Was the Official Style of the Art of the French

Abduction of the Sabine Women
(1634-5) by Nicolas Poussin, the
foremost exponent of bourgeois
academic style of painting. His
meticulous compositions, idealistic
content with its complex allegorical
references, and polished cease, fabricated
him the 17th century epitome of the
"academic way" in France.

Academic Art
The mode of painting and sculpture canonical past official academies of fine arts, notably the French University and the Royal Academy.

Contents

• What is Bookish Art?
• Origins
• Characteristics
• History and Development
• How the Academies Controlled Art Teaching and Exhibitions
• How Academic Art Was Taught
• Salon Exhibitions
• Decline of the Salon
• Academic Art in the Tardily 19th-Century
• European Academies of Fine Art
• Academic Art in the 20th-Century: Largely Irrelevant
• Academic Art in the 21st-Century: Old Values v Computer Software

Samson and Delilah (1830) past
Peter Paul Rubens, whose mode of
painting represented the more
colourful dramatic schoolhouse within
the academies.

The Valpincon Bather (1808) by
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres
doyen of the more conservative
bookish style of art.
Meet Female Nudes in Fine art History.

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What is Academic Art?

In fine art, the term "Academic fine art" (sometimes also "academicism" or "eclecticism") is traditionally used to describe the style of true-to-life but highminded realist painting and sculpture championed by the European academies of art, notably the French Academy of Fine Arts. This "official" or "approved" style of art, which later came to exist closely associated with Neoclassical painting and to a lesser extent the Symbolism motion, was embodied in a number of painterly and sculptural conventions to be followed by all artists. In particular, there was a strong accent on the intellectual element, combined with a stock-still ready of aesthetics. To a higher place all, paintings should contain a suitably highminded message. Artists whose works have come to typify the ethics of bookish 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 formation only gained official approval equally a means of boosting the political authority of the Rex - perfectly illustrates the problems of establishing such a monolithic system of cultural control. From its foundation in 1648, the French Academy sought to impose its authority on the teaching, production and exhibition of fine art, only 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 exercise of fine 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 by a patron of the arts (typically the pope, a King or a Prince), and undertook to brainwash young artists according to the classical theories of Renaissance fine art. The development of these artistic 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 power of the guilds. For more than, see History of Bookish Fine art (below).

Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833)
National Gallery, London.
By Paul Delaroche.
An ideal example of bookish art.

Characteristics of Bookish Art

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

one. Rationality

The Academy was at pains to promote an "intellectual" manner of art. In dissimilarity, say, to the "sensuous" style of the Rococo, the "socially-enlightened" style of French Realism, the "visual" mode of the Impressionism, or the "emotional" style of Expressionism. Information technology considered fine art to be an intellectual discipline, involving a high caste of reason, thus the "rationality" of a painting was all-important. Such rationality was exemplified by a piece of work's subject-matter, its use of classical or religious allegory, and/or by its references to classical, historical or emblematic subjects. Careful planning - through preliminary sketching or utilise of wax models - was too valued.

two. Message

Bang-up importance was placed upon the 'message' of the painting, which should be appropriately "uplifting" and have a high moral content. This principle was the basis for the official "Hierarchy of the Genres", a ranking system first announced in 1669, by the Secretarial assistant to the French Academy. The genres were listed in the following order of importance: (1) History Painting; (2) Portrait art; (3) Genre Painting; (4) Landscapes; (5) Withal Life Painting. The idea was that history paintings were better platforms from which to communicate a highminded bulletin. A battle scene or a piece of Biblical art would convey an obvious moral message nearly (say) backbone or spirituality, whereas a still-life picture of a vase of flowers would struggle to exercise the same. In practice, artists succeeded in injecting moral content into all types of pictures, including still lifes. See, for instance, 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 letters based on the futility of life without Christian values.

As well equally Christian principles or humanistic qualities, academic 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 so on, in which the essence of these ideals are embodied past a single effigy.

3. Other Artistic Conventions

Over time the Academic authorities gradually built upwards a series of painterly rules and conventions. Hither is a pocket-sized 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'southward back in La One thousand Odalisque (1814, Louvre).

• History paintings should depict people in historical dress. For case, Benjamin Due west (1738-1820) acquired a scandal with The Death of General Wolfe (1770, National Gallery of Fine art, Ottowa), which was the first major history painting to feature contemporary costume.

• Complex rules governed the use of linear perspective and foreshortening, in keeping with Renaissance theory. Likewise in the way light was handled, and in matters of chiaroscuro.

