departments, which found their cultural expression through their relations with the academic institution.[24]^[25] The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition gained momentum at the time and has been staged annually without interruption to the present day.

As the century progressed, challenges to this primacy began to emerge, demanding that its relations with the government be clarified, and the institution began to pay more attention to market aspects in a society that was becoming more heterogeneous and cultivating multiple aesthetic tendencies. Subsidiary schools were also opened in various cities to meet regional demands. By the middle of the 19th century, the Royal Academy had already lost control over British artistic production, faced with the multiplication of independent creators and associations, but continued, facing internal tensions, to try to preserve it. Around 1860, it was again stabilized through new strategies of monopolizing power, incorporating new trends into its orbit, such as promoting the previously ignored technique of watercolor, which had become vastly popular, accepting the admission of women, requiring new members in an enlarged membership to renounce their affiliation to other societies and reforming its administrative structure to appear as a private institution, but imbued with a civic purpose and a public character. In this way, it managed to administer a significant part of the British artistic universe throughout the 19th century, and despite the opposition of societies and groups of artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites, it managed to remain a disciplinary, educational and consecrating agency of the greatest importance, able to largely accompany the progress of modernism, contradicting a common view that academies are invariably reactionary.^[24][25]

Germany

In Germany, the academic spirit initially encountered some resistance to its full implementation. Already at the end of the 18th century, theorists such as

The influence of the Royal Academy extended across the ocean and strongly determined the foundation and direction of American art from the end of the 18th century until the middle of the 19th century, when the country began to establish its cultural independence. Some of the leading local artists studied in London under the guidance of the Royal Academy and others, who settled in England, continued to exert influence in their home country through regular submissions of works of art. This was the case with John Singleton Copley, the dominant influence in his country until the beginning of the 19th century, and also with Benjamin West, who became one of the leaders of the English neoclassical-romantic movement and one of the main European names of his generation in the field of history painting. He made a number of fellow disciples, such as Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull, and his influence was similar to that of Copley on American painting.^[28]

The first academy to be created in the United States was the

In the field of sculpture, however, the greatest influence came from the Italian academies, especially through the example of Antonio Canova, who was the main figure of European neoclassicism, educated in part at the Venice Academy and in Rome.^[34][35] Italy offered a historical and cultural backdrop of irresistible interest to sculptors, with priceless monuments, ruins and collections, and working conditions were infinitely superior to those of the New World, where there was a shortage of both marble and capable assistants to help the artist in the complex and laborious art of stone carving and bronze casting. Horatio Greenough was just the first in a large wave of Americans to settle between Rome and Florence. The most notable of these was William Wetmore Story, who after 1857 assumed leadership of the American colony that had been created in Rome, becoming a reference for all newcomers. Despite their stay in Italy, the group continued to be celebrated in their country, and their artistic achievements received continuous press coverage until the neoclassical vogue dissipated in North America from the 1870s onwards. By this time, the United States had already established its culture and created the general conditions to promote consistent and high-level local sculptural production, adopting an eclectic synthesis of styles.^[36][37][38] These sculptors also strongly absorbed the influence of the French Académie, several of them were educated there, and their production populated most public spaces and the facades of major American buildings, with works of strong civic and great formalism that became icons of local culture, such as the statue of Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French and the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.^[39]

In 1875, the

Young artists spent four years in rigorous training. In France, only students who passed an exam and carried a letter of reference from a noted professor of art were accepted at the academy's school, the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts). Drawings and paintings of the nude, called "académies", were the basic building blocks of academic art and the procedure for learning to make them was clearly defined. First, students copied prints after classical sculptures, becoming familiar with the principles of contour, light, and shade. The copy was believed crucial to the academic education; from copying works of past artists one would assimilate their methods of artmaking. To advance to the next step, and every successive one, students presented drawings for evaluation.

If approved, they would then draw from plaster casts of famous classical sculptures. Only after acquiring these skills were artists permitted entrance to classes in which a live model posed. Painting was not taught at the École des Beaux-Arts until after 1863. To learn to paint with a brush, the student first had to demonstrate proficiency in drawing, which was considered the foundation of academic painting. Only then could the pupil join the studio of an academician and learn how to paint. Throughout the entire process, competitions with a predetermined subject and a specific allotted period of time measured each student's progress.

The most famous art competition for students was the

One effect of the move to academies was to make training more difficult for women artists, who were excluded from most academies until the last half of the 19th century.^[a][41][42] This was partly because of concerns over the perceived impropriety presented by nudity during training.^[41] In France, for example, the powerful École des Beaux-Arts had 450 members between the 17th century and the French Revolution, of which only 15 were women. Of those, most were daughters or wives of members. In the late 18th century, the French Academy resolved not to admit any women at all.^[b] As a result, there are no extant large-scale history paintings by women from this period, though some women like Marie-Denise Villers and Constance Mayer made their name in other genres such as portraiture.^{[44][45][46][47]}

In spite of this, there were important steps forward for female artists. In Paris, the Salon became open to non-Academic painters in 1791, allowing women to showcase their work in the prestigious annual exhibition. Additionally, women were more frequently being accepted as students by famous artists such as Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Baptiste Greuze.^[48]

The emphasis in academic art on studies of the nude remained a considerable barrier for women studying art until the 20th century, both in terms of actual access to the classes and in terms of family and social attitudes to

Stylistically, the

Realists and Impressionists also defied the placement of still-life and landscape at the bottom of the hierarchy of genres. Most Realists and Impressionists and others among the early avant-garde who rebelled against academism were originally students in academic

This exhibition is sad and grotesque... save for one or two questionable exceptions, there is not a single work that deserves the honor of being shown in the official galleries. There is even something cruel about this exhibition, people laugh as if everything was nothing more than a farce.[55]

