Advanced Guard before the Avant-Garde
There is some historical disagreement over when and where the avant-garde movement in the visual arts began. But it is clear that that the notion that changes in art come from the margins not the center came into existence and began to impact painting by the middle of the nineteenth century. What were the aesthetic and cultural conditions that made the avant-garde possible?
SINCERITY AND ARTIFICE IN REALISM
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Realism was an international movement. In England, with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, “realism” was a form of a return to the moral and ethical purpose of art in the Early Renaissance. However, in France, “realism” divided along two poles, “sincerity,” as with Millet and Courbet, or “artifice,” as with Manet.
The PRB were at first not known as individuals. In their debut exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1848, the artists were designated collectively, through their “PRB” signature on their paintings. The were at first savaged and attacked by the press, so badly that Gabriel Rossetti did not show publically again for a decade. However, their moral stance towards art as craft and elevated labor and the moral and religious content of their subject matter found a defender in England’s most powerful art critic, John Ruskin, who also felt that art should have a moral purpose. As the artists found support, they emerged from anomnymity. But the Pre-Raphaelites differed from their French counterparts in significant ways.
The Pre-Raphaelites took their name from the paintings from the pre-Raphaelite artists of the Early Renaissance: those painters who preceded Raphael. By opposing Raphael, the artists opposed the Royal Academy and the traditional classicism that was a hundred years old, out of date in content, and, to the minds of the young men, thoroughly degenerate. The PRB was a reforming group with the goal of returning painting to the medieval values of careful craft. There was a moral stance in their adherence to craft. In the meticulous attention to the infinite detail of nature, the artists were recording the moral presence of God in nature. This tradition of intense description can be traced back, not only to the Italian Renaissance but also to the medieval paintings of Northern Europe. In England, one could point to the meticulous art of Hans Holbein. To borrow Panofsky’s description of the artists of the Northern Renaissance, the realism of the Pre-Raphaelites was based upon a vision that was both “microscopic” and “macroscopic.” In other words, the artist saw as through a microscope and a telescope, perfect vision, both near and far: the world revealed in all its manifest detail.
Compared to their secular French counterparts, the PRB—Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—had a distinctly religious cast with Christianity of the New Testament providing inspiration as a source of spiritual value. They modeled themselves on the early Nineteenth century group, the Nazarenes, who also sought a more authentic art through a more “primitive” approach to art making. The young, all-male community of the PRB believed that art should deal with serious issues and made their debut in 1849 under a cloak of anonymity, hiding their individual identities under the signature “PRB.” Paintings, such as Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents and Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! which demonstrated the naïve traits of early Renaissance art, shrill colors, intense details broken into fragments and ignored pictorial order. “Disease,” “deformity,” “dissection,” “ugliness” were some of the charges against the art of the PRB. Queen Victoria sent for Millais’s offending painting and poor Rossetti never exhibited in public again. But from 1852 on the Brotherhood found valuable support from Ruskin who celebrated the “actual facts” and the “truth to nature” that took painting back to fundamentals. The PRB produced a revolution in taste and caused a new appreciation for Early Renaissance art.
The first group of the Pre-Raphaelites followed their predecessors of the Fifteenth century by painting on white ground, using bright and pure colors, and painted directly from the careful study of nature. The brightness of the hues, after centuries of subdued tones and deliberately darkened colors, came as a shock to the audiences of London who were blinded by this new light. The historically accurate detail was rendered at a level of the daguerreotype and the content of the painting was literary and contemporary, Biblical and mythological, and always with moral content and didactic lesson. It is often said that the English were a literary race, and that the French were more attuned to the visual arts. Although this comparison is simplistic, the English allowed and welcomed literary content while the French gradually removed narrative from the visual arts. While it is true that the PRB artists enjoyed painting literary subjects, from the Bible to Shakespeare to tales of King Arthur, all from English literature, the Pre-Raphaelites were very popular in France and, because of their contemporary subject matter, were often an inspiration for the Naturalists. As the leader in the Industrial Revolution, England was a society split between the future and the past, cherishing its own native heritage which, at the same time, destroying the past. Pre-Raphaelite art was similarly Janus-faced, looking to the past while examining the present. The Pre-Raphaelites told stories from the Bible and evoked a pre-modern Britain of King Arthur and fairies as an antidote to modern times. But, by the 1850s, the Pre-Raphaelites shifted their gaze to modern London and the modern problems of industrialization and modernization.
