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Bouguereau & theReal 19th Century |
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What did these two geniuses of French Impressionism see that their chief followers and supporters over the next hundred years did not? For Bouguereau, a true genius of the art of painting, was soon to fall so far from grace that art history students in the 1940s through to the 1980's could study 19th century art and never hear his name, or see one of his paintings. For over ninety 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 Center, and with the help of many colleagues and scholars around the world, have fully and fairly analyzed 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. Allow me to try to characterize how I first came upon this recognition. Just imagine for a moment that you are a lover of great Classical Music, and among your favorite composers were Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Handel. Suppose you're even a music major, and get your master's degree in that field. Then imagine that in spite of that, you had never heard of Chopin or Beethoven, nor ever heard any of their music. Imagine that both of those artists had been methodically maligned and denigrated in the description told to you by a Modernist music establishment. At the most, you'd heard that they were from a small but powerful group of composers who had run the music world, and who didn't appreciate the greatness of Shostakovitch or Bartok, who had ultimately led to the genius of John Cage. You were taught that Chopin and Beethoven were petty academics who wrote romantic, sentimental, inane, vapid, maudlin and silly works, and you were never exposed to, nor was it arranged for you, to listen to any of their music. Then imagine that a few years after graduating with your Master degree in music, you went to a concert and heard some of the most intensely beautiful works of your life, with incredible orchestration with profound emotionality, equal or better than you'd ever before experienced. You were awestruck with an overwhelming sense of beauty coming from the minds of obviously consummate genius. Quickly you look at the program and see the names Frederic Chopin and Ludwig von Beethoven; and remember, you're imagining that you'd never heard those names before. The next day you run to the library and find out that they were two of the villains who ran the 19th century music world, who you had been told had no talent and whose music was mindless, shallow and vapid. But you knew what you'd heard, and what had been written made no sense. Next you run to a music store and find their work on some rare CD's and start listening to everything you can find by them, and despite everything written in the music history books, and everything you'd been taught about them, you were certain in the deepest recesses of your heart, you were certain beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, that you had discovered two of the greatest musical geniuses in all of history. Racing through your head are an endless barrage of questions, and outrage. How could such masterpieces ... self-evident ... a priori ... self-validating, consummate, masterpieces have been so maligned, that were written by artists who were not just overlooked, or accidentally forgotten, but who were maliciously targeted to be attacked, degraded, and ridiculed ... and the main reason was because they were accused by the modernists in today's music establishment of having not appreciated the genius of atonal music. So you started searching for every sonata, nocturne, symphony, and concerto you could find that Beethoven and Chopin had ever written. Perhaps you had only just happened to have heard the only good works they had ever written, a "one time" lucky work where they'd hit it, but they really were all those bad things that had been said about them. And then, as you uncovered work after work after work, you discovered that nearly everything they'd ever written during their mature years were as great, or greater, than the first pieces you had heard at that one concert. Wouldn't the world seem like it was upside down? The professors and authorities who you had depended on to teach you truth and beauty had literally done nothing more than teach you the party line and a truckload of libelous propaganda, for reasons you still could not fathom. Well this, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what happened to the works and reputation of William Bouguereau, as well as many other great artistic geniuses of his time. And this little story is nearly an exact rendition of what I experienced when I studied art and art history when I earned my Bachelor's degree at Brandeis, and then my Master's of Art Education from Columbia University in 1974, just a couple of miles from here. In October 1977, I walked into the Clark Museum to see their thirty Renoirs, and after leaving the Renoir galleries walked out into a major hall, at the end of which was a painting that grabbed me body and soul. It was a life-size painting of four water nymphs playfully dragging a mythological satyr into a lake against his will. Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine, I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast. It was so alive, so beautiful and so compelling. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of soaking up wave after wave of artistic and spiritual ecstasy, I started to take back control of my consciousness…..my mind started racing with unanswered questions. My first thought was "I haven't felt this way about a work of art since I stood before Michelangelo's David. Then I thought, "This must be one of the greatest old master paintings every produced. But no name or country or time would come to mind. Italian High Renaissance, 17th Century Dutch, Carravaggio, Fragonard, Ingres, Prudhon ... back further perhaps ... Raphael, Botticelli, Leonardo, no! no! NO! Not one of those names or times felt anything like what I was looking at. Then I approached the painting more closely, and saw the name mispronouncing it as Bouguereau at the bottom, and the date 1873 -- 1873? How was that possible? I'd learned that the greatest artists at that time were, Manet, Corot, Courbet, and Renoir ... that the techniques and greatness of the old master's had died out, and that nobody knew how to do anything remotely this great by the 1870's. Years of undergraduate courses and another sixty credits post graduate in art, and I had never heard that name. Who was he? Was he important? How could he not be important? Anyone who could have done this must surely be deserving of the highest accolades in the art world. Then I asked the guard if they had any more works by him, and he asked somebody else, and I was led to a second work of a single female nude, seated by the water holding her knees. It was one of the finest nudes I had ever seen. In somewhat of a state of shock from this experience, I decided that I must find out if this artist ever comes up for sale at the largest auction house in New York, Parke Bernet who was years later bought out by Sotheby's. Was he deemed important enough to be sold at auction? My only experiences collecting up to then at auction was to purchase a few etchings by old master's: Rembrandt, Durer, Breughel and Goya. But they were very famous names. I was at the Clark on Sunday October 2nd 1977, I stopped in at Sotheby's that Tuesday October 4th, and as fate would have it, there were three Bouguereau paintings being offered for sale that coming Friday. I purchased one called Les Enfants Endormis, of two babies asleep in each other's arms. The hands of fate certainly seemed involved, for later I learned that these were the first Bouguereaus to come up for sale in the last eighteen months, and another was not to appear on the auction block until twelve months later. So the timing could not have been any more precise for fortuitous. I remember too, there was an energy of excitement in the air, and I somehow knew that I would never again be able to purchase works by these artists at these prices. But I didn't know which ones to buy. And I still didn't know who he was. During the next few weeks I started researching Bouguereau and the entire period as much as I could using any free time I had. But almost immediately, I discovered that he had won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1851 at the age of twenty-six, and after winning nearly every accolade and award imaginable for an artist of his time, ultimately become the President of the Academy, Head of the Salon, President of the Legion of Honor. He was in fact, considered the greatest French artist of his time, and Paris was the center of art world. All this made me feel very good about my instincts, and that I had intuitively identified as being one of the worlds' greatest artists somebody who had generally been considered as such by most of the world during the final decades of the 19th century. As an aside, consider this interesting article in the New York Times, published April 7, 2000, by KATIE HAFNER: Ironically, this is exactly what we've done at the Art Renewal Center, which you can all find at www.artrenewal.org. I can't help but wonder why Mr. Lowry after having such a similar experience to my own with the same exact painting, has not aided in the resurrection of academic art. But many with careers in the art world are intimidated, and afraid to speak out against accepted gospels of Modernist theory. It didn't take long before I discovered a lot of other major names that I'd never heard of before: Jules Joseph Tissot, Alexander Cabanel, Jules Lefebvre, Ernst Louis Meissonnier, Jean George Vibert, Jean Leon Gérôme, Leon Bonnat and Leon L'hermitte from France, -- and John William Waterhouse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir John Everett Millais, Edward Coley Burne Jones, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Frederic Lord Leighton, and Frank Dicksee from England, and scores of other artists all across Europe and American about whom I had never learned, never been taught, and never seen any of their works, even though I had paid for and studied art history at what was supposed to be one of the foremost educational institutions in America ... Columbia University. |
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