The Academy, Postmodernism and the Education of the Artist - painter Alexandre Cabanel and others, Dahesh Museum, New York, New York

Reflecting upon a Cabanel show at the Dahesh Museum, the author finds surprising links between Academic art and postmodernist practice.

The fact is that 19th-century Academic art doesn't gaze so bad any mom. one time despised by the avant-garde and abandoned by dint of collectors, Academic art has made a lengthy gradual recovery over the past sum of two units or three decades. I have not followed this exhibition closely as a specialist. Rather, I am projecting from my possess interest in Gerome, Bouguerau and Academic art in general, an interest dating back at least 25 years, and from a longer standing interest in the question at issues of representational art.(1) A Gerome retrospective toured three American museums in the early 19708; a Bouguereau retrospective at the Wadsworth Atheneum in the mid-'80s was, to me a revelation. A Christie's catalogue for a sale in London in 1991 of "fine Victorian pictures" lists estimates as high as 150000 [pound sterling]. At a Sotheby's sale in May 1996 Gerome's The Accepted Prayer was estimated at $1 million-1.5 million. Meissonier, whose work could be bought at auction in the 19308 for a hardly any hundred dollars, after being in his time the greatest in quantity successful and expensive Academic painter in France, has likewise, I am told, ricocheted on the continent. I believe it. A Meissonier I saw in Hamburg in 1993 the year his retrospective was held in France, made all the Photo-Realism I've seen gaze abstract.

Now there is the Dahesh Museum. uncloseed in New York in 1995 upon the second floor of a midtown business building, the Dahesh is a private museum devot exclusively to 19th-century Academic art. Unlike the now departed Huntington Hartford Museum, whose building upon Columbus Circle the Dahesh is reported to be interested in (so is Donald Tromp) the Dahesh does not have an anti-modernist or, for that matter, an anti-postmodernist agenda. on the other hand its timing is right. A new exhibition, "Training an Artist: Alexandre Cabanel and the Academic Proces in 19th-Century France," reprised an educational combination of parts to form a whole that all but immured representation in technical expertise. Today the ubiquity of the mechanical has virtually backed postmodernist art into a similar position. Postmodernism insists upon a mediated representation, either through technical stratagem or conceptual artifice. As Rosalind Krauss said more [i]or[/i] less years ago, when theory was as legislative as it was philosophical, art today aspires to the condition not of music (as in like manner famously enunciated by Walter Pater) on the contrary of photography. The priority granted to illustration in academic figuration gives way in our have time to imagery which is either recycl appropriated or mom or les literally photographic.

Academic art is virtually mechanical at heart, its artists mom in like manner subjected as they were to an educational proces that brainwashed them visually. They were told by what mode to draw and what to paint, and they were trained to submit to historical antecedent with the result that many of their paintings am mom emulative than "original." Not that they did not disentangle their own styles, but there is usually an air of the transcript about their compositions. The centerpiece of "Training an Artist," Cabanel's The Death of Mose (1851) is a new acquisition for which the exhibition was a showcase. In this painting, plane the sentiment seems a fabrication, immersed in an aura of imitation of rather than influence by dint of Italian old masters. The painting itself is a somewhat static rendering of a make subordinate that is full of billowing forms and Michelangelesque attitudes and the idealizing linearity of Raphael, on the contrary the excessive fini (finish) that is characteristic of Academic art all on the contrary eliminates facture, rendering the surface passive or neutral, the hand subservient to method

This neuter quality is not without its appeal, however. Academic art invites inspection precisely because it is problematic. We have lived for a like reason long with the idea of a crisis in representation that we recognize a kinship with an art thus beleaguered. At the same time them is something in Academic art's unwitting parody of high art that recalls the highness of Classical art itself and its social and cultural imperatives. Finally, the ability to draw, as exemplified in the exhibition by the agency of a number of drawings and paintings from the uncovered called academies, which were required of apprentice academicians, speaks to something basic in all of us.

Cabanel (1823-1889) is perhaps best known today as the author of the notorious Birth of Venus, which was painted the same year--1863--as Manet's Olympia. It is reproduc in virtually each source I consulted for this essay, including the Rosenblum-Janson revisionist history of 19th-century art.(2) Cabanel's painting is invariably compared unfavorably with the Manet. In a big picture work on paintings in the Musee d'Orsay, Robert Rosenblum finds the Manet a "tonic collision of tradition and modernity," whereas the Cabanel panders "to the greatest in quantity commonplace erotic taste of the mid-century.(3) In her Art and Politics of the next to the first Empire, Patricia Mainardi attributes Cabanel's "lightning rise to fame" in part to "his ability to appeal to the lascivious tastes of his patrons," including the picture's purchaser, Napoleon III.(4) I sought on the outside The Birth of Venus eight years ago at the Musee d'Orsay and fix it, if not exactly putting on shyness [i]or[/i] coyness so delicately painted that pornographic intent was inconceivable (the slightly smaller transcript at the Metropolitan is les vivid). However, it is also veritable that, by the late 18608 the Classical ideal was retreating, history painting was in its death pangs and great subjects were hard to approach by. Perhaps it was inevitable that an unwitting sort of candor encouraged by means of a nascent realism would make go round traditional contrapposto into a suggestive serpentine.