William Bouguereau just blew my mind!
polycounter lvl 19
Has anyone ever heard of William Bouguereau? I sure hadn't before yesterday. Oh man, I feel so cheated. Art Renewal Center is this amazing art site, and their philosophy is well worth reading, the title is The Great 20th Century Art Scam: or how Arrogance, Greed and Folly
Nearly Destroyed 2500 years of Western Art
http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/philosophy1.asp
My favorate, and most telling, quote.
If you were an Alma-Tadema or Bouguereau dealer, you had a list of a hundred clients wanting to buy their work. But their technique permitted them to only paint one canvas every 3 to 8 weeks, so you stood biting your nails waiting for each canvas that you knew was sold long before it was completed. Modernists, however, could often complete a single canvas each and every day. Some did even more than that. This was certainly true with all of the biggest names. Whether we are speaking of Picasso, Modrian, Matisse or De Kooning. Many of their works could be completed in a couple of days or a couple of hours. Their dealers now had an enormous supply to meet whatever demand they could generate. They had high motivation to prove that these paintings were not only as valuable as the prior generation's, but that they were even better. And when the money pouring in from this consummate con game, they were able to buy themselves historians, writers and critics, who happily developed complex, convoluted arguments to justify their philosophical positions.
Incredible fortunes were made from all of this. Incredible fortunes are still at risk invested in these works.
I recomend everyone read it, and then check out Bouguereaus gallery. Here is a sample
http://store1.yimg.com/I/yhst-30479181885695_1830_72250644
I feel very similarly to this writer, and I have all throughout college, and I faced the derogatory attitude from my peers and professors, I thought I was alone.
Nearly Destroyed 2500 years of Western Art
http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/philosophy1.asp
My favorate, and most telling, quote.
If you were an Alma-Tadema or Bouguereau dealer, you had a list of a hundred clients wanting to buy their work. But their technique permitted them to only paint one canvas every 3 to 8 weeks, so you stood biting your nails waiting for each canvas that you knew was sold long before it was completed. Modernists, however, could often complete a single canvas each and every day. Some did even more than that. This was certainly true with all of the biggest names. Whether we are speaking of Picasso, Modrian, Matisse or De Kooning. Many of their works could be completed in a couple of days or a couple of hours. Their dealers now had an enormous supply to meet whatever demand they could generate. They had high motivation to prove that these paintings were not only as valuable as the prior generation's, but that they were even better. And when the money pouring in from this consummate con game, they were able to buy themselves historians, writers and critics, who happily developed complex, convoluted arguments to justify their philosophical positions.
Incredible fortunes were made from all of this. Incredible fortunes are still at risk invested in these works.
I recomend everyone read it, and then check out Bouguereaus gallery. Here is a sample
http://store1.yimg.com/I/yhst-30479181885695_1830_72250644
I feel very similarly to this writer, and I have all throughout college, and I faced the derogatory attitude from my peers and professors, I thought I was alone.
Replies
Picasso to take one example was classically trained before he took on the non-traditionalist approach. Take a look at his starting work. To say he had no skill is to not know his history nor his aims. Many things going on in his work.
Sure the dealers have maligned many an artist, but that's just biz.
Bouguereau is great. Have you seen Turner's portraits? There's a man who bridged the two worlds, realism and abstraction, often in the same piece.
I went through my Art A level and Art foundation course being taught by people that didn't think the great masters had anything to learn from. ( it makes me mad thinking about it now that I just sucked it up instead of challenging it more ) It was a very frustrating experience for me. I always wanted to paint in a representational fashion and people like Carravaggio were my Gods, but it was always rammed down my throat to 'get a much bigger brush' or 'paint with your feet' or some other such nonsense. I didn't really see it for what it was at the time. i.e hippy stoner Art teachers. My illustration course was a huge relief, since I got to pursue painting in the way that I wanted to. But I still feel like I've missed out an a classic Art training to a certain extent. And yeah, Bouguereaus work is quite remarkable. And I'd never heard of him.
'Oretes Pursued by the Furies' is one of my favourites
Paul's rule of thumb for choosing an art school: Forget facilities and repuation. Look at the type and quality of work that the professors are producing on their own. Is that what you want to learn to do? If not, look elsewhere.
P.S. I "discovered" Bougereau at the Museum of Art in Minneapolis in 1996. Extremely talented painter who got little historical attention because the noisy impressionists and their artistic heirs were his contemporaries. He was associated with the art academy, which in the eyes of avante garde art historians made him easily dismissable. He made art that people liked ... so that made him that much easier to dismiss.
I guess I lucked out too... it was drilled into me early on that if I want to study abstraction I should first learn from the masters before deciding what I want to throw away or change. Better to start from knowledge than ignorance, IMO.
From my aesthetics education, I understand this conflict as 'The Academy vs. The Moderns'. To me, if you even choose a side in this little 'art war', you disrespect the other side. Poop, I think you do yourself wrong if you accept Ross's idea that Modernism was calculated to commercially overtake Academism. That's just balderdash.
It all comes down to ideas of convention. From what I understand about the Academy, by the late 19thC, they were exclusively represenational, and only recognized Classical or religious themes -- and maybe lanscapes -- as legitimate content. Along came the young turks of Impressionism, messing everybody up, and then the Moderns, etc., etc. You think this seems overblown? People ran screaming from Post-Impressionst exhibitions. They were afraid of paintings.