• Bright colours should be used sparingly. The fence well-nigh the significance of color rumbled on in the Academy for more than than two centuries: come across the office of Rubens and Delacroix, as outlined beneath.

• Colour should be naturalistic: grass should be green, so on. This alone disqualified Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists from academic approval.

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

History and Development of Bookish Art

The in a higher place characteristics of academic art didn't appear overnight. Rather they emerged over fourth dimension, equally the result of several ongoing debates between differing viewpoints, typically embodied by certain artists who and so became "models" to be copied. At that place were several debates, such as:

Disegno or Colorito: Which Has Primacy?

The Italian Renaissance embraced 2 of import factions: the Florentine Renaissance faction that championed "disegno" (pattern); and the Venetian Renaissance faction that preferred "colorito" (color). The departure between these two factions tin can be summarized every bit follows:

To a Florentine, a painting consisted of shape/design plus color: in other words colour was a quality to be added to blueprint. Merely to a Venetian, a painting consisted of shape/pattern fused with colour: in other words, it was inseparable from blueprint. In Florence, colour was regarded as an attribute of the object to which it belonged: so a bluish hat or a green tree were patches of bluish and green confined within the boundary lines of those objects. In Venice, colour was understood to be a quality without which the chapeau or the tree could inappreciably be said to exist, thus a painter's ability to mix colour pigments was earth-shaking.

Poussin or Rubens?

Not long after the French Academy was reorganized in 1661, the Renaissance fence 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 - meet, for instance, Et in Arcadia Ego (1637, Louvre, Paris - and valued clarity and rationality to a higher place everything. To many, this highminded rational approach fabricated him the perfect embodiment of the ideals of the Academy. Rubens, on the other hand, painted all the great religious and historical scenes with enormous verve and style, and with a wonderful heart for sumptuous color. In simple terms, the question was: should Poussin's line (disegno), or Rubens' color (colorito) predominate? At a higher level, the issue was about what lay at the heart of art: intellect or emotion? The consequence was never conclusively resolved - not to the lowest degree considering both were such exceptional artists - and it resurfaced a century and a one-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, absurd, polished paintings of the political artist Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) - run across: Death 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 arranged and polished according to classical convention. In contrast, Delacroix was the fiery hero of French Romanticism whose large-scale vigorous, sometimes tearing canvases (admitting carefully 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 debate eventually went in favour of Ingres, who was appointed director of the French University in Rome (1835-twoscore). However, the aim of the French art world soon became to synthesize the line of Classicism with the colour of Romanticism. The academician William-Adolphe Bouguereau, for case, believed that the fox to beingness a good creative person is recognizing the cardinal interdependence of line and color, a view echoed past the academician Thomas Couture who said that whenever someone described a painting equally having better color or better line, it was really nonsense, because colour depended on line to convey it, and vice versa.

Copy One-time Masters or Copy Nature?

Another fence over Academic art fashion 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 way, which was superior - the intellectual ability to interpret and organize what one sees, or the ability to reproduce what one sees? In a style, this academic debate anticipated the statement among Impressionists and Post-Impressionists every bit to the merits of meticulous studio-painting versus spontaneous plein-air painting.

NOTE: None of these bug had a precise answer and, in general, the argument dwelt on which creative person or what type of painting best synthesized the competing features. The principal weakness of the University every bit an establishment, lay in its assumption that at that place was a 'correct' approach to fine art, and (more than importantly) that they were the right body to notice information technology.

Meanwhile, European painters and sculptors moved on in their incessant quest for new art styles, new color-schemes, new forms of limerick, and new types of brushstrokes, without paying too much heed to the doctrinal arguments which raged within the academies. The powerful mod paintings of Gustave Courbet (The Painter's Studio, 1855, Musee d'Orsay), Whistler (Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Daughter 1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), Jean-Francois Millet (The Gleaners 1857, Musee d'Orsay and Human being 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 a match for those conformist academic painters such every bit Alexandre Cabanel, Jean-Leon Gerome and Adolphe-William Bouguereau.

How the Academies Controlled Fine art Education and Exhibitions

The French Academy had a virtual monopoly on the pedagogy, production and exhibition of visual art in France - most other academies were in the same position. Every bit 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 education positions. In short, the Academy held the cardinal to an creative person's hereafter prosperity.