The Pre-Raphaelites were socially aware but not politically active, but, in their youth, they were rebels with a cause, announcing their presence in 1848. By returning the artists of the Early Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites found a primitive and pious sincerity in content and a sharp edged observation in technique that gave sacred stories an intense gloss of convincing detail. Unlike many of the avant-garde groups in Europe, the Pre-Raphaelites were not as overtly political or critical of the state. There is no question that witnessing, albeit at a distance, the Revolution of 1848, impacted the interest of the Pre-Raphaelite artists in the nation’s poor. England had lived through one revolution in the Seventeenth Century and had no desire to live through another. The English desired equilibrium over all things, particularly after witnessing the horror of the French Terror, and staved off a rebellion of the lower classed with small measures of Reform. Chartism, a reform movement, rather than a revolutionary movement, finally succeeded in securing universal male suffrage in 1867. Until then, according to French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, there was a real “affection” by the lower classes for the upper classes. Other English artists, such as the American, James Abbot McNeill Whistler and the French artist, James Tissot, painted the wealthy and privileged middle class in Great Britain, the PRB pioneered in the “problem picture,” or paintings that dwelt on the problems of modern life in the city, especially those faced by the lower classes.
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Avant-Garde Realism in England: Coping with Contemporary Life
At mid-century, young English artists were prepared for the Royal Academy in a system called the “schools,” or preparatory schools, such as Sass’s Academy and Heatherley’s School of Art. But the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds seemed less relevant to new artists, as a newly restive lower class demanded a voice in government and newly rich industrialists began to collect art. After the Reform Bill of 1832, the climate of English art changed and the shift away from ancient times and Renaissance models and towards a new interest in the great social and economic changes taking place in Britain. A group of young artists, some graduates of the “schools,” initiated a modern realism in England at the same time Gustave Courbet was preparing for his bold move to political realism. In 1848, the artists of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood established a style and content that was so successful and so beloved that the “realism” of this group lasted as an English tradition well into the Twentieth Century. The movement was complicated, combining vestiges of Neoclassicism, with careful drawing and historical content, and Romanticism, with a fascination with the Medieval past, and Realism, with a new emphasis on urban subject matter.
Debuting in the revolutionary year of 1848 under the mysterious acronym “PRB,” the paintings showed a virtuoso demonstration of technical prowess in painting and bright colors patterned after the original “pre-Raphaelites” of the Early Renaissance. To borrow Erwin Panofsky’s description of the artists of the Northern Renaissance, the realism of the PRB was based upon a vision that was both “microscopic” and “macroscopic.” In other words, the artist saw through both a microscope and a telescope, perfect vision, both near and far: the world revealed in all its manifest detail. With the Pre-Raphaelites, the attention to detail was nothing short of obsessive. The labor-intensive painting practices were based upon a morality of work and diligent labor that gave their works an aura of the medieval, as was intended. Pre-Raphaelite art acted as a rebuke to the lazy habits of the academic artist who copied, not nature, but artistic conventions. The influential art writer, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, called their academic practices “laborious idleness.” Although the PRB was rebellious against academic theories and practices, there were limits to the rebellion of these middle class men. The group resembled a boy’s club, for the men involved were quite young, and the women later associated with the PRB remained peripheral and played a larger role as models than as associates.
Art history has exorcised Pre-Raphaelites from the canon of correct art but the PRB was the first group to self-consciously declare themselves avant-garde artists. They issued a literary manifesto, published their own journal, The Germ, for four issues, opposed the kind of academic art that based upon Raphael, painted en plein air, and organized their own exhibitions three decades before the Impressionists. There were two main groups. The founding group, the “PRB,” was organized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1848 and included John Millais, who entered the Royal Academy at the age of eleven, and William Holman Hunt. All members selected by Rossetti, this group included lesser known painters and writers, Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner, and Frederick George Stephens. Meeting for the first time in 1848 in the studio of Millais, the original group were inspired by the German Nazarene artists and determined that three elements were necessary for them to establish a new kind of art. First, they had to be a disciplined group, which, second, produced a distinct doctrine, disseminated, lastly, by their own journal.
