The Relevance of 19th Century Painting

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Fred Ross presented this keynote address at the Oil Painters of America Meeting, May 5, 2006:

Ninety-nine percent of all paintings being done between 1850 and 1900 were not Impressionism or Postimpressionism. Instead they were academic art, which was taught in the great academies of the time and exhibited in the yearly European exhibitions, especially in the Paris salons.

The words "academic art" have come to be used in a dismissive or disparaging way, being considered petty, banal, mundane, and uninspired. However, academic more accurately means a dedication to standards of excellence both in training and in artistic execution, and a dedication to teaching and learning with great discipline and devotion to the methods, developments, and breakthroughs of prior generations.

But while the past was to be fully appreciated, so too were artists encouraged to develop their craft to ever higher levels of creative and technical excellence and expression.

Yet this academic art was characterized as oppressive, narrow, and superficial by the "official" pedagogues of abstraction. The exact opposite was the truth, however.

I will show that the academic artists of the 19th century and William Bouguereau in particular were not only relevant to the times and relevant to the major thread of art history, but that they were relevant to the evolution of art itself. They were working at what will certainly be considered the most important crossroads in human history, when humanity, after countless generations as slaves, vassals, and serfs, using the creative words of their newly found political philosophy, threw off their chains and rebuilt societies based on human rights and democratic rule.

The artists of their day, unlike the writers and poets at their sides, have not only been unfairly treated in our schools and textbooks, but have been intentionally degraded and maligned in articles, catalogs, and even art reference books and art history texts.

These writings could more accurately be understood as massive propaganda brochures put out by the modernist victors writing what clearly suited their transitory cause and interests. Their interests surely are not in the interests of great art, art history, and the integrity of art education, which we must pass down responsibly to the next generation.

Relevance is a word that has been much used and abused when critics and historians endeavor to place artists and writers into the "progressive" view of art history as it has made its way through the centuries from the early Renaissance until the modern day. 

Beginning with the art of about 1840 onward, 20th century scholars tossed out all the normal criteria for judging, describing, and chronicling the history of art.

While many great and accomplished artists have probably been lost or under-appreciated, for the most part, the great and near-great have received their due or at least reasonable notice in the discipline of art history. That was true until the mid-19th century.

Beginning with the art of about 1840 onward, 20th century scholars tossed out all the normal criteria for judging, describing, and chronicling the history of art. Almost all the art textbooks that have been used since the middle of the 20th century have rewritten the history of the 19th century to fit the needs and prejudices of the modernist art world, which sees all of art history through a "deconstructionist" lens.

This lens defines as important, valuable, and relevant only those works that broke one or another of the rules and parameters by which works of art were formerly valued and appreciated. Art history was seen as a long march from the "breakthroughs" of Impressionism through a stream of different movements that led the way to abstraction—espoused with a strident religious fervor by the followers of this "new history" to be the greatest of all forms and styles of art.

It is one of the goals of this talk to expose the truth of modernist art history, and it is very much on topic to bring into question any practice that purports to analyze art history in a way that deliberately suppresses a valid and correct understanding of what actually happened.

It is of the utmost importance that the history of what actually took place not be lost for all time due to the transitory prejudice and tastes of a single era. This is exactly what almost happened to the reputations of William Bouguereau and the other great academic artists of the 19th century.

There are few if any left alive from their time who can be currently interviewed. But there is fortunately a mountain of information and evidence still available for the clear, even-handed, responsible, and fair-minded scholar to access, organize, and analyze the actual history. Doing so may yet save for current and future generations an ability to know for ourselves by knowing what came before, not as we might have wanted it to be, but indeed as it actually was.

This must be done if art history as a field of scholarship is not to be ultimately discovered to have devolved into nothing more than documents of propaganda geared toward market enhancement for valuable collections passed down as wealth-conserving stores of value.

Successful dealers, who derived great wealth by selling such works, works created in hours instead of weeks, had little trouble lining up articulate masters of our language to build complex fire walls of cognoscenti jargon presented everywhere as brilliant analysis.

These market-influenced treatises ensured the financial protection of these collections. Such "artspeak" as it has come to be known is a form of contrivance that uses self-consciously complex and convoluted babble to impress, mesmerize, and ultimately silence the human instinct so that it cannot identify honestly what has been paraded before it.

This brainwashing authoritatively confounds the evidence of our senses, which otherwise any sane person would question.

The "authority" of high positions, the "authority" of books and print, and the "authority" of certificates of accreditation attached to the names of the chief proponents of modernism have all conspired to impress and humble those whose common sense would rise up in opposition to what would have been evident nonsense if it had emanated from the mouths and pens of anyone without such a preponderance of "authority" as backup.

Finally, with adulation and the highest praise being paid to such artistic shams as cans of excrement, the jargon has at last come to be recognized as the glib artspeak that it is. This comes first by a trickle, then a stream. As a child cries out in innocence, a flood of voices will finally be heard above the din of sycophants struck dumb.

Softly, "the Emperor has no clothes" can be heard as it floats above the multitude. As I speak now, the worst has passed as revelation wakes the sleeping throng to their nearly lost aesthetic sensibilities still, thankfully, linked inextricably to human dignity.

In fact, it is in the realm of human dignity wherein one finds the truly prodigious accomplishments of the works of William Bouguereau. Born in 1825, just after the American and French Revolutions (two events more than any others that embody the breakthroughs of Enlightenment thinking), Bouguereau stood at the top of the list of the leading writers and artists of his day.

Their work was to codify those advances and bridge the gap from centuries of human societies ruled by kings and emperors who dictated by divine right to a civilization made of men and laws where governments could only gain legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

Fred Ross is chairman and founder of the Art Renewal Center. He holds a master’s degree in Art Education from Columbia, is an art educator, lecturer, collector, writer, artist, and a published art historian on the 19th century.