Conclusion

Boime, Albert

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Conclusion

Albert Boime

The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century

~This study has investigated the French Academic pedagogy and production in painting during the nineteenth century and their relationship both to progressive trends and to the official, or State, apparatus devoted to the Fine Arts. Although emphasis has of necessity been placed on the Academic viewpoint, references have been made to independent...

Author

Albert Boime

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00116.013

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16910

Conclusion

This study has investigated the French Academic pedagogy and production in painting during the nineteenth century and their relationship both to progressive trends and to the official, or State, apparatus devoted to the Fine Arts. Although emphasis has of necessity been placed on the Academic viewpoint, references have been made to independent movements in so far as they were affected by, and in turn affected, this viewpoint. Almost all of the important representatives of these movements began their careers in the studio of one or another Academic painter, from whom they absorbed significant lessons for their mature development.

Particular attention has been paid to the compositional and landscape programmes in the curriculum, and their consequences for the evolution of the aesthetics of the sketch. The nineteenth-century conflict between the generative and executive phases of painting has often been noted by historians and critics; however, no one has previously traced how or where the emphasis shifted from the second to the first of these phases. This study shows that the shift occurred in the framework of Academic pedagogy and production, and that this shift was anticipated in contemporary art criticism – itself an outgrowth of Academic theory.

The executive phase was foreshortened to the vanishing point as the independents advanced the Academy’s isolated conception of the sketching operation. The sketch had always been admired for its spontaneity and sincerity; but the Academicians maintained that a good sketch had to be translated into a great painting through an intellectualizing process. In this way, a strict division between the two phases of sketching and finishing has been formulated, and each was assigned neat, precise functions. As tastes changed, emphasis was shifted from the executive, refining phase, to the generative, spontaneous phase. But this shift could not have occurred if the Academy had not already separated the two phases, and already allocated to each its autonomous role. The qualities eventually associated with the aesthetics of the sketch were exactly those which had been assigned to the preparatory sketch throughout the history of the Academy; the independents had only to shift emphasis from the executive to the generative phase and systematize the sketching procedures.

By showing that the change took place under the aegis of Academic doctrine, this study has endeavoured to construct a picture of the totality of French painting during the nineteenth century. Instead of considering this period as the scene of a heroic struggle of progressives against Academics, it shows the positive, if unintended, contribution of the Academy to the evolution of independent tendencies.

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