The idea of discipline and doctrine would have pleased Sir Joshua and the journal was designed to preempt the power of the art critics. However, the President would not have been pleased by the PRB’s refusal to take classical art as their model. Instead the Pre-Raphaelites rebuked the notion of “style” and formulas and looked to nature in a desire to retrieve a naïve vision. Clearly, the English idea of Realism was close to the French concept. Based upon science and a close study of nature, Realism in both nations sought to regain an innocent eye and to eliminate self-conscious style in favor of objective observation. Both the French and British Realists were part of a movement that was deliberately avant-garde and in rebellion against their respective academies. Both groups used realism, as approach and as content, to position their art to counter the stranglehold of the establishment. There were important divergences, however.
It would be more appropriate to say that the Realism of the French was a response to contemporary scenes of life in France, particularly life among the lower classes. The English Realists were more intent in precisely copying nature and losing themselves in the welter of details. For them, Realism was linked to an absolute and moral fidelity to Nature and their content was simply “English.” The “Englishness” of English art could be found both in the past and present in the art of the Pre-Raphaelites who were inspired by English literature and poetry and by the social problems in an industrial society. In contrast, the second group of Realist artists in England could also be termed “artisans,” whose realism was to be found in their exactitude of execution. This second group used precision to evoke the past.
Just as the first group of mid-century English artists were self-consciously archaic, so too did the second group also look back to Medieval art and its standard of excellence and pride in individual craft. This group, which formed around Rossetti and included, the painter, Edward Burne-Jones and the designer, William Morris, the leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the artist, Ford Maddox Brown. These men came together in 1852 in reaction to the horrors of mass manufacturing revealed in the Great Exhibition of 1851. They came, not from London, but from Oxford’s Exeter College and were unaware of the Pre-Raphaelite group until 1854. Once again, this is a male brotherhood in rebellion against the status quo. The Oxford Group rejected the “canon” of literary reading and looked to the Romantic English poets, such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But, typical of the Victorian period, they particularly admired Chaucer’s Medieval poems and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epic poems of King Arthur.
Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” (1856 – 85) was an updating of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1470), discovered by the Group in 1855. Like the German Romantics before them, these men looked to Gothic architecture for inspiration and traveled to Italy to see the early Renaissance murals. The only way, they surmised, to counter the pernicious influence of manufactured aesthetics was to become visual artists themselves. William Morris became an architect and interior designer and Edward Burne-Jones became a painter. The Oxford Group connected with the Pre-Raphaelites when Burne-Jones introduced himself to Rossetti. Also joining the Group were Arthur Hughes, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Valentine Cameron Prinsep, John Hungerford Pollen, and sculptor, Alexander Munroe. Together they painted murals of the life of King Arthur in the new building for the Oxford Debating Society.
Both the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Oxford Group had many followers and a long life span that dominated artistic and aesthetic life in England well into the Twentieth century. Sir Joshua Reynolds would not have been pleased to learn that the “English” style or “English school” of painting would never be established by chasing the classicism of the Italians or the English, in other words, “modeling,” but by a careful rendering of nature and a relentless observation of human behavior. The Pre-Raphaelites and their followers created “English” art precisely by defying Sir Joshua and his Discourse.
The Oxford Group began the Arts and Crafts Movement that merged effortlessly into the English version of Art Nouveau and its Liberty fabrics and designers, such as Archibald Knox and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The seven men of the Oxford Group were, as founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the precursors of Art Nouveau in France. Both movements were dreams of restoring respect for hand-crafted goods to counter bad middle class taste. However beautiful and popular these styles were, both Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau were to expensive and too elitist to be accessible to the middle class the movements were trying to reform. And yet, today, these avant-garde English styles are still living and still popular and still in use, having long since been assimilated into contemporary life.
