The artists of the French Academy and the artists of the French Avant-garde are often presented as being protagonists, but, in fact, each group defined itself in terms of the other. The French Academy was the bastion of the establishment, of rules and regulations and of order. The Avant-Garde bohemians were the original outsider artists, misfits without credentials, who were able to break the rules of art and change the course of art. But the Academy absorbed and co-opted and softened the concepts and techniques of the avant-garde artists, making the “radical” changes acceptable to the general public.
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Tags: academic art, Antonio Canova, art-for-art's sake, avant-garde, Beaux-Arts, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Francois Rude, French Academy, Horatio Greenough, Peter Burger, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Renato Poggioli, Romanticism, Royal Academy, Salon Exhibition