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 painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art, usually used of work produced in the 19th century, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. In this period the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts were very influential, combining elements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres a key figure in the formation of the style in painting. Later painters who tried to continue the synthesis included William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart among many others. In this context it is often called "academism", "academicism", "art pompier" (pejoratively), and "eclecticism", and sometimes linked with "historicism" and "syncretism." Academic art is closely related to Beaux-Arts architecture, which developed in the same place and holds to a similar classicizing ideal.

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 Florence by Cosimo I de' Medici, on 13 January 1563, under the influence of the architect Giorgio Vasari, who called it the Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy and Company for the Arts of Drawing) as it was divided in two different operative branches. While the company was a kind of corporation that every working artist in Tuscany could join, the academy comprised only the most eminent artists of Cosimo's court, and had the task of supervising the whole artistic production of the Medicean state. Among the founding members were Michelangelo, Bartolomeo Ammannati, Agnolo Bronzino and Francesco da Sangallo. In this institution, students learned the "arti del disegno" (a term coined by Vasari) and heard lectures on anatomy and geometry.^[1][2][3] The Accademia's fame spread quickly, to the point that, within just five months of its founding, important Venetian artists such as Titian, Salviati, Tintoretto and Palladio applied for admission, and in 1567, King Philip II of Spain consulted it about plans for El Escorial.^[4]

Another academy, the Accademia de i Pittori e Scultori di Roma (Academy of Painters and Sculptors of Rome), better known as the Accademia di San Luca (named after the patron saint of painters, St. Luke), was founded about a decade later in Rome. It served an educational function and was more concerned with art theory than the Florentine one, attaching great importance to attending theoretical lectures, debates and drawing classes.^[5] Twelve academics were immediately appointed as teachers, establishing a series of disciplinary measures for studies and instituting a system of awards for the most capable students.^[6]

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 Peter Paul Rubens or Nicolas Poussin was a suitable model to follow. Followers of Poussin, called "poussinistes", argued that line (disegno) should dominate art, because of its appeal to the intellect, while followers of Rubens, called "rubenistes", argued that color (colore) should be the dominant feature, because of its appeal to emotion.^[13] The debate was revived in the early 19th century, under the movements of Neoclassicism typified by the art of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Romanticism typified by the artwork of Eugène Delacroix. Debates also occurred over whether it was better to learn art by looking at nature, or at the artistic masters of the past.^[14]

Transformations and diffusion of the French model

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: Nuremberg (1674), Berlin (1697), Vienna (1705), Saint Petersburg (1724), Stockholm (1735), Copenhagen (1738) and Madrid (1752). In England, this was the Royal Academy, which was founded in 1768 with a mission "to establish a school or academy of design for the use of students in the arts".^[15][16]

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 Academy of San Carlos in Mexico being founded in 1783, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the United States in 1805,^[18] and the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Brazil in 1826.^[19] Meanwhile, back in Italy, another major center of irradiation appeared, Venice, launching the tradition of urban views and "capriccios", fantasy landscape scenes populated by ancient ruins, which became favorites of noble travelers on the Grand Tour.^[18]

Development of the academic style

Stylistic trends and contradictions

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 allegory in art. Theories of the importance of both line and color asserted that through these elements an artist exerts control over the medium to create psychological effects, in which themes, emotions, and ideas can be represented. As artists attempted to synthesize these theories in practice, the attention on the artwork as an allegorical or figurative vehicle was emphasized. It was held that the representations in painting and sculpture should evoke Platonic forms, or ideals, where behind ordinary depictions one would glimpse something abstract, some eternal truth. Hence, Keats' famous musing "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." The paintings were desired to be an "idée", a full and complete idea. Bouguereau is known to have said that he would not paint "a war", but would paint "War." Many paintings by academic artists are simple nature allegories with titles like Dawn, Dusk, Seeing, and Tasting, where these ideas are personified by a single nude figure, composed in such a way as to bring out the essence of the idea.

