Lessons of the Academy

Unless you are a character in Louis Auchincloss’s “Tales of Manhattan” – one of those Groton grads who hold forth on French academic painting – you may never have visited the Dahesh Museum. Its collection of academic art of the 19th and early 20th centuries is considered a defunct currency, like tsarist bonds. The Modernist enterprise has displaced lebeau ideal and the assumptions that transmit it. Just last year Joe Queenan, writing in the Times, insisted the Dahesh was full of “uncompromising twaddle” that was “too bad to be true.”The Dahesh has been with us 10 years now. It is time to look at what it offers with our own eyes instead of through the prism of the self-declared superiority of its successors. Mr. Queenan’s disdain originates in the Darwinian view of art history: a myth of the supposedly organic structure of art history, progressing ever forward to the present. We like to believe that art moves on, but, most often, it just moves over. The Dahesh tells its story in opposition to a presumed ladder of ascendancy that has consigned many fine things to storage.The seedbed of its collection was assembled by the Lebanese writer and savant Salim Moussa Achi, who took Dahesh (Arabic for “inspiring wonder”) as a pen name. Lebanon, part of France’s colonial empire until 1943, was not an unlikely repository for European painting, but Dr. Dahesh’s plan for a museum of 19th-century academic art in Beirut was aborted by Lebanon’s civil war. He sold the collection to associates, who brought it with them when they emigrated in 1976. Since then it has broadened to include a wider range of national academies, acquiring some wonderful works.Throughout the 19th century, the annual Paris Salon was an immense, sensational bazaar of academic painting and sculpture. Fifty thousand people, including such luminaries as Denis Diderot, Emile Zola, and Charles Baudelaire, might visit on a Sunday; attendance could reach 500,000 during its two-month run. The Dahesh show makes it clear why they came.“In the Salon of 1879,” a witty grisaille by Wilhelm Gause, a genre painter from the Dusseldorf Academy, presents the spectacle as a social event, a place to see and be seen. Paintings are hung floor to ceiling and frame against frame, a practicality that slights modern insistence on sanctuary space for each object.Adolphe-William Bouguereau’s “The Water Girl” (1885) is a direct descendant of Ingres’s water nymph, “The Source” (1856). His tidied-up peasant, modeled on a young girl from his own village, is cleaner than her real-life counterpart, but the point lies elsewhere: in the solemn face of authentic childhood and the exquisite Scurve of her stance. Derived from Greco-Roman statuary, her pose suggests that a simple rural girl is as much heir to classical values as her social betters. It is a courteous conception beautifully rendered.Jean-Leon Gerome’s sly gem “Working in Marble” (1890) is astonishingly small for such complexity of composition. Gerome portrays himself on a turn stand, putting the final touches on the full-size plaster maquette of his famous statue “Tenagra.” He gauges the accuracy of his work against the live model and amid his collection of props for historical paintings. Reality and artifice intertwine with a wry hint of self satire that contradicts contemporary dismissals of Gerome as sentimental.It is hard for us to disassociate academic female nudes, shaved of pubic stubble, from the air-brushed luvvies in girlie magazines. Classicizing the female form – painting the figure to emulate antique marble ones – had hazards even then. Looking at “Andromeda Chained to a Rock” (1874) by Henry Pierre Picou, leading practitioner of the neo-grec style in the 1850s, I couldn’t help but think of John Ruskin, whose wedding night came to ruin over dismay at unsuspected details of his wife’s nakedness.This distorting mix of classicism, reticence, and fantasy in depictions of women keeps us aware that the past is, truly, a foreign country. Travel in it requires some willing suspension of comfort. The Dahesh presents a past that Americans now know little about. A significant degree of historical reality, if not realism, resides in the collection. Much on view clears the hurdle of “Orientalism,” the new Western sin uncovered by Edward Said in his 1978 book of that name.Look at Georges Clarin’s “Battle of Arabs,” which resulted from his travels across North Africa in 1869. It describes a common entertainment: a mock battle that involved up to 500 charging horsemen who brandish swords, fling torches, and shoot wildly. Such images draw disfavor from Said’s camp for stereotyping Arab culture as violent. Indeed: Clarin knew dead horses when he saw them. The battles may have been staged, but ammunition was live, and torches set fire where they landed.Czech painter Jaroslav Cermak exhibited “The Abduction by Bashibazouks in a Christian Village in Herzegovina” in the Salon of 1861. He had his choice of antecedents for the composition – various rapes of Proserpine, Europa, or Sabine women and multiple abductions by fauns – but he witnessed his subject firsthand: savage violence by Turkish troops against non-Muslims in Central Europe. Here a woman is carried off as booty by the murderers of her husband and child, a graphic reminder that the Ottomans took slaves from the Caucasus, Armenia, and Greece. A formidably rendered image of domination, the painting keeps us mindful that, before the West coined obliging sophistries like “Islamism,” there was Islam. And it was relentless.Charles-Theodore Frere, one of the best-known recorders of the Islamic East, established a studio in Cairo and, like the Impressionists, painted out doors for accuracy. His “The Banks of the Nile, Cairo” has the golden shimmer and coloristic splendor that brought him the admiration of Claude Monet.Austrian photographers Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Landrock, who journeyed through North Africa in the early 20th century, produced photogravures of the desert and its Bedouin people that overwhelm with a harsh beauty. Francois-Pierre-Bernard Barry, commissioned by Napoleon III to record the building of the Suez Canal, exhibited his Egyptian paintings in the Salon of 1863. “The Caravan, Egypt” is one of them: a stunningly atmospheric scene of Bedouins moving their herd along a stream.Several small studies are not to be missed: Benjamin-Constant’s “Seated Arabs” (1877), steeped in the mood of Delacroix; Henri Fantin-Latour’s darkling “Scene From Oberon” (1869); Isidore-Alexandre-Augustin Pils’s plein-air oil sketch “Seated Arab.” Lord Frederic Leighton, president of Britain’s Royal Academy in the late 1800s, is represented by two semi-abstract oil studies, jewels of color harmony and delicious brushwork.Last year young artists flocked to the Dahesh’s show of instructional drawings by Charles Bargue, whose “Cours de Dessin” was essential for 19th-century students. Drawing was the touchstone of academic art because form, not color, was thought the greatest conveyor of expression. One of Bargue’s lithographs is on view now, together with miraculous figure drawings by a selection of other academicians. The ensemble testifies to the old-fashioned assumption that disciplined training is crucial to creating anything of value in the arts.Until September 22 (580 Madison Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, 212-759-0606).

Lessons of the Academy

Lessons of the Academy

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