The Style of the Official Art of the Nineteenth Century

Abduction of the Sabine Women
(1634-5) past Nicolas Poussin, the
foremost exponent of conservative
academic mode of painting. His
meticulous compositions, idealistic
content with its complex allegorical
references, and polished finish, made
him the 17th century epitome of the
"bookish style" in French republic.

Academic Art
The mode of painting and sculpture approved by official academies of fine arts, notably the French Academy and the Royal Academy.

Contents

• What is Bookish Art?
• Origins
• Characteristics
• History and Development
• How the Academies Controlled Art Instruction and Exhibitions
• How Academic Art Was Taught
• Salon Exhibitions
• Turn down of the Salon
• Academic Art in the Late 19th-Century
• European Academies of Art
• Academic Art in the 20th-Century: Largely Irrelevant
• Academic Art in the 21st-Century: Erstwhile Values five Computer Software

Samson and Delilah (1830) by
Peter Paul Rubens, whose style of
painting represented the more
colourful dramatic school within
the academies.

The Valpincon Bather (1808) by
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres
doyen of the more conservative
bookish manner of fine art.
See Female Nudes in Art History.

Earth'S GREATEST ARTWORKS
For the Summit 300 oils, watercolours
see: Greatest Paintings Ever.
For the Peak 100 works of sculpture
encounter: Greatest Sculptures Ever.

What is Academic Fine art?

In fine fine art, the term "Academic art" (sometimes as well "academicism" or "eclecticism") is traditionally used to describe the way of true-to-life merely highminded realist painting and sculpture championed by the European academies of art, notably the French Academy of Fine Arts. This "official" or "canonical" style of art, which later came to be closely associated with Neoclassical painting and to a lesser extent the Symbolism movement, was embodied in a number of painterly and sculptural conventions to be followed by all artists. In particular, there was a strong emphasis on the intellectual element, combined with a fixed set up of aesthetics. In a higher place all, paintings should contain a suitably highminded message. Artists whose works accept come to typify the ideals of academic art include Peter-Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Jean-Antoine Gros (1771-1835), J.A.D. Ingres (1780-1867) Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), Ernest Meissonier (1815-91), Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904), Alexandre Cabanel (1823-89), Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), Thomas Couture (1815-79), and William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905).

The history of the French Academy - whose germination only gained official approval equally a means of boosting the political authority of the King - perfectly illustrates the bug of establishing such a monolithic system of cultural control. From its foundation in 1648, the French Academy sought to impose its say-so on the teaching, production and exhibition of art, but subsequently proved incapable of modernizing or adapting to changing tastes and techniques. As a outcome, by the 19th century information technology was increasingly ignored and sidelined, as modern artists such as Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso revolutionized the theory and practice of art.

Origins

From the sixteenth century onwards, a number of specialized fine art schools sprang up across Europe, beginning in Italia. These schools - known as 'academies' - were originally sponsored past a patron of the arts (typically the pope, a King or a Prince), and undertook to educate young artists co-ordinate to the classical theories of Renaissance fine art. The development of these creative academies was a culmination of the effort (begun by Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo) to upgrade the status of practising artists, to distinguish them from mere craftsmen engaged in manual labour, and to emancipate them from the ability of the guilds. For more, come across History of Academic Art (below).

Execution of Lady Jane Grayness (1833)
National Gallery, London.
By Paul Delaroche.
An ideal example of academic fine art.

Characteristics of Academic Art

The most of import principles of Academic art, as laid down by the French University, can be expressed as follows:

1. Rationality

The Academy was at pains to promote an "intellectual" style of fine art. In contrast, say, to the "sensuous" style of the Rococo, the "socially-aware" style of French Realism, the "visual" style of the Impressionism, or the "emotional" style of Expressionism. It considered fine fine art to be an intellectual bailiwick, involving a high degree of reason, thus the "rationality" of a painting was earth-shaking. Such rationality was exemplified by a work's subject-matter, its utilize of classical or religious apologue, and/or past its references to classical, historical or emblematic subjects. Careful planning - through preliminary sketching or utilise of wax models - was as well valued.