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 dialectics of ideas, a fertile ground for important allegory, using themes from these subjects was considered the most serious form of painting. A hierarchy of genres, originally created in the 17th century, was valued, where history painting—classical, religious, mythological, literary, and allegorical subjects—was placed at the top, next genre painting, then portraiture, still-life, and landscape.^[20][21] History painting was also known as the "grande genre." Paintings of Hans Makart are often larger than life historical dramas, and he combined this with a historicism in decoration to dominate the style of 19th-century Vienna culture. Paul Delaroche is a typifying example of French history painting.

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

By the second half of the 19th century, academic art had saturated European society. Exhibitions were held often, with the most popular exhibition being the Paris Salon, and beginning in 1903, the Salon d'Automne. These salons were large scale events that attracted crowds of visitors, both native and foreign. As much a social affair as an artistic one, 50,000 people might visit on a single Sunday, and as many as 500,000 could see the exhibition during its two-month run. Thousands of paintings were displayed, hung from just below eye level all the way up to the ceiling in a manner now known as "Salon style." A successful showing at the salon was a seal of approval for an artist, making his work saleable to the growing ranks of private collectors. Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme were leading figures of this art world.^[22][23]

During the reign of academic art, the paintings of the Rococo era, previously held in low favor, were revived to popularity, and themes often used in Rococo art such as Eros and Psyche were popular again. The academic art world also admired Raphael, for the ideality of his work, in fact preferring him over Michelangelo.

England

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 Baumgarten, Schiller and Kant had promoted the autonomy of Aesthetics through the concept of "art for art's sake", and had emphasized the importance of the artist's self-education, against the massification imposed by civilization and its institutions, seeing the collectivizing structure and impersonal nature of academia as a threat to their desires for creative freedom, individualistic inspiration, and absolute originality. In this vein, art criticism began to take on distinctly sociological colors.

Part of this reaction was due to the activity of the Nazarenes, a group of painters who sought a return to a Renaissance style and medieval practices in a spirit of austerity and fraternity. Under their influence, masterclasses were introduced—paradoxically within the academies themselves—which sought to group promising students around a master, who was responsible for their instruction, but with much more concentrated attention and care than in the more generalist French system, based on the assumption that such more individualized treatment could provide a stronger and deeper education. This method was first instituted at the Dusseldorf academy and progressed slowly, but over the course of the 19th century, it became common to all German academies, and was also imitated in other northern European countries. Interesting results of the masterclasses were the beginning of a tradition of large-scale mural painting and the steering of the local avant-garde along less iconoclastic lines than the Parisian ones.

Other countries

Academic art not only held influence in Western Europe and the United States, but also extended its influence to other countries. The artistic environment of Greece, for instance, was dominated by techniques from Western academies from the 17th century onward: this was first evident in the activities of the Ionian School, and later became especially pronounced with the dawn of the Munich School. This was also true for Latin American nations, which, because their revolutions were modeled on the French Revolution, sought to emulate French culture. An example of a Latin American academic artist is Ángel Zárraga of Mexico. Academic art in Poland flourished under Jan Matejko, who established the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. Many of these works can be seen in the Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art at Sukiennice in Kraków.

Academic training

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 Prix de Rome, whose winner was awarded a fellowship to study at the Académie française's school at the Villa Medici in Rome for up to five years. To compete, an artist had to be of French nationality, male, under 30 years of age, and single. He had to have met the entrance requirements of the École des Beaux-Arts and have the support of a well-known art teacher. The competition was grueling, involving several stages before the final one, in which 10 competitors were sequestered in studios for 72 days to paint their final history paintings. The winner was essentially assured a successful professional career.

As noted, a successful showing at the Salon, the exhibition of work founded by the École des Beaux-Arts, was a seal of approval for an artist. Artists petitioned the hanging committee for optimal placement "on the line", or at eye level. After the exhibition opened, artists complained if their works were "skyed", or hung too high. The ultimate achievement for the professional artist was election to membership in the Académie française and the right to be known as an academician.

Women artists

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][27][28] This was partly because of concerns over the perceived impropriety presented by nudity during training.^[27] 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.^{[30][31][32][33]}

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.^[34]

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 middle-class women becoming artists.^[35]

Criticism and legacy

Decline and the rise of modernism

Academic art was first criticized for its use of idealism, by Realist artists such as Gustave Courbet, as being based on idealistic clichés and representing mythical and legendary motives while contemporary social concerns were being ignored. Another criticism by Realists was the "false surface" of paintings—the objects depicted looked smooth, slick, and idealized—showing no real texture. The Realist Théodule Ribot worked against this by experimenting with rough, unfinished textures in his painting.

