I. “We have no Libraries of Art!”
It was already an old problem in the 1820s, and Rembrandt Peale wasn’t even the first in his family to try to solve it. His father, Charles Willson Peale, founded both the first artist dynasty and the first public museum in the United States. “The painter, and the lover of the painter’s art,” the younger Peale observed, “have to lament the non-existence of public galleries where specimens of European artists . . . might serve as examples of instruction.”1
Charles Willson Peale’s first attempt was part curiosity cabinet and part natural history museum. He displayed the skeleton of a mastodon, which fueled a debate about the biodiversity of American megafauna. Thomas Jefferson waved the bones as evidence of America’s greatness: Look at the size of these things! Jefferson hadn’t considered that the creature whose bones Peale displayed was in fact long extinct — the idea of extinction hadn’t yet been invented. Peale’s first museum was built in part on the faith that what America might celebrate could be literally dug out of the ground, right here, in America. The venture ultimately failed, but his next efforts would lay a cornerstone for American cultural institutions.
And his son, Rembrandt Peale, understood the superiority of the new model. It required “European specimens.”
In other words, don’t bring a mastodon to a painting fight. Charles Willson Peale must’ve known it all along: why else do you name your sons Titian, Rembrandt, Raphaelle? Europe is the source of all value, and America’s job is to catch up.
The challenge was three-fold: America had little art market (few patrons or collectors, and few dealers); no educational institutions to make new artists; and no “library,” a place for the public to admire the goods. CW Peale aimed to rise to all three challenges with one institution: a museum/school that would produce new artists, display their contemporary work regularly, and collect European masterpieces to learn from and enjoy. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts — Peale’s next effort — did just that.
These sentiments were echoed at the American Academy of the Fine Arts (1801-1840) and at the National Academy (founded 1826), where a founder Samuel Morse observed that “All we wish is a taste in this country and a little more wealth . . . taste is only acquired by a close study of the merits of the old masters.”2
Thing is, the European specimens that would serve as models for the American academies were themselves prone to the same forces that worked on Peale’s mastodon: evolution, and extinction.
II. The European Academies.
Over just the same time period that America was developing its system of academies, the European models were coming all unglued.
The medieval system of art-making was relatively simple. Church and state and market were one beast, so the decorative arts were essentially employed by a single client, portraying the fancy people (royalty, clergy) and decorating the fancy places (palace, church). The point of the painting wasn’t self-expression or distributing an idiosyncratic “brand,” but all about the subject: devotional paintings are made to put the viewer in contact with Jesus, not the painter. With little room to waver from orthodoxy in style, paintings were produced by workshops of craftsmen. There was a master in the shop, and apprentices learned how he did his work by copying it and slowly advancing from washing brushes to mixing paints to filling in backgrounds to the fine work of painting hands and faces. Nobody signed the work, and an artwork was considered to be like any other craftwork — maybe finely-made by a laborer, like a shoe or a piece of jewelry, but not a lot of individuality involved.3
That changed in the Renaissance, as the medieval guild system gave way to private patronage. Businessmen became the principal patrons, and the artists they supported came to resemble the free-market enterprise they modeled. The master-apprentice relationship continued — but the best of the best got big contracts and became house-hold names, like sports stars today. Michael Jordan didn’t invent much of the game of basketball, but the excellence and panache with which he played were exceptional and well-compensated — but he was still part of a team, with management above him and rules to follow on the court. The artist as a one-man craft-house, with a signature style — and a literal signature — arrived.
Across Europe, the medieval guild system kept skulking on, and as the individualist notion of The Artist rose up, it ran into conflict with the union shops. In Italy, small schools for design (drawing, painting, anatomy, geometry, and few other pencil-heavy disciplines) opened in the mid-16th century: artists teaching aspiring artists, not laborers in a guild.4 Paris was a guild-work town, and the more sophisticated artistes chafed at languishing as mere laborers. They saw the Italian schools as a model to separate the artists from the workers, and by the middle of the next century, a group of French painters petitioned Louis the XIV for the charter of the Académie Royale. The idea was modeled along the still-breathing idea of master-apprentice, with artists controlling style and standards, but also the notion that competition fueled greatness: standards for entry, titles attached to the duly-elected, and prizes handed out for the very best.