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EUROPEAN REALISM, PART ONE
Although Realism is usually associated with the artistic movement in France, Realism was an international movement that was both visual and literary. Realism in the nineteenth century was not just a political or social impulse, it was also a set of concepts that challenged and replaced the rubrics of Romanticism. This podcast examines the principles of the Realists artists.
EUROPEAN
Realism in French and English Art
The main goal of a Realist artist in France was to create an objective and detached description of banal reality, as it existed, in all its ordinariness. Realism, tended to adhere to a particular social point of view that of championing the poor or the lower classes. Depending upon the artist, Realism could be very confrontational, like the art of Gustave Courbet or very conservative, like the paintings of Rosa Bonheur. Basically Realism, expressed a modern desire to look at that which existed in the here and now, rather than re-create a dead world in a dead language, such as Neoclassicism, or to imagine a fantasy world, in the way of Romanticism. Realism demanded, not only new content, but also a new way of making art, based upon the question of how to see, really see, and to look at the “real.” The result of these Realist experiments was a certain consistency in subject matter but a variety of approaches to executing a response to the world, as it existed. But Realism was far too complex from nation to nation to be reduced to a simple-minded contrast to Romanticism.
Like Romanticism, Realism was never a style and was never uniform in content. Full of contradictions, Realism could include, in France, the daughter of a Saint-Simonist, Rosa Bonheur, the petit-bourgeois painter, Gustave Courbet, the narrator of amusing tableaux of middle class life in America, Lily Martin Spencer, the elegant portraits of British society by James Tissot, and the international provocateur par excellence, international artist, James Whistler. Realism incorporated a number of artistic and literary impulses, including Naturalism and Impressionism, and would be a longer movement, lasting at least forty years until the 1880s.
Although the Romantic imagination is often compared to Realist observation of every day life, Realism contained elements of escapism, just as Romanticism had contained elements of Realism. France continued its dominance in the world of the arts, but Realism was far from a French phenomenon. Realism begins, in fact, in England in 1848 with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The PRB was founded while the rest of Europe was embroiled in yet another Revolution. The Brotherhood was inspired by the events on the continent but concentrated, at first, on religious subjects.
Perhaps because the artists in France experienced the uprising directly, their artistic response was more political and more politicized by the art audience. The Revolution of 1848 was the final blow to Romanticism and all illusions of the French Revolution of 1789 died on the barricades. The impact of the Revolution of 1848 is the chief reason why realism in America is a special case and why when the term “Realism” is used in art history, the speaker often thinks of England or France, and especially France.
First, Realism was a revolt against the Academies in both England and France, where classicism still ruled. For the Realist artist, the transcendence of time seen in the academic worship of the past should be—had to be—replaced by the particular and observable events of the contemporary era. The universal event was replaced by the unique event, taking place in a fleeting moment of time. In Academic art, “history” signified an entire narrative that had moral and ethical importance. Within Realism, the anti-academic approach told no story and imparted no significance to the depicted scenes. Contemporary history was approached with the same deadpan viewpoint used for more banal moments. There is nothing romantic or glorious about Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (1867), only embarrassment and tragedy. Realism was also anti-Romantic by rejecting the escape into the unreal.
The Romantic artist’s struggle for self-expression was replaced by the desire to depict one’s own time. Honoré’s statement, “Il faut être de son temps” was the battle cry of the Realists who preferred humble subjects compared to the exotic and fantastical narratives of the Romantics. The rejection of both Academic art and of Romantic ideals signaled a new understanding that even the ordinary is important and should be rendered as seriously as a noble deed from the past. Taking note of the funeral attire, the black suits of the bourgeoisie males, Charles Baudelaire argued that there was a unique kind of “modern” heroism of everyday life. In the Salon of 1946, he wrote,
But to return to our principal and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions, I observe that the majority of artists who have attacked modern life have contented themselves with public and official subjects – with our victories and our political heroism. Even so, they do it with an ill grace, and only because they are commissioned by the government which pays them. However there are private subjects which are very much more heroic than these.
