Roots of the 19th Century Art Machine

Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp.5-7, 16-18.

THE  medieval painters' guilds still  ruled in French cities  at the  beginning of the seventeenth century. Their  privileges were  jealously  guarded, but inroads had already been  made in their  once solid legal front and a more complicated framework was developing.

Essential  to this new framework was the  international diffusion of art and the shifting of its centers. The Valois kings (ruled from 1328 to 1589) had imported great Italian works and  artists of their era to create unrivaled monuments to  the king's glory.  It became the custom for many painters to be trained in Rome, far from the French guild system's control. . . .

Against the background of  the  regency's antipathy  toward antiforeigner political disturbance  the  Italian-trained "free" artists and some rebels within  the guild were able to make their play for independence. In 1648 they  obtained lettres-patentes from the royal government giving them the right to work in the guild's territory and to conduct a school of  drawing. The  Royal   Academy, so established, was at  first merely  independent of the guild, but soon dominated and then replaced it in power and  prestige.

ARTIST AS LEARNED MAN: TRIUMPH  OF  THE ROYAL  ACADEMY

In  consolidating its  monopoly of  privilege, the  Academy also emphasized a new conception of the artist: no longer an artisan or a low-caste hawker of  wares, he was instead a learned man, a teacher of the high principles of beauty and  taste. Under Charles Lebrun as rector, the Academy obtained the monopoly on the teaching of drawing "from  life," expanded its membership by forcing all "free" painters and brevetaires into its organization, and laid down the ideological framework --  a rigid hierarchy of subject matter by cultural  importance, a definition of "correct" style and a program of training to inculcate it -- that was to persist as the basis of the Academic system.

The concept of an  academy was an  Italian import as were some of the  theories on  style. Holding aloft the  example of  Poussin, the revered  Italianate-French master, Lebrun and some of his successors succeeded in imposing certain theories as doctrine. In brief, these were the precepts:

1.  Classical   and   Christian  themes  are the only proper  subject matter.
2. Only  the  most  "perfect" forms  (as found in classical  sculpture and  the painting of Raphael) should be selected  from  nature to portray such subjects.
3. Only  a certain set of "nobly" expressive positions and gestures (again classical or high Renaissance in origin) are appropriate in the representation of the human figure.
4. The human figure is the highest form and expresses perfect "absolute" beauty.
5.  Pictorial  composition should  preserve classical   balance, harmony, and unity: there should be no  jarring elements either of form  or  expression.
6.  Drawing is the probity of art. . . .

THE Revolution brought the  most critical change in  the Academy since its inception. The  Royal Academy of 150 or so members was suppressed in 1792. This move  came at the instigation of a dissident group from within its ranks, led by its young public hero, Jacques-Louis David. After several  Republican substitutes under David's direction, the Academy returned in its new form as the Section  de Peinture  et Sculpture  o£ the Classe des Beaux-Arts in Napoleon's Institut  de  France. Six of the eight original members, including David, were former members of the Royal Academy.

In 1803  the  lnstitut was reorganized and the  painting section membership increased to ten.  Its powers were well defined by the emperor. Along with the traditional jurisdiction over  the  Prix de Rome [a prize which allowed a young artists to study in Rome] and the  Academy at  Rome, this section had  the exclusive power   over   admission  and  awards  in   the   salons.    Moreover, although state  prizes, commissions, and teaching appointments to the new Ecole des Beaux-Arts were subject to approval by the government ministry concerned with fine arts, the real power of selection lay with the Section  de Peinture.

GOVERNMENT PATRONAGE AND  THE NEW  ELITE

The principal concern of the revolutionary and succeeding nineteenth-century governments was legitimation. Following the  royal examples of the past, art was accepted as being an essential exposition of  the  symbols  of  power.  Nineteenth-century France exhibited the most widespread, comprehensive government involvement with  art of  any  state. The culmination was the international exhibitions in 1855 and 1867 at which Louis Napoleon dazzled the sovereigns of Europe with French art.

Patriotically symbolic history painting, which had flourished under Lebrun, was given a new impetus in David's severely classicist  painting. As  director of revolutionary  pageants, the new "dictator of the art world" applied the repertoire of neoclassic symbols to costume, processional accouterments, and decorations. From the political symbolism of the Roman Republic it was an easy step to the glorification of Napoleon as the new caesar.  So it went with the various restorations  and  particularly the  Second Empire. The Academy,  although decreeing pure "history" painting with classical or biblical themes for the aspiring student, came to assimilate to its tradition grandiloquent  works on current patriotic events, particularly contemporary battle scenes. . . .

With its new establishment the Academy  had elevated the painter to a higher social position than  ever before.  Not only did  it bestow the status of learned man, an equal of the philosophers and men of letters of the  other sections of the Institut; but also the Academy was a relatively independent part of the state bureaucracy, and its members were in a position qualitatively very different from that of even the most esteemed court painter, who was, after all, just a higher type of servant. As an example for  all to see of  what a painter could   attain, it  was an undoubted  influence upon the status of all artists.