2. Message

Great importance was placed upon the 'message' of the painting, which should be appropriately "uplifting" and have a loftier moral content. This principle was the footing for the official "Hierarchy of the Genres", a ranking arrangement first announced in 1669, past the Secretary to the French Academy. The genres were listed in the following order of importance: (1) History Painting; (2) Portrait art; (3) Genre Painting; (iv) Landscapes; (5) Nonetheless Life Painting. The idea was that history paintings were improve platforms from which to communicate a highminded message. A battle scene or a piece of Biblical art would convey an obvious moral bulletin about (say) courage or spirituality, whereas a still-life moving-picture show of a vase of flowers would struggle to practise the same. In practise, artists succeeded in injecting moral content into all types of pictures, including still lifes. See, for case, the genre of vanitas painting, mastered by Harmen van Steenwyck (1612-56) and others, which typically depicted an array of symbolic objects, all of which conveyed a series of moral messages based on the futility of life without Christian values.

As well as Christian principles or humanistic qualities, bookish artists were encouraged to communicate some eternal truth or ideal to the viewer. Hence some academic paintings are no more than simple allegories with names like "Dawn", "Evening", "Friendship" and and so on, in which the essence of these ethics are embodied by a single figure.

iii. Other Artistic Conventions

Over time the Academic authorities gradually congenital up a serial of painterly rules and conventions. Here is a minor selection:

• Artists should use 'idealized' rather than 'overly realistic' forms; thus realism - in faces, bodies, or details of scenes, was discouraged. Ironically, Ingres, the doyen of the Academy, was criticized for the abnormal length of the model's back in La Grand Odalisque (1814, Louvre).

• History paintings should describe people in historical clothes. For case, Benjamin Westward (1738-1820) caused a scandal with The Death of Full general Wolfe (1770, National Gallery of Art, Ottowa), which was the first major history painting to feature gimmicky costume.

• Complex rules governed the use of linear perspective and foreshortening, in keeping with Renaissance theory. Besides in the way calorie-free was handled, and in matters of chiaroscuro.

• Vivid colours should exist used sparingly. The argue about the significance of colour rumbled on in the Academy for more than two centuries: see the role of Rubens and Delacroix, as outlined below.

• Color should be naturalistic: grass should be green, and then on. This alone disqualified Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists from academic blessing.

• The paint surface should be polish with no trace of brushstrokes. Impasto was out, expressive brushwork was out: the Academy insisted upon a polished finish.

History and Development of Bookish Fine art

The in a higher place characteristics of academic art didn't appear overnight. Rather they emerged over time, as the result of several ongoing debates between differing viewpoints, typically embodied by certain artists who then became "models" to exist copied. There were several debates, such as:

Disegno or Colorito: Which Has Primacy?

The Italian Renaissance embraced two important factions: the Florentine Renaissance faction that championed "disegno" (pattern); and the Venetian Renaissance faction that preferred "colorito" (color). The difference betwixt these 2 factions tin can be summarized as follows:

To a Florentine, a painting consisted of shape/design plus colour: in other words colour was a quality to be added to pattern. But to a Venetian, a painting consisted of shape/pattern fused with color: in other words, it was inseparable from design. In Florence, colour was regarded as an aspect of the object to which it belonged: and then a blue hat or a green tree were patches of bluish and greenish bars within the boundary lines of those objects. In Venice, colour was understood to exist a quality without which the hat or the tree could hardly be said to exist, thus a painter'due south ability to mix colour pigments was all-important.

Poussin or Rubens?

Non long subsequently the French Academy was reorganized in 1661, the Renaissance debate was revived by two rival factions. The issue concerned which style of art was superior - that of the French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) or that of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Poussin specialized in medium-format mythological painting and classical, pastoral landscapes - come across, for instance, Et in Arcadia Ego (1637, Louvre, Paris - and valued clarity and rationality to a higher place everything. To many, this highminded rational arroyo made him the perfect embodiment of the ideals of the Academy. Rubens, on the other paw, painted all the great religious and historical scenes with enormous verve and style, and with a wonderful eye for sumptuous colour. In simple terms, the question was: should Poussin'south line (disegno), or Rubens' colour (colorito) predominate? At a higher level, the issue was near what lay at the heart of art: intellect or emotion? The issue was never conclusively resolved - not to the lowest degree because both were such exceptional artists - and it resurfaced a century and a half later

Ingres or Delacroix?

