Dali House

“Une âme au ciel” (”A Soul in Heaven”) by William Bouguereau, 1878
Click the image to see it much larger.

Pretty feisty bunch down at the Art Renewal Centre, where they’re giddily passionate about the 19th-century realists and won’t spare a poop for anything more modern. Cantankerously building barricades in preparation for an anticipated jihad against the Establishment is Fred Ross, the centre’s chairman, who’s got a major rant going on that seems almost perverse in the way it’s trying to turn art history upside down. But, he has his points (and some terrific art to back him up).

You’ll recall that the “Estabishment” used to be in favour of “academic” art and the very classical realism it involved, and against upstart weirdos like Goya and Manet and, well, JMW Turner too for that matter. Then the impressionists caught hold, Picasso made everyone’s heads hurt and academic art was all but forgotten in the delirium of deconstruction, save for the funeral dirge sung by the likes of Barnett Newman and Henry Moore. (I would have said Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, but that really sets the ARC mob off – more on that later.)

Now, of course, Ross et al are saying the staunch old academy was right in the first place and these young hooligans – Cezanne, Braque, Warhol, you name it – should have been clubbed to death at birth so we wouldn’t have to spend a century being dragged all the way into abstract hell.

Following are excerpts from Ross’ tirade “The Great 20th Century Art Scam”. You can read it in its entirety here.

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FOR OVER 90 YEARS, there has been a concerted and relentless effort to disparage, denigrate and obliterate the reputations, names and brilliance of the academic artistic masters of the late 19th century. Fueled by a cooperative press, the ruling powers have held the global art establishment in an iron grip. Equally, there was a successful effort to remove from our institutions of higher learning all the methods, techniques and knowledge of how to train skilled artists. Five centuries of critical data was nearly thrown into the trash. It is incredible how close Modernist theory, backed by an enormous network of powerful and influential art dealers, came to acquiring complete control over thousands of museums, university art departments and journalistic art criticism.

We at the Art Renewal Centre have fully and fairly analysed their theories and have found them wanting in every respect, devoid of substance and built on a labyrinth of easily disproved fallacies, suppositions and hypotheses. If, dear reader, you are not already one of their propaganda successes, I encourage you to read on.

Against all odds, and in the face of the worst kind of ridicule and personal and editorial assault, only a small handful of well-trained artists managed to stay true to their beliefs. Then, like the heroes who protected a few rare manuscripts during inquisitional book-burnings of the past, these 20th-century art world heroes managed to protect and preserve the core technical knowledge of Western art. Somehow, they succeeded to train a few dozen determined disciples.

Today, many of those former students have established their own schools or ateliers, and are currently training many hundreds more. This movement is now expanding exponentially. They are regaining the traditions of the past, so that art may once again move forward on a solid footing. We are committed in every way possible to record, preserve and perpetuate this priceless knowledge …

If you studied art history anytime between 1945 and 1980, you were told that there were great old masters that existed from the early Renaissance to the time of David, Constable and Turner in the early 1800s. Then you were taught about Corot and Courbet and the Pre-Impressionists and then finally the Impressionists themselves who led the way into Modernism. Most of the period from 1850 to 1910 was described as a terrible cesspool of official art where petty academic artists painted inane silly paintings that cared only for technique, that were devoid of emotion and who didn’t recognise the genius of the Impressionists …

The period of art history from 1850 through 1910 was thrown into near obscurity. But it was precisely this period that produced some of the greatest art and artists in the history of humanity … It was a period when 500 years of accumulated knowledge, stretching from the early Renaissance to the present, reached its absolute peak of development …

It is an incredible irony that this greatest of all periods should have become the most denigrated.
Men like William Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Jean Francois Millet, Jehan Georges Vibert, Edward Burne Jones, Fredrick Lord Leighton, Edward Poynter, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John William Waterhouse, Leon L’hermitte, Sir Frank Dicksee, Sir John Everett Millais, Alexander Cabanel and Jules Lefebvre. These names, many of which may be new to you, were as well known by the cogniscenti in the 1890s as Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, DeKooning, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol are known today. They were household names. People would line up sometimes for blocks to see exhibitions of their works. The rich, and the poor, the humble and the famous alike adored their work.

Men like Henry James, Frederic Chopin and Charles Dickens idolised these academic masters. Could such men that we all agree were beyond question great artistic geniuses themselves have had such bad taste so as to idolise art that today’s ideologues would have us believe was so bad?

Bouguereau is one of the chief villains in tales told by modern historians. I shall especially refer to him in this discussion, for he is being increasingly revered by thousands of scholars, collectors, curators and art lovers as one of history’s all-time greats, ultimately deserving to stand shoulder to shoulder with Leonardo, Caravaggio and Rembrandt.

But just as Rembrandt was relegated to near oblivion for over 100 years after his death, so too was this to be Bouguereau’s fate. One of the most famous stories about Rembrandt concerns his painting “Night Watch”. After his death, no one wanted it. Finally, a gymnasium agreed to hang it on their back wall if the top foot of the painting would be cut off so it would fit. Today, this artistic masterpiece is known only in a mutilated form.