Following the example of Courbet, who in 1855 had opened a solo exhibition he called the Pavillon du Réalisme (Pavilion of Realism), in 1867 Manet, rejected from the official Salon, exhibited independently, and six years later a group of Impressionists founded the Salon des Indépendants (Salon of Independents). As a result of these initiatives, the art market began to open up to alternative schools, while dealers for new creators and private societies began aggressive campaigns to publicize their own artists, opening up various exhibition spaces to capture the interest of the bourgeois consumer public. Independent critics and literati also played an important role in shifting the economic and social center of gravity of the art system, protecting and promoting various non-academic artists and providing a kind of informal public education through the publication of articles in the press, which became a major forum for artistic debate, and one with a wide reach. In this process, the official institution of the Academy, by then renamed the École des Beaux-Arts and having severed its connection with the government, began to lose ground rapidly, beginning its decline as a consecrating and educational institution.^[56][57][58]

Full denigration and fall into obscurity

Clive Bell, linked to the Bloomsbury Group of English modernism, stated in 1914 that, by the middle of the 19th century, art had died, losing all its aesthetic interest, and even tradition had ceased to exist.^[59] This denigration of academic art reached its peak through the writings of American art critic Clement Greenberg who stated in 1939 that all academic art is "kitsch", in the sense of banal, commercialist, and tried to associate academicism with the problems of industrial capitalism, in addition to linking a new concept of "good taste" with the ethics of left-wing, anti-bourgeois political radicalism. For him, the avant-garde was positive because it was an affective expression of a libertarian social conscience, and was therefore truer and freer, which was repeated ad infinitum afterwards, following the following logic: academic = reactionary = bad, versus avant-garde = radical = good.^[60][61]

Several other influential critics, such as

Mannerist, Baroque, Rococo and neoclassical academic production managed to pass relatively unscathed by modernist criticism and secure its place in history, but eclectic academic trends of the second half of the 19th century were ridiculed and devalued to the point that, throughout the 20th century, most of these works were discarded from private collections, saw their market prices plummet and were removed from display in museums, relegated to oblivion in their storerooms.^[63][64][65] By the 1950s, all the last practitioners of the old academicism had been cast into obscurity. More than that, pure opposition to academicism had become one of the main cohesive forces of the modern movement, and the only thing that interested critics linked to the avant-garde was the avant-garde itself.^[66]

Critical recovery

Despite the widespread discredit into which academicism fell, several researchers throughout the 20th century undertook the study of the academic phenomenon. Art historian Paul Barlow stated that despite the wide dissemination of modernism at the beginning of the 20th century, the theoretical bases of its rejection of academicism were surprisingly little explored by its proponents, forming above all a kind of "anti-academic myth", more than a consistent critique.^[67] Of all those engaged in this study, Nikolaus Pevsner was perhaps the most important, describing in the 1940s the history of academies on an epic scale, but focusing on the institutional and organizational aspects, disconnecting them from the aesthetic and geographical ones.^[68]

Many authors agree that the birth of modernism can be described as the end of collective values ​​and the denial of art as essentially a vehicle for

• 
  The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1634–35, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• 
  Egypt Saved by Joseph, by Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, 1827, oil on canvas, ceiling of a room in the Louvre Palace, Paris^[76]
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  The Assassination of the Duke of Guise at the Château de Blois in 1588, by Paul Delaroche, 1834, oil on canvas, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France
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  Condé and Mazarin, by Eugène Devéria, c. 1835, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans, Orléans, France
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  The Romans in their Decadence, by Thomas Couture, 1844–1847, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris^[77]
• 
  Call of the Last Victims of Terror, by Charles Louis Müller, 1850, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Carcassonne, Carcassonne, France
• 
  The Alchemist, by William Fettes Douglas, 1853, oil on canvas, Victoria and Albert Museum, London^[78]
• 
  The Empress Eugenie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1855, oil on canvas, Château de Compiègne, Compiègne, France^[79]
• 
  Rehearsal of The Flute Player and The Woman of Diomede at the home of Prince Napoleon in the atrium of his Pompeian house, by Gustave Boulanger, 1861, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay
• 
  Lost Illusions, by Léon Dussart and Charles Gleyre, 1865–1867, oil on canvas, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, US
• 
  The Death of Orpheus, by Émile Lévy, 1866, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay^[80]
• 
  The Discovery of Pulque, by Jose Maria Obregon, 1869, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City
• 
  Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down), by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872, oil on canvas, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
• 
  The Triumph of Beauty, Charmed by Music, amidst the Muses and the Hours of the Day, designed for the ceiling of the auditorium of the Palais Garnier, by Jules-Eugène Lenepveu, 1872, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay
• 
  Moonlit Dreams, by Gabriel Ferrier, 1874, oil on canvas, private collection
• 
  Gloria Victis, by Antonin Mercié, 1874, bronze, Petit Palais, Paris^[81]
• 
  The Excommunication of Robert the Pious, by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1875, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay^[82]
• 
  The Babylonian Marriage Market, by Edwin Long, 1875, oil on canvas, Royal Holloway, University of London
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  The Oracle, by Camillo Miola, 1880, oil on canvas, Getty Center, Los Angeles, US^[83]
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  Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners, by Alexandre Cabanel, 1887, oil on canvas, private collection^[84]
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  The Renaissance of Letters, by Pierre-Victor Galland, 1888, oil on canvas, Musée départemental de l'Oise, Beauvais, France
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  Ulysses and the Sirens, by John William Waterhouse, 1891, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia^[85]
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  The Garden of the Hesperides, by Frederic Leighton, c. 1892, oil on canvas, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Wirral, the UK^[86]
• 
  Reverie (In the Days of Sappho), by John William Godward, 1904, oil on canvas, Getty Center

Notes

References