Gustave Courbet @190
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- "I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of 'art for art's sake.' No! I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality. To know in order to do: such has been my thought. To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see them — in a word, to create a living art — this has been my aim." Gustave Courbet, preface to World's Fair catalogue, 1855.
Academic art was first criticised by Realist artists such as Gustave Courbet, as being based on clichés and representing fantasies and tales of mythology while real social concerns were being ignored. Impressionists, who were associated with loose brushstrokes, criticized the smooth finish of academic art.
As modern art and its avant-garde gained more power, academic art was further denigrated, and seen as sentimental, clichéd, conservative, non-innovative, bourgeois, and "styleless". The French referred derisively to the style of academic art as "art pompier" (pompier means fireman) alluding to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David (who was held in esteem by the academy) which often depicted soldiers wearing fireman-like helmets. The paintings were called "grande machines" which were said to have manufactured false emotion through contrivances and tricks.
This denigration of academic art reached its peak through the writings of art critic Clement Greenberg who stated that all academic art is "kitsch".
Other artists, such as the Symbolist painters and some of the Surrealists, were kinder to the tradition. As painters who sought to bring imaginary vistas to life, these artists were more willing to learn from a strongly representational tradition. Once the tradition had come to be looked on as old-fashioned, the allegorical nudes and theatrically posed figures struck some viewers as bizarre and dreamlike.
With the arrival of Postmodernism, academic art has been brought back into history books and discussion, though many postmodern art historians hold a bias against the "bourgeois" nature of the art.