Realism also turned away from the concept of style, particularly as a personal trait that expressed one’s personality. Delacroix and Ingres asserted themselves by flouting or by exaggerating the academic style. The Realist artist resisted academic conventions and rejected the influence of the trained artistic eye that came between an honest depiction of reality and the hand of the artist. Many Realist artists expressed the desire to see as innocently as a child and this need for nonconventional innocence resulted in a challenge to the received techniques of the Academy.
The Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Millais, obliterated academic style with his obsessive delineation of closely observed nature. Gustave Courbet mimicked the clumsy and naïve approach of outsider artists. The result, as Emile Zola expressed it, was “nature seen from the corner of a temperament.” In order to see freshly, conventional composition and chiaroscuro were disregarded and color became local rather than emotional or formal. Like philosophy, art came to increasingly rest upon empiricism and close observation. However, there was a genuine desire on the part of the artist to throw off the weight of the dead history of classical art (to paraphrase Karl Marx) and to defy the authority of the previous generation.
The role of the Realist artist was to tell the truth. Reasons for telling the truth and for making objective art varied. Some artists, such as Ernst Meissonier, used the idea of photographic realism to recreate a historical scene with accuracy. Some artists, such as Rosa Bonheur, used realism to celebrate the working animals of the rural life of her country, la belle France. It would be incorrect to assume that those two artists were not political, for both were very nationalistic in their intentions to celebrate France and its heritage.
Other Realist artists, such as Jean-François Millet or Gustave Courbet were considered to be “political,” “Red,” or “communist,” because they did not uphold the existing artistic order and challenged its social preconceptions of rigid class stratifications. Millet’s The Gleaners of 1857 showed the plight of the landless peasant in the age of the collective corporate farm. In England, Holman Hunt took up the theme of the “fallen woman,” the social problem of the Victorian era, and presented a morality tale to the audience with The Awakening Conscience. Edouard Manet had no such moral pretentions in his equally graphic images of the woman in her fallen state, such as Nana, a smiling courtesan inspired by Emil Zola’s novel of the same name.
Whatever the artist’s motivations, Realism was based upon the scientific method. Like scientists, they observed nature and recorded it faithfully. Like scientists, they supposedly sat passively before nature and copied it without comment or judgment. But the vaunted objectivity of any of these artists should not be taken literally, for no human is ever completely objective or nonjudgmental. Courbet had every intention of confronting bourgeois complacency with his realistic depictions of ordinary life among the petit bourgeois of his home territory of Franche-Comté.
The later accusations of passivity that were leveled against the Impressionists especially do not reflect the fact that artists are actively selecting their content. The Impressionists, who extended Realist to its logical outcome, painted their optical impressions of light and color. But the Impressionists eschewed the provocative content of their predecessors and did not confront the audience with social challenges. The last of the Realist groups, the Impressionists selected suburban scenes of middle class life, where the sun always shone and the skies were always blue and the people were always joyous.
Keeping in mind that “impressionism” was a derogratory term, it is also important to be aware of the reception of the Realist artists. The art audience was often hostile towards Realist art in terms of subject matter while accepting, however, grudgingly the talents of the artist. Although there were those who objected to his workman-like use of the palette knife, Courbet’s painting skills were universally acknowledged. Manet, on the other hand, would be roundly condemned for is complete abandonment of academic technique. And the Barbizon School and the Impressionists would be excoriated for their neglect of the rules of academic “finish” when it came to completing a painting in the appropriate manner.
When examining the critical reception of the Realists, it seems that even provocative content could be somewhat tolerated as long as some semblance of recognizable “skill” was visible. When painterly technique diverged too radically from the academic standards, the audience was scandalized, regardless of the subject matter. Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, both transition artists, would be the last of their kind in their quest for Salon acceptance and the recognition of the Academy. The Impressionists would completely reject the academic system and would make their case to the avant-garde collector. It is here with this last generation of the Realist artists, that the avant-garde matured with Impressionism.
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Realism in England, France, and America
At the end of the Napoléonic wars, the French were able to take a good hard look at the impact of the Industrial Revolution, going full speed ahead in Britain. Appalled at the misery of the lower classes, the industrial smog of London, and the blighting effects of technology, the French made the decision to approach modernism with caution. Although the British worker was actually better off than the French worker, and English people were more educated and more productive than the French, the costs were too high.