History moves in waves. You get one extreme, and then the other. Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s appear to me to have been the peak of the Modernist movement, and the freaky thing is not that the Academy's name was smeared beyond recognition in the 20thC, but that you can go major in Painting today and still be forced to learn to paint like Pollock. That's wrong. The fact that the pendulum hasnt swung back the other way indicates to me that painting, as a dynamic medium, is dead. Pictorial artwork is no longer the vital means of cultural communication that it once was, and its limits have been pioneered, explored, exploited, and finally commerically paved over in the last 50 years.
Therefore, since we can now look back at all the many trends that have happened in history, WHY do we need to take sides about one or another convention's value? They're ALL good in their own way, and I can give you my reasons for any one. I agree that Academic representational styles have been denigrated beyond belief, and that it's still hard to get past the Modernist prejudice when you get to art school. That's wrong. But is it now necessary to go and commit genocide on the Moderns in revenge, Mr. Fred Ross? This isn't a Balkan tribal feud, after all, it's just freakin' ART!
I just wish my college Aesthetics teacher, Larry Bakke, was still alive to see The Great Academic Backlash! He'd laugh.
/jzero
I highly recommend this book.
Jzero, you didn't go to Massive Black, did you. it opened my eyes to the value of academic painting, as it relates to digital skills, and color theory. it shows how inadequately instruction in any current art school, outside of the Watt's Atelier in san Diego, is just not up to the instructioal quality of the late 19th century painters. Painting is not irrelevant, especially those working in the fields of Concept art. That has a direct bearing on the Game Industry.
Daz There is a woman in Palo Alto that teaches "Academic drawing". If you have a particular week in March free, you may be able to go, her classes are less than $1000.00 a weekm but they are intensive. I'm seriously thinking about it.
Scott
Take a look at some Ingres while you're at it... ridiculously perfect cloth and textures, almost looks like a photo until you see the fleshy parts which are all slightly stylised.
Spot the person who's been talking to Laurel, Ben... heh
Mop I have seen a fair amount of prints of Dear August Ingres, and his sketches are even more fascinating. My indoctrination was that Ingres was the last of the traditional painters before Photography, and that Impressionism was the reaction to photography. But this now seems not to be the case.
Scott
Scott
I didn't say that painting was irrelevant, I said it had reached its limits as a medium for expression, on its own. Up until about the 1970s, painting was a medium that existed by and for itself in Western culture. But it doesn't have anywhere to go now, thematically. My aesthetics professor was all about McLuhan's ideas about media and the way it moves and changes over time, and I've found those ideas to be useful. He said that when a medium is new, it uses the resources of the old media to generate its own. I think I see the very new medium of games using painting this way.
I agree, Scott, painting has vital tools for concept art and games. But it's not the strict Academic convention. What we see now in the return to representational painting is not to revive the goals of the Academy painters (beauty and 'pure art'), but to use the techniques of the old school to do new work for the (infinitely more imaginative) game trade.
But what I see Fred Ross of ArtRestoration.org doing is picking up the old "what is good art" argument, when that's just completely unnecessary. He could be singing the praises of the Academy style without his negative posturing, and just let people see the stuff for the value that it has. Must we fight about who draws better pictures?
And YES, every painting school instructor everywhere who plays the hipster Modernist card and still teaches Abstract Expressionism needs to be, in the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, "whacked across the mouth with a basketball shoe." And made to study Frazetta!
/jzero
Anyway back to the point, wow, realism vs. abstraction...First of all I think anyone that discounts a whole field of artistic endeavor as meaningless or as some scam to fill the coffers of art dealers and ancient critics should be smacked with that same, aforementioned basketball shoe. They would be no better than the monderist critics claiming Abstract Expressionism was a "higher" form of art than anything representational. It's just different, yes non-representational art is more academic in the sense that alot of times you need to know something about the artist and his or her particular motives to "get it." Anyway people obsess FAR too much about what an artist ment with a particular piece. In all seriousness, who cares? It seems to me that a personally derived meaning would be more significant to the person who thought of it than what someone told them to think of it anyway.
Regarding that, Carl Jung said "Being essentially the instrument for his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no reason for expecting him to interpret it for us. He has done the best that in him lies in giving it form, and he must leave the interpretation to others and to the future...To grasp it's meaning we must allow it to shape us as it once shaped him."
Representational art is certainly often more attractive, reproduces much better, and is mentally alot easier to deal with. However as some in the art field have pointed out, in the end it's a lie. A painting can NEVER be a potent as the actual experience that it attempts to portray. Some of the non-representational painters sought to create original experiences with their paintings. It's not a painting of anything, its a painting.
Also there is a reaction that I think certain personalities have to being told "This is how you do this, and there is no other way" which is basically how the Art Academies tought in the 19th century. Nowadays I think people are having the same reaction, but just to a different standard. I certainly had my share of painting instructors that would poop on realism every chance they got.
I think our community is alittle one-sided toward representational art simply because commercial art and illustration almost always requires some degree of realism. You can't tell an art director who hired you to create some concept sketchs of characters that the mess of lines and colors is really more of a psychological portrait of the character...they wanted a picture of the character. However, abstract forms can be a great starting place for a piece that is eventually going to be representational...Look at Ralph Steadman's work. Anyway, my main point, as I said at the begining, is that it's an stupid mistake to drag one type of art up above another as "better" And besides, all this is just about western art...lets not forget that there are lots of cultures who value abstraction without the need for philosophical noodlings about it. Nearly ALL tribal art is abstracted to some degree or another...the beginnigs of cubism can be found by looking at the African masks that Picasso was so fond of checking out.
Well I'm all ranted out for right now, but it was definatly fun dragging up this old argument.
peas
James Ball
This guy is one of my favourite traditional painters ever, "The Lady of Shallott" (bottom of page)is just jaw dropping in real life.
http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/art.asp?aid=79