As went France, so went Europe: the Hague’s Royal Academy of Art followed in 1682; the Royal Danish Academy of Portraiture, Sculpture, and Architecture was built on the same model in 1754; a British Royal Academy grew out of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, in 1768. By the time America was contemplating its artistic future, Europe had a unified vision. Who gets to be an artist? The painters who pass through the royally-chartered academy in your local principality.
Membership has its privileges, and among them is the chance to compete at the Salon — the only way to be seen in an art world run almost entirely by the House. Sales and commissions might be handled privately, but you only got access to those patrons and those markets by showing at the Salons.
But the Academic problem wasn’t different from the Guild problem: friction between individual innovation and institutional inertia hadn’t changed by handing out credentials. The house teaches the house style and shows the door to anyone who deviates, whether by inspiration or ineptitude. But by the 19th century, a time of social upheaval and rapid innovation in many fields, the deviants in the arts felt increasingly entitled to a say.5
One mechanism demanded innovation; another mechanism set limits. As long as the most radical innovators were kept outside the gates, the system hummed merrily along — but when the academicians themselves began to innovate dangerously, the machine seized up.
First the Salon adopted a jury system to award prizes, to give the system an air of objectivity. In the French Revolution, the Salon was opened to all French artists, not just Academicians — another democratizing step. By the 1860s, Napoleon III allowed the Academicians that had been rejected from the official Salon to hang a parallel show, with their own jury and award system — another attempt to placate the rejects, maybe even embarrass them by eliciting public scorn. Instead, they won popular support, and a decade later, the rejects were exhibiting together with a pact not to apply to the official Salon. By 1884, the Independents put another nail in the coffin of Academicism with a new slogan: No juries, no prizes. Starting in 1890 with another French schism,6 a string of successions from European Academies accelerated the downfall of the old system: the Vienna Secession, the Munich Secession, the Dresden Secession.
Surprisingly, most of these institutions remain today — even the Secessionist schools. But the polyphony of these institutional voices doesn’t capture the extent of the change. No royal charter or state-sanctioned jury would be able to enforce aesthetic standards from now on. For centuries, a gesture from the king was enough to end an artist’s career or vault them to immortality; in the 20th century, states that attempted to enforce aesthetic standards resorted to violence.7 European artists no longer needed to be academicians to exist as artists. They had destroyed their own certification system.
The academies continued, but academicism was dead.
This was the European specimen that Americans examined. They saw the power of a national school and museum to establish and enforce a national style and elevate national standards. They saw the fault-lines of the academic system growing, but they nonetheless joined the growing international chorus.
Let’s start an Academy.
In two weeks: American Academy Fight Song, or How’d That Go?
As quoted in Robert Hughes, American Visions, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997, p. 218.
Samuel Morse, as quoted by Hughes, 1997, p. 218; my emphasis.
More on the history of signatures in our article, “What’s in a Name?”
Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence; the Accademia di San Luca in Rome; and Academy of Desiderosi in Bologna.
It was nominally more complicated: especially in France, the Academic system was a bureaucratic warren of schools and award schedules, carved up and reconstituted with the Revolution and Napoleonic period — but the Academic Style was a through-line. That style had its nuances just as the names of the bureaucracies did, but its elasticity was limited. A glance at the overwhelming Cézanne Drawing show at MoMA now lays bare exactly what those limits excluded.
The Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts splintered from the Société des artists français; it’s complicated.
At a certain distance, the Nazi regime’s exhibition of “Degenerate” Art feels a lot like Napoleon III’s Salon des Refusés: round up the weirdos and hold them up for public scorn. But the Refusés were running with the wind, and the “Degenerates” didn’t sign up to be Degenerates — they were hunted. Artists and collectors of modernism were rounded up, their property plundered and destroyed or distributed among the party bosses — along with the rest of the horrors of the fascism, the cowardice of trying to suppress threatening new ideas with bullets.