How Academic Art Was Taught

Academy schools taught art according to a strict set of conventions and rules, and involved only representational art: there was no abstract art permitted. Until 1863 classes inside the academy were based entirely on the practice of figure cartoon - that is, drawing the works of Old Masters. Copying such masterpieces was considered to be the only means of absorbing the correct principles of profile, light, and shade. The style taught by academy teachers was known equally academic fine art.

Students began with drawing, get-go from prints or drawings of classical Greek sculpture or the paintings of Old 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 more, they then had to nowadays drawings for evaluation. If successful, they were immune to copy from alive male nudes (known as 'drawing from life').

Note: one side-outcome of the focus on drawing from the male nude was to get in diffficult for women artists to gain admittance to the Academy, until the second one-half of the 19th century (1861 for the London Purple Academy), due to moral issues.

Only after completing several years training in drawing, as well as anatomy and geometry, were students immune to paint: that is, to use colour. Indeed, painting was not even on the curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (the French Academy'southward school) until 1863: instead students had to join the studio of an academician in gild to learn how to paint. (Note: Among the best of the academician studios was the studio of Gustave Moreau, in Paris.) This dogmatic didactics method was reinforced past strict entry qualifications and course assessments. For example, entry to the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts was only possible for students who passed an exam and possessed a letter of the alphabet of reference from a noted Professor of fine art. If accepted, the student began the fine arts grade, advancing in stages (as nosotros accept seen) only subsequently presenting a portfolio of drawings for approving. In add-on, regular fine art competitions were held under timed weather condition, to tape each students' ability.

At the same time, the academies maintained the strict ranking arrangement of the painting genres. History Painting was the highest course, followed past portraiture, genre paintings, landscapes and finally notwithstanding life. Thus, the highest prizes were therefore awarded to history painters - a practice which caused much discontent among pupil artists.

Salon Exhibitions

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

A successful showing at one of these displays was a guaranteed seal of approval for an aspiring artist. Since several one thousand paintings would usually be on display, hung from middle-level to the ceiling, at that place was tremendous contest to secure prime number position from the Hanging Committee, who every bit usual were influenced by the genre of a painting and (no doubt) by the 'academic conformity' of its artist.

The French Academy, for instance, had its own official art exhibition, known as the Paris Salon. First held in 1667, the Salon was the most prestigious art upshot in the world. As a effect, its influence on French painting - in particular on artistic style, painterly conventions and the reputation of artists was enormous. Until the 1850s the Paris Salon was enormously influential: up to 50,000 visitors might attend on a single Dominicus, and every bit many as 500,000 might visit the exhibition during its viii-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 status with the academy. Artists who showed regularly at the Paris Salon, and whose paintings or sculptures were 'approved of', might be offered Acquaintance and ultimately Full membership of the academy (Academician status). Securing this coveted accolade was the goal of any ambitious painter or sculptor. Even Impressionist painters who had been rejected by the Salon - similar Manet, Degas and Cezanne - yet continued to submit works to the Salon jury in the hope of acceptance.

Note: Although the British Imperial Academy (RA) shared some of the weaknesses of the French Academie des Beaux-Arts and others, it adopted a more independent line. For example, the unorthodox fashion of JMW Turner did non foreclose his becoming the youngest ever member of the RA.

Decline of the Salon

By the 1860s, the French University and others had lost bear on with artistic trends and continued stubbornly to promote a form of academic art, and a rigid didactics method, that was old-fashioned and out of touch with modern styles. (They nevertheless ranked paintings co-ordinate to the "Bureaucracy of Genres" [see above], thus for example a history painting always 'outranked' a landscape, and would therefore exist 'hung' in a better position in the Salon.)

Due to this inability to go along up to engagement, the Salon became more and more conservative, and ultimately went into a serious pass up. The first overt sign of trouble came in 1863 with the announcement by the French ruler Emperor Napoleon 3 that a special Salon des Refuses would be held, simultaneously with the official Salon, to showcase all works that had been rejected by the Salon jury. The culling Salon proved every bit pop equally the official 1. Even and then, it is worth remembering that French Impressionism - still the world's nearly popular fashion of painting - was rejected by the official Salon, forcing its adherents to exhibit privately. Encounter Impressionist Exhibitions in Paris (1874-86).

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

Later, more progressive alternative Salons - like 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 period 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 simply 3. Only then did the public get to see abstract paintings and abstract sculpture.