In contrast to England, where the nation transformed itself from a rural to an urban society and from an agrarian to an industrial country, France slowed down industrialization. According to That Sweet Enemy. Britain and France: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, by 1840 England’s industries had overtaken agriculture in prominence, but until 1950 the rural way of life predominated in France. As the result of its economic policies, France was spared the industrial pollution that made life in England a dark and shrouded nightmare. The contrasting economies of the two nations also explain the difference in artistic content between the English and French Realist artists.
Most artists and writers were middle class and were financially secure enough to criticize the prevailing establishment by depicting their own age. They wrote and painted from a position of protected privilege. The lower classes did not represent themselves; they were represented in terms of the attitudes and needs of the dominant class. For example, in France, Georges Sand, the novelist, and Jean-Françoise Millet, the painter, both from wealthy or well-to-do backgrounds, concentrated on peasant life.
Meanwhile, in England, John Millais and Ford Maddox Brown, turned their attention to “modern problems,” or life in an urban culture. The Pre-Raphaelites were certainly painting from a position of social privilege but their content was frequently urban, reflecting the realities of life in London at mid-century. The French artists concentrated to rural subjects for several reasons. First, peasants still existed in large numbers in that nation and rural life was a significant factor in French culture. Second, modernization, as moderate as it was in France, set off waves of nostalgia about the supposedly untouched agricultural sectors.
In France, however, depicting peasants, however benignly, was rife with risk for an artist. Outside of Paris, the lower classes were resistant to the new forms of government following the revolution, with the “White Terror” of the Vendée revolts in the countryside continuing into the Twentieth Century. By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the “peasant” in France came to symbolize the lower classes in general. Peasant paintings tended to function in a socially reassuring fashion, by displacing middle-class anxiety away from the ever-troublesome proletariat to the more distant peasant, isolated in the countryside.
The idealization of the peasants and rural life calmed bourgeois fears, while a more realistic approach had effect of drawing bourgeois attention to those left behind by the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 in pre-Industrial conditions. In France, artistic depiction of the lower classes was a political act that could easily be construed as a critique of bourgeois power. In England, the plight of the lower classes was conveyed in terms of an artistic narrative of reform that was a positive echo of the effort by the British government to bring about peaceful changes in society.
In America, “realism” was a more amorphous impulse. Not so much a movement as a choice of subject matter and the employment of a certain technique, realism in America often crossed paths with American Romanticism. Romanticism lingered much longer in America because it continued to serve cultural needs. Romanticism, from the very beginning, was allied to landscape painting, which was used to create a sense of nationhood. One of the tasks of the landscape painter was to reveal the wonders of American scenery. In the American northeast, these landscapes were tinged with a Romantic nostalgia as the mythic Wilderness was being ruthlessly carved away to make way for settlements.
As the frontier moved from East to West, Romantic landscape painting moved with it, but the paintings that resulted were highly realistic in their naturalistic details. Frederich Church and Albert Bierstadt competed to see whose work was the most accurate in the rendition of nature. Indigenous American art had a much older tradition of realism and genre painting that could be applied to the Romantic tradition. The audience for these paintings were the Easterners who had never seen and could not imagine the wonders of the scenery. On one level, these paintings, often large and expansive, were educations in and or themselves. On the other hand, the landscapes barely concealed a subtext of imperialism and colonial conquest.
George Caleb Bingham’s scenes of everyday life on the frontier were sometimes reflective of Romanticism, especially its close American relative, Luminism, in his scenes on the Mississippi. On the other hand, he paintings could be completely anecdotal and full of a nationalistic narrative. In contrast to French Realism, American realism was more akin to the English Pre-Raphaelites with their preference for storytelling conveyed through a multitude of details. Realism, in America, was coincidence with realistic rendering, often a specific technique learned in Düsseldorf and imported to America. After the 1850s when the frontier moved West of the Mississippi, realism became more urban and romanticism continued to be aligned to landscape painting. Like Romanticism, Realism lingered in America, long after its European counterparts had become exhausted.
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THE ACADEMY AND THE AVANT-GARDE IN FRANCE
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.