In the 19th century, the argument was revived but this time with new champions. Now information technology was the neoclassical, cool, polished paintings of the political creative person Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) - see: Decease of Marat (1793) and Oath of the Horatii (1785) - and his follower J.A.D. Ingres (1780-1867), versus the colourful, dramatic, Romanticism of Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). Ingres was the ultimate Academician, whose muted portraits, female nudes and history paintings were exquisitely bundled and polished according to classical convention. In contrast, Delacroix was the peppery hero of French Romanticism whose large-scale vigorous, sometimes violent canvases (admitting advisedly prepared and sketched) represented a much more than uninhibited interpretation of classical theory. (In comparision, one painter who straddled both sides of this stylistic divide was the Napoleonic history painter Antoine-Jean Gros: 1771-1835).

The argue eventually went in favour of Ingres, who was appointed managing director of the French Academy in Rome (1835-forty). However, the aim of the French art world presently became to synthesize the line of Classicism with the colour of Romanticism. The academician William-Adolphe Bouguereau, for instance, believed that the pull a fast one on to beingness a skilful artist is recognizing the fundamental interdependence of line and colour, a view echoed by the academician Thomas Couture who said that whenever someone described a painting as having better color or improve line, it was really nonsense, because colour depended on line to convey it, and vice versa.

Re-create Old Masters or Copy Nature?

Another debate over Bookish fine art style concerned basic working methods. Was it better for an artist to learn art by looking at nature, or by scrutinizing the paintings of Old Masters? Put another fashion, which was superior - the intellectual power to translate and organize what i sees, or the ability to reproduce what 1 sees? In a style, this academic debate anticipated the statement amid Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as to the claim of meticulous studio-painting versus spontaneous plein-air painting.

Note: None of these bug had a precise answer and, in full general, the argument dwelt on which creative person or what blazon of painting best synthesized the competing features. The principal weakness of the Academy as an institution, lay in its assumption that there was a 'correct' approach to fine art, and (more chiefly) that they were the right body to detect information technology.

Meanwhile, European painters and sculptors moved on in their ceaseless quest for new art styles, new colour-schemes, new forms of composition, and new types of brushstrokes, without paying too much heed to the doctrinal arguments which raged within the academies. The powerful modernistic paintings of Gustave Courbet (The Painter'due south Studio, 1855, Musee d'Orsay), Whistler (Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Daughter 1862, National Gallery of Fine art, Washington DC), Jean-Francois Millet (The Gleaners 1857, Musee d'Orsay and Human with a Hoe, 1862, Getty Museym LA), Edouard Manet (Olympia, 1863, Musee d'Orsay), and Claude Monet (Impression: Sunrise 1872, Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris; or Nympheas 1920-6, Orangerie Museum, Paris), were more than a match for those conformist bookish painters such as Alexandre Cabanel, Jean-Leon Gerome and Adolphe-William Bouguereau.

How the Academies Controlled Art Pedagogy and Exhibitions

The French Academy had a virtual monopoly on the didactics, product and exhibition of visual art in France - most other academies were in the same position. As a result, without the approval of the Academy a budding painter could neither obtain an official "qualification", nor exhibit his works to the public, nor gain access to official patronage or educational activity positions. In short, the Academy held the key to an creative person's hereafter prosperity.

How Bookish Art Was Taught

University schools taught art according to a strict gear up of conventions and rules, and involved only representational art: in that location was no abstruse art permitted. Until 1863 classes inside the academy were based entirely on the do of effigy cartoon - that is, drawing the works of Sometime Masters. Copying such masterpieces was considered to exist the only means of absorbing the correct principles of contour, low-cal, and shade. The way taught by university teachers was known every bit academic fine art.