Stylistically, the Impressionists, who advocated quickly painting outdoors exactly what the eye sees and the hand puts down, criticized the finished and idealized painting style. Although academic painters began a painting by first making drawings and then painting oil sketches of their subject, the high polish they gave to their drawings seemed to the Impressionists tantamount to a lie. After the oil sketch, the artist would produce the final painting with the academic "fini", changing the painting to meet stylistic standards and attempting to idealize the images and add perfect detail. Similarly, perspective is constructed geometrically on a flat surface and is not really the product of sight; Impressionists disavowed the devotion to mechanical techniques.

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 ateliers. Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and even Henri Matisse were students under academic artists.

As modern art and its avant-garde gained more power, academic art was further denigrated, and seen as sentimental, clichéd, conservative, non-innovative, bourgeois, and "styleless." The French referred derisively to the style of academic art as L'art pompier (pompier means "fireman") alluding to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David (who was held in esteem by the academy), which often depicted soldiers wearing fireman-like helmets.^[36] It also suggests half-puns in French with pompéien ("from Pompeii") and pompeux ("pompous").^[37][38] The paintings were called "grandes machines", which were said to have manufactured false emotion through contrivances and tricks.

This denigration of academic art reached its peak through the writings of art critic Clement Greenberg who stated that all academic art is "kitsch." Other artists, such as the Symbolist painters and some of the Surrealists, were kinder to the tradition.^{[citation needed]} As painters who sought to bring imaginary vistas to life, these artists were more willing to learn from a strongly representational tradition. Once the tradition had come to be looked on as old-fashioned, the allegorical nudes and theatrically posed figures struck some viewers as bizarre and dreamlike.

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.^[39] 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.^[40]

With the goals of Postmodernism in giving a fuller, more sociological and pluralistic account of history, academic art has been brought back into history books and discussion. Since the early 1990s, the creation of academic art has even experienced a limited resurgence through the Classical Realist atelier movement.^[41] In museums and art galleries, L'art pompier (a term supporters mostly avoid) has also enjoyed something of a critical revival in the last twenty years, partly caused by the new Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where it is displayed on more equal terms with the Impressionists and Realist painters of the period.^[42] Some other institutional agents of this rescue are the Dahesh Museum of Art in the United States, which specializes in academic art of the 19th and 20th centuries,^[43] as well as the Art Renewal Center, also based in the United States and dedicated to promoting academicism as a basis for the qualified training of future masters.^[44] Additionally, the art is gaining a broader appreciation by the public at large, and whereas academic paintings once would only fetch a few hundreds of dollars in auctions, some now fetch millions.^[45]

Major artists

Gallery

• 
  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^[47]
• 
  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
• 
  Condé and Mazarin, by Eugène Devéria, c. 1835, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans, Orléans, France
• 
  The Romans in their Decadence, by Thomas Couture, 1844–1847, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris^[48]
• 
  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^[49]
• 
  The Empress Eugenie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1855, oil on canvas, Château de Compiègne, Compiègne, France^[50]
• 
  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^[51]
• 
  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^[52]
• 
  The Excommunication of Robert the Pious, by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1875, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay^[53]
• 
  The Babylonian Marriage Market, by Edwin Long, 1875, oil on canvas, Royal Holloway, University of London
• 
  The Oracle, by Camillo Miola, 1880, oil on canvas, Getty Center, Los Angeles, US^[54]
• 
  Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners, by Alexandre Cabanel, 1887, oil on canvas, private collection^[55]
• 
  The Renaissance of Letters, by Pierre-Victor Galland, 1888, oil on canvas, Musée départemental de l'Oise, Beauvais, France
• 
  Ulysses and the Sirens, by John William Waterhouse, 1891, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia^[56]
• 
  The Garden of the Hesperides, by Frederic Leighton, c. 1892, oil on canvas, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Wirral, the UK^[57]
• 
  Reverie (In the Days of Sappho), by John William Godward, 1904, oil on canvas, Getty Center