“By an academy is understood an assembly of men the most expert in science or in art, their object being to investigate truth, and to find fixed rules always conducing to progress and perfection.” Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1799)
One of the most glorious paradoxes of teaching Art History is that I spend so much of my time teaching about the Avant Garde. Here I am, with my advanced academic degree, expounding upon the importance of such figures as Malevich and Duchamp, who seem to embody the antithesis of the idea of The Academy in all its staid respectability.
Good portions of my students are Fine Arts students, eagerly taking drawing, painting, and design. In their studio courses, they are replicating all the basic lessons that have gone unchanged for hundreds of years. After all, learning to draw is much the same as learning to write. You look at something, and then attempt to replicate it by training your muscles to form those shapes as you perceive them.
However, the root of art schools, those royal academies established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were not simply after teaching basic muscle control. No, it was not that simple! As the quote from Mengs illustrates above, there was an important theory behind the academy. There was a belief that there was a right way of making art that needed to be taught by exemplary men who were embodiments of this right way of art making. This can be clearly seen in another quote by Mengs (the emphases are mine):
“The fine arts, as liberal ones, have their fixed rules founded in reason and on experience, by which means they join to obtain their end, which is the perfect imitation of nature; from whence the academy of these arts ought not to comprehend alone the execution, but ought to apply principally to the theory and to the speculation of rules, since indeed these arts terminate in the operation of the hand; but if this is not directed by good theory, they will be deprived of the title of liberal arts.”
In other words, art must perfectly imitate nature; however, unless your imitation of nature is based in learning the theory and rules as to why it must be so, you are a simple craftsperson, no different from a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.
So it was in the Art Academy for about two hundred years. Student imitated the teacher, became a teacher, taught his students, and the whole cycle repeated itself. (I am using male pronouns quite intentionally, as women were almost entirely refused entry into the Academy).
This stifling tradition bred what is now known by Art Historians as Academic Art. The term is generally used as a pejorative: art that is polished, refined, pretty, and generally focuses on a very limited category of subjects like mythology, or history vignettes.
It really should be no surprise that eventually there was rebellion in the ranks. How many times can the same painting be painted by a successive generation before someone finally complains: “THIS IS BORING!”?
The Realists poked a hole in the wall of the Academy. The Impressionists tore down the doors. Then, a whole flood of what we now call Modern Artists invaded and routed the Academics almost entirely.
Today, the Academy still exists, but is forever changed. Beginning students still learn to draw and paint in much the same way as before. Now, however, we academics help students find their own voice along the way. Instead of forming every student to do exactly the same thing in the same way, we encourage them to find out what makes their approach unique to them, and to develop that individual spark.
The Academy is dead.
Long live the Academy!
!["Anton Raphael Mengs - Self-Portrait [c.1775]" by Gandalf's Gallery is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/545a242be4b04f070d49e9eb/1605657709761-DIZD46QL5MTSP5XBKJ7U/Screen+Shot+2020-11-17+at+5.01.37+PM.png)