Students began with drawing, first from prints or drawings of classical Greek sculpture or the paintings of Erstwhile Masters such as Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Raphael (1483-1520) of the High Renaissance era. Having completed this stage, students then had to present drawings for evaluation. If successful, they then moved on to drawing from plaster casts or originals of antique statuary. Once once again, they and so had to present drawings for evaluation. If successful, they were allowed to copy from live male nudes (known as 'drawing from life').

Note: one side-result of the focus on cartoon from the male person nude was to make it diffficult for women artists to gain comprisal to the Academy, until the second half of the 19th century (1861 for the London Royal Academy), due to moral bug.

Only after completing several years training in cartoon, every bit well as anatomy and geometry, were students allowed to paint: that is, to use colour. Indeed, painting was non even on the curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (the French Academy's school) until 1863: instead students had to bring together the studio of an academician in order to learn how to paint. (Note: Amid the best of the academician studios was the studio of Gustave Moreau, in Paris.) This dogmatic instruction method was reinforced by strict entry qualifications and course assessments. For instance, entry to the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts was only possible for students who passed an exam and possessed a letter of reference from a noted Professor of fine art. If accepted, the pupil began the fine arts course, advancing in stages (equally nosotros accept seen) only after presenting a portfolio of drawings for blessing. In improver, regular art competitions were held under timed weather, to tape each students' ability.

At the same fourth dimension, the academies maintained the strict ranking organisation of the painting genres. History Painting was the highest class, followed past portraiture, genre paintings, landscapes and finally still life. Thus, the highest prizes were therefore awarded to history painters - a practice which caused much discontent amongst student artists.

Salon Exhibitions

Typically, each academy of art staged a number of exhibitions (salons) during the year, which attracted great interest from art buyers and collectors. In order for a painting to be accepted by the Salon, it get-go had to be approved by the Salon "jury" - a committee of academicians who vetted each submission.

A successful showing at 1 of these displays was a guaranteed seal of approval for an aspiring artist. Since several m paintings would normally be on brandish, hung from centre-level to the ceiling, there was tremendous competition to secure prime position from the Hanging Commission, who equally usual were influenced by the genre of a painting and (no doubt) by the 'bookish conformity' of its artist.

The French Academy, for instance, had its own official fine art exhibition, known as the Paris Salon. Starting time held in 1667, the Salon was the most prestigious art upshot in the world. As a outcome, its influence on French painting - in item on artistic style, painterly conventions and the reputation of artists was enormous. Until the 1850s the Paris Salon was enormously influential: up to l,000 visitors might attend on a single Sunday, and every bit many as 500,000 might visit the exhibition during its eight-calendar week run. A successful showing at the Salon gave an artist a huge commercial advantage.

Even if an creative person had graduated successfully from an Academy school and had 'shown' at the Salon, his future prospects were still largely dependent on his condition with the academy. Artists who showed regularly at the Paris Salon, and whose paintings or sculptures were 'canonical of', might exist offered Acquaintance and ultimately Full membership of the academy (Academician status). Securing this coveted accolade was the goal of any ambitious painter or sculptor. Fifty-fifty Impressionist painters who had been rejected past the Salon - similar Manet, Degas and Cezanne - withal continued to submit works to the Salon jury in the promise of acceptance.

Note: Although the British Royal Academy (RA) shared some of the weaknesses of the French Academie des Beaux-Arts and others, information technology adopted a more contained line. For example, the unorthodox style of JMW Turner did non prevent his condign the youngest ever member of the RA.

Decline of the Salon

By the 1860s, the French Academy and others had lost touch with artistic trends and continued stubbornly to promote a grade of academic art, and a rigid teaching method, that was old-fashioned and out of touch with modern styles. (They still ranked paintings according to the "Hierarchy of Genres" [see higher up], thus for case a history painting always 'outranked' a landscape, and would therefore be 'hung' in a improve position in the Salon.)