[Discourse on the unprecedentedly high standards for the rigorous study of art in the 19th century and the innovation and exploration of new themes that took place.] These academic artists are more accurately described as “Humanists”. As you read, keep your thoughts on the term Humanity or Humanism. It’s probably the chief defining characteristic of the art of the 19th century. It is the most evident concept that distinguishes it from the bulk of the current establishment-celebrated art of the 20th century, which is more accurately understood as existential, destructive and nihilistic …

What happened? Three things explain half of it: World War I, World War II, and the Great Depression … What unspeakable atrocities and tragedies caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, from want and war? Somebody was to blame! Someone had to be blamed. This could not have just been written by the fates. God could not have wanted mankind to suffer so. The clear, evident, and easy scapegoat for all that went wrong was quite simply “The Old Order”.

“The Carpet Market” by Jean Leon Gerome, 1887

It wasn’t just the leaders that were guilty. The entire last generation was to blame. This seems now a rather absurdly all-sweeping attribution of culpability. And with them everything that they believed and respected was impugned, discredited and desecrated. The artists they loved were pigeonholed as their lackeys and supporters, and their art was debased in every possible way by every possible format. People stopped even looking at the art of these great Traditional Humanists. It just had to be bad. After all, look who supported it; the old order! …

The other critical cause was the consideration of powerful economic reasons for dealers to wholeheartedly espouse this new modernist ethic. 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 three to eight 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 … 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 …

One of the greatest of [the myths that have been perpetuated about this era] was the claim that Bouguereau and his colleagues were not relevant to their times; that they copied the styles of earlier times. This argument is without a shred of truth. Bouguereau was born in 1825, shortly after the American and French Revolutions. These upheavals were the most tangible results of the new ideas generated by the Enlightenment, whereas earlier centuries were controlled by ideas of the primacy of religion and monarchs ruling by “divine right” …

Both America and France were at the cutting edge of the changing Western world. It is no coincidence that some of the greatest works of art of the 19th century came from these two societies. And with these changing ideas, art too changed, generating the many new groups and styles. There were the Realists who showed the nobility of the common man straining under the yoke of a hard life. They tried to show rural life, as it really was.

Then there were the Idealists and Romantics, who celebrated all humanity in keeping with the democratic principles and a respect for human rights and dignity. Bouguereau was undoubtedly the greatest of this group. In much of his work he uses peasants and gypsies for his subject matter. How fitting to choose society’s lowest to exalt all mankind to the highest, for if we could appreciate the value of the peasants and gypsies, then certainly all mankind must be valuable … Rather than dumping on the Victorians, one might just as readily credit them and their era with setting in motion all of the societal changes that led to the undoing of most of these injustices …

The next myth perpetuated about Bouguereau by his critics was that he painted just for the bourgeois in order to get rich. Let’s dispel that once and for all. He prided himself in never needing to take commissions. He painted what he loved and believed, often labouring 16 hours a day, seven days a week, much like Michelangelo. His fame became so great that his dealer, Goupil, was able to charge $10,000 for a single canvas (equivalent to more than $300,000 today). The bourgeois couldn’t possibly buy his paintings, and they were eagerly acquired by the wealthy Mellons, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies. Let me ask who has been buying Matisse, Picasso and Gauguin, or deKooning, Rothko and Pollock? The Mellons, Vanderbilts and the Carnegies, or their equivalents!

I don’t hear anyone claiming that these artists painted just for the bourgeois in order to get rich. Certainly Picasso was far wealthier when he died than Bouguereau at his death. Rubens, Gainsborough, Church, Rodin, Boucher, de Kooning and Frank Stella all made or are making substantial sums on their art. The fact is that most often, it is the wealthy who buy art …

Because Bouguereau’s work had been unfairly denigrated, the resulting low prices much of the 20th century allowed private collectors to acquire or keep his work, including some of his greatest paintings. In the last 20 years, however, his prices have increased astronomically. Paintings that would have sold for $5,000 in 1970, were worth $50,000 in 1980, and would currently sell for over a million. In November 1998, the world record for Bouguereau was broken twice, with “Cupid and Psyche as Children” selling for $1,760,000, and “Alma Parens”, an allegorical painting of mother France nurturing her children, brought $2,650,000 at Sotheby’s. His work is still undervalued when a Picasso sold the same year for $48 million, an Andy Warhol for $17 million and a Van Gogh self portrait for $71 million.