Bookish Fine art in the Late 19th Century

By the 1880s, there were two systems of fine art operating in France, in parallel: the "official" organisation of bookish art, involving the Academy of Fine Arts, and its school the Ecole des Beaux Arts (information technology 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 organization catered for conservative circles - for instance, both sculpture and architecture were run by strong believers in academic art - simply had no real influence elsewhere, not least because it failed to encourage innovation. It was criticised past Realist artists like Gustave Courbet for its promotion of idealism, instead of paying more attention to gimmicky social concerns. Information technology was criticized by Impressionist painters for its cosmetic manicured terminate, whereby artists were obliged to alter the painting to conform 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 still lifes in the bookish bureaucracy of the genres.

Meanwhile the alternative arrangement was flourishing. All serious fine art collectors, dealers and art critics in Paris paid far more than attention to new developments in the Salon des Independants than they did to the same quondam repetitive mode of academic painting in the official Salon. Private schools prospered, including the Academie Julian (started 1868), Charles Gleyre's School (started 1843), Academie Colarossi (started 1870) and the Lhote Academy (started 1922). In London, the leading unofficial academy was the Slade School of Fine Fine art (opened 1871), which competed with the hopelessly arid pedagogy methods of the official Majestic Academy. There were other schools that taught art design, such as the famous German Bauhaus design school (1919-32). Meanwhile Secession - see, for example, 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 brusk, past the plow of the century, everything that was new, innovative and exciting was happening 'outside' the official system.

European Academies of Fine Art: Origins and History

The get-go modernistic fine art university was the Academy of Art in Florence founded in 1562 by the painter, architect and fine art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), under M Duke Cosimo 1 de Medici.

The second important fine art university, the Academy of Art in Rome (named after Saint Luke, the patron saint of painters), initiated in Rome about 1583, was sponsored by the Pope and presided over past the painter Federico Zuccaro (1542-1609). Due to opposition past powerful local painters guilds, the spread of fine art academies throughout Italian republic was boring.

Growth of the University Organization

Outside Italy, the first university to be 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 ascendant during the period 1663-83.

Despite its close affinity with the Italian academies, which were profoundly respected by travellers on the Grand Tour, the French Majestic Academy was much more active. Information technology opened branches in provincial cities, it awarded scholarships for report at the French University in Rome and became the model for all the other royal and regal 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 during the eighteenth century in several German language states, and in cities in Italy and Switzerland. The first official American Academy of the Fine Arts appeared in Philadelphia, in 1805. In Ireland, at that place are 2 academies of visual art: the Imperial Hibernian Academy (RHA), founded in 1823, and the Royal Ulster University of Arts (RUA), established in 1930.

Academic Art in the 20th-Century - Largely Irrelevant

The reputation of academic-style art fell farther during the start three decades of the 20th-century. First, as mentioned above, there was the Expressionist movement followed by Cubism, both of which were seen every bit wholly anti-establishment. Then, during the period 1916-25, the Dada motility attacked the very idea of traditional art. After this, with the exception of figurative Surrealism (1925-50) and American Scene Painting (1925-45), abstraction dominated art until at to the lowest degree the 60s. Thus, movements like Neo-Plasticism (1918-31), Abstract Expressionism (1947-65), and Op-Art (1955-lxx), to proper name but three, championed a completely unlike prepare of aesthetics to that of academic art. None of these styles necessitated whatsoever form of bookish training, or traditional craftsmanship, and most seemed to contradict some, if not all, of the rules laid down by the Greeks, re-discovered by the Italian Renaissance and promoted by the academies.

Later 1960, the art world - whose eye was at present located in New York, not Paris - dumbed down even further - the mass consumer imagery of Pop Art contrasting with the austere severity of Minimalism. To confuse matters further, completely new types of art were invented, such every bit Conceptual art, and Installation art. New forms of fine art photography emerged, besides as various types of digital and computer art. By the late 1980s/ early 1990s, contemporary art competitions, like the Turner Prize were rarely, if always, won past traditional or academically trained artists. In other words, on the surface at least - the art academy had - by 2000 - become near irrelevant to the mainstream practice of art.

Academic Art in the 21st-Century: Former Values v Computer Software

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

So why might at that place be a resurgence of academic art? Well, let's go one thing straight, art taught in today's academies is very unlike to that taught fifty years ago, allow solitary 100 years ago. So academic art itself has undergone significant modernization, in both content and methods of pedagogy. But the main reason why information technology may become more important, is that today information technology is abstract, hypermodern art which dominates: it is this stuff that is at present mainstream. So perhaps collectors will look for something new - like a return to quondam values, at least in painting or sculpture. Against this, is the ever-increasing power of computers, with their art and design software, and other online tools, that may eventually brand all paw-made fine art redundant, if not extinct.

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