Due to this inability to keep upward to date, the Salon became more and more conservative, and ultimately went into a serious decline. The first overt sign of trouble came in 1863 with the announcement by the French ruler Emperor Napoleon III that a special Salon des Refuses would exist held, simultaneously with the official Salon, to showcase all works that had been rejected by the Salon jury. The alternative Salon proved as popular as the official one. Still, information technology is worth remembering that French Impressionism - even so the world'due south nearly popular mode of painting - was rejected past the official Salon, forcing its adherents to exhibit privately. Encounter Impressionist Exhibitions in Paris (1874-86).

In fairness, i should note that not every painting hung in the French Academy'due south annual Salon was old-fashioned in style or backward-looking in content. Some progressive paintings did become past the jury. Such works included: the historical painting Joan of Arc (1879, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY) by Jules Bastien-Lepage; the Orientalist painting Hassan et Namouna (1870, Private Collection) past Henri-Alexandre-Georges Regnault; The Decease of Francesca da Rimini and of Paolo Malatesta (1870, Musee d'Orsay, Paris) by Alexandre Cabanel, Jean-Leon Gerome's classical Pollice Verso (1872, Phoenix Fine art Museum); Pierre-Auguste Cot's neo-Rococo moving picture Bound (1873, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; and William-Adolphe Bouguereau's The Moving ridge (1896, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY).

Afterward, more progressive alternative Salons - similar the Salon des Independants, founded by Albert Dubois-Pillet, Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and the Salon d'Automne, initiated by Hector Guimard, Frantz Jourdain, Georges Desvallieres, Eugene Carriere, Felix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard - emerged to provide the public with a full range of modern art. In the menstruation 1884 to 1914, these new Salons helped to introduce revolutionary new styles of painting to the public, including Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism, to proper name merely iii. Only and then did the public get to meet abstruse paintings and abstract sculpture.

Academic Art in the Late 19th Century

By the 1880s, at that place were two systems of art operating in France, in parallel: the "official" arrangement of academic art, involving the University of Fine Arts, and its schoolhouse the Ecole des Beaux Arts (it had relinquished command of the Salon in 1881); and an alternative system of modern art, involving private schools, plus the Salon des Independants and other private exhibition venues.

The official system catered for conservative circles - for instance, both sculpture and architecture were run by strong believers in bookish art - but had no existent influence elsewhere, non least because it failed to encourage innovation. It was criticised by Realist artists similar Gustave Courbet for its promotion of idealism, instead of paying more attention to contemporary social concerns. It was criticized past Impressionist painters for its cosmetic manicured finish, whereby artists were obliged to alter the painting to arrange to bookish stylistic standards, by idealizing the images and adding perfect detail. And practitioners of both Realism and Impressionism strongly objected to the low ranking accorded to landscapes, genre paintings and nonetheless lifes in the academic hierarchy of the genres.

Meanwhile the alternative system was flourishing. All serious art collectors, dealers and fine art critics in Paris paid far more attending to new developments in the Salon des Independants than they did to the same old repetitive style of academic painting in the official Salon. Private schools prospered, including the Academie Julian (started 1868), Charles Gleyre'southward Schoolhouse (started 1843), Academie Colarossi (started 1870) and the Lhote University (started 1922). In London, the leading unofficial academy was the Slade School of Fine Fine art (opened 1871), which competed with the hopelessly barren didactics methods of the official Majestic Academy. There were other schools that taught fine art pattern, such equally the famous High german Bauhaus design schoolhouse (1919-32). Meanwhile Secession - see, for instance, the Munich Secession (1892), the Vienna Secession (1897) and the Berlin Secession movement (1898) - was sweeping across Europe, setting up progressive alternative organizations to the old-style academies. In short, by the turn of the century, everything that was new, innovative and exciting was happening 'outside' the official system.

European Academies of Art: Origins and History

The first modernistic art academy was the Academy of Fine art in Florence founded in 1562 by the painter, builder and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), nether 1000 Duke Cosimo one de Medici.

The second of import art academy, the Academy of Fine art in Rome (named later Saint Luke, the patron saint of painters), initiated in Rome about 1583, was sponsored by the Pope and presided over by the painter Federico Zuccaro (1542-1609). Due to opposition by powerful local painters guilds, the spread of art academies throughout Italy was slow.