Another myth concerns the accusation that most of the work of these traditional Humanists or Academic Realists is just petty sentimentality. I would agree that an adult’s abnormal attachment to a high-school ring or cheerleader pompoms is petty sentiment. But what of the incomparable joy of a child taking his or her first steps? What of depicting a young person’s first moments of sexual awareness as childhood passes into adulthood? What of the cruelty of the industrial life in the cities with the cold and homeless lining up for bread on a wintry night? Of course, many academic artists of the period unsuccessfully tried such subject matter and it often did look oversentimentalised. But in every period in history most of the work being done was mediocre. That doesn’t prevent us from separating the wheat from the chaff …

Next I wish to address the myth that Bouguereau, Meissonier, Cabanel and Gérôme stopped the Impressionists from showing in the salons and working at the academies and ateliers. In their youths, Monet and Renoir worked next to the great academic artist Gérôme in the atelier of Charles Gleyre. Degas was accepted and worked successfully in the atelier of Hippolyte Flandrin and Ingres. Edouard Manet worked in the atelier of Thomas Couture. And in every salon from 1873 forward there were always impressionist paintings shown. The reason that there were only a few during the earlier years was because there weren’t yet many impressionist artists …

It was also untrue that van Gogh despised Bouguereau’s work. Critics like to point to one letter where van Gogh said that he would be able to sell his paintings more readily if he painted pretty things like Bouguereau. They always conveniently overlook another letter in which van Gogh expresses his deep disappointment that he’ll never be able to draw as well as Bouguereau, and yet another, “I know very well that it is neither drawn nor painted as correctly as a Bouguereau, and I rather regret this, because I have an earnest desire to be correct. But though it is doomed, alas, to be neither a Cabanel nor a Bouguereau, yet I hope that it will be French.” …

There is another reason that Academic Realism or Traditional Humanism is coming back. It has to do with a widespread reevaluation of the ideological underpinnings and theoretical framework of Modernism and Post-modernism.

Our 20th century has marked a period that celebrated the bizarre, the novel and the outrageous for its own sake. The defining parameter of greatness to Modernism is “has it ever been done before”, “Is it totally original where there is no derivation from any former schools of art”, “does it outrage”, “does it expand the definition of what can be called art?” I propose to you today that if everything is art, then nothing is art. If I call a table a chair, have I expanded the definition of the word table? Would this make me brilliant? If I call a hat a shirt have I expanded the definition of hat? Or in reality have I perpetrated a fraud on the people who wanted to buy tables?

Modernists have not expanded the definition of art at all. What they have done is attempted to destroy art, created icons that represent this destruction, and then called these icons the thing that they have destroyed, ie, works of art. A urinal or an empty canvas, hung on the wall of a museum, are especially pure examples of this. They are not works of art but symbols of the victory of the Huns, who have sacked the bastions and forums of our culture. It would be like saying that the Roman Forum today is far greater architecture than it was when all the buildings and streets were intact …

Modern artists are told that they must create something totally original. Nothing about what they do can ever have been done before in any way shape or form otherwise they risk being called “derivative” How utterly absurd. They’ve been indoctrinated with the concept that bad equals good. Every parameter upon which any standard for quality and excellence can be deduced, they have been told is improper because it’s “limiting to freedom of expression”. There can be no story for then you have to stay within the “tight boundaries” of the tale. There can be no illusion for than you are “chained” by the need to recreate a sense of three dimensions.

There can be no drawing, as that can be “limiting” to objects of people or things taken from the real world. They want to remove the “shackles” of modelling, perspective or subject matter of any sort. There certainly can be no attempt at harmonising of the above parameters with composition, colour and tonality, for that would “restrict” one to making everything work together.

On the contrary they have been propagandised by modernism into believing that only those works that break boundaries, ignore standards and show no interest in skill or technique can be truly “original” or “inspired” …
The sheer glaring reality is that nothing could be more imprisoning, binding, restricting, chaining and shackling than the impossible limitations of modernism and post-modernism, that remove from the would be artist every tool (including training) that could give them the ability to create great works of art. The simple truth is that each and every one of us is capable of thinking of something that has never been done before. Does that make it worth doing and the work of genius? …

Modern and post-modern art is nihilistic and anti-human. It denigrates humanity along with our hopes, dreams, desires and the real world in which we live. All reference to any of these things is forbidden in the canonistic halls of modernist ideology. We can see that their hallowed halls are a hollow shell, a vacuous vacant vault that locks their devotees away from life and humanity, while stripping mankind of his dignity. It ultimately bores the overwhelming majority of it’s would be audience who can find nothing with which to relate.

It has been called exciting and “avant garde”, but the sad truth is that it is incredibly humdrum and monotonous. Whether you glue together pieces of plastic or shards of glass, assemble metal scraps or piles of feathers. Whether you dribble little dollops of colors or drag fat uneven slashes of black. Whether you compile a mountain of paper or wrap the statue of liberty. The effect is always the same: Meaningless primitivism.

Modernism is art about art. It endlessly asks the question ad nauseum: what is art? What is art? They believe that only those things that expand the boundaries of art are good all else is bad. It is art about art. Whereas, all of the great art in history is art about life …

Do we really want the works of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning to be representatives of the best of what mankind can produce? They are a hoax. And the public has been for too long subjected to the farce of modernism that has captured and laid siege to civilisation’s museums and institutions.

As if by way of “full disclosure”, Fred Ross freely admits that, along with his wife Sherry, he owns “one of the foremost collections of 19th-century European paintings”.