Growth of the Academy System

Outside Italian republic, the starting time academy to exist established (1583) was at Haarlem in Holland, under Karel Van Manda (1548-1606). In French republic, the first was the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, founded in Paris in 1648 through the efforts of the painter Charles Lebrun (1619-1690), whose influence on French painting and sculpture was dominant during the catamenia 1663-83.

Despite its close analogousness with the Italian academies, which were profoundly respected by travellers on the Thousand Tour, the French Royal Academy was much more than active. It opened branches in provincial cities, it awarded scholarships for written report at the French Academy in Rome and became the model for all the other regal and imperial academies of Northern Europe.

In due course, fine art schools were established in Nuremberg Academy (1674) past Joachim Von Sandrart (1606-1688), Poland (1694), Berlin (1697), Vienna (1705), St Petersberg (1724), Stockholm (1735), Copenhagen (1738), Madrid (1752), London (1768).

Lesser academies were set up during the eighteenth century in several German states, and in cities in Italy and Switzerland. The first official American University of the Fine Arts appeared in Philadelphia, in 1805. In Ireland, there are two academies of visual art: the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), founded in 1823, and the Royal Ulster University of Arts (RUA), established in 1930.

Bookish Fine art in the 20th-Century - Largely Irrelevant

The reputation of academic-style art fell further during the showtime three decades of the 20th-century. First, as mentioned in a higher place, in that location was the Expressionist motility followed by Cubism, both of which were seen equally wholly anti-establishment. Then, during the period 1916-25, the Dada movement attacked the very idea of traditional art. Subsequently this, with the exception of figurative Surrealism (1925-50) and American Scene Painting (1925-45), abstraction dominated fine art until at to the lowest degree the 60s. Thus, movements like Neo-Plasticism (1918-31), Abstract Expressionism (1947-65), and Op-Art (1955-70), to name only iii, championed a completely different set up of aesthetics to that of academic art. None of these styles necessitated any form of academic training, or traditional craftsmanship, and nearly seemed to contradict some, if non all, of the rules laid downwardly by the Greeks, re-discovered by the Italian Renaissance and promoted by the academies.

Afterward 1960, the fine art world - whose centre was now located in New York, not Paris - dumbed downwards even further - the mass consumer imagery of Pop Art contrasting with the ascetic severity of Minimalism. To confuse matters further, completely new types of art were invented, such as Conceptual art, and Installation fine art. New forms of fine fine art photography emerged, every bit well as diverse types of digital and computer art. By the late 1980s/ early 1990s, contemporary fine art competitions, similar the Turner Prize were rarely, if ever, won past traditional or academically trained artists. In other words, on the surface at to the lowest degree - the fine art academy had - by 2000 - go almost irrelevant to the mainstream practice of art.

Academic Art in the 21st-Century: Old Values v Calculator Software

Nonetheless, while in that location remains a superficial gulf betwixt the fashion of postmodern fine art and the style of academic painting, at that place are reasons to think that things may change. This despite the fact that non-academic fine art - equally exemplified by artists like Francis Bacon (1909-92), Andy Warhol (1928-87) and Picasso (1881-1973) - is the near fashionable type of fine art in the salerooms of auction houses such as Christie's and Sotheby'south.

And then why might there be a resurgence of bookish fine art? Well, let's get one affair direct, fine art taught in today'southward academies is very different to that taught 50 years ago, permit alone 100 years ago. And so academic fine art itself has undergone meaning modernization, in both content and methods of instruction. Only the main reason why it may go more important, is that today it is abstract, hypermodern art which dominates: it is this stuff that is now mainstream. So peradventure collectors will await for something new - similar a return to old values, at least in painting or sculpture. Against this, is the ever-increasing ability of computers, with their art and blueprint software, and other online tools, that may eventually brand all paw-made fine art redundant, if not extinct.

friddleortogs.blogspot.com

Source: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/academic-art.htm

Share this post