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Nymphs and Satyr, by William Bouguereau (Detail)
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A R T I C L E S

THE JOURNAL OF THE ART RENEWAL CENTER





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Articles are written for ARC by some of the art world's greatest artistic minds, whether art historians, practicing artists, scholars, scientists, collectors, etc.
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ARC Philosophy

ARC Philosophy: the most in demand document on ARC, read by well over 200,000 visitors in the last two years. Permission to reprint the ARC Philosophy is automatic when given to students by professors and educators worldwide.


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Most Popular Articles, Essays and Sites on ARC

  1. The ARC Philosophy
  2. Living Masters(tm) Gallery
  3. Biography of William Bouguereau
  4. ARC Approved Ateliers listing
  5. Good Art/Bad Art: Pulling Back the Curtain
  6. Bouguereau and the Real 19th Century
  7. A Review of 'Exposed: The Victorian Nude'
  8. The Painter in Oil - Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
  9. John William Waterhouse Gallery
  10. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema Gallery

Speeches and Articles by Fred Ross, ARC Chairman


Articles Refuting David Hockney


Articles by Sherry Ross, ARC Trustee


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Technical Essays


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225 Reasons to Tour the ARC Museum
The Art Renewal Center is proud to share with its public, for the first time, a list of the 225 most popular artists in the ARC Museum. The figures below were compiled over 6 months, and represent the total number of times any page in an artist's gallery was viewed over this period. We also hope to list the totals for the most popular artworks in the ARC Museum - in addition to the most popular artists listed here - at a not too distant date ...



Just because something causes you to have a feeling of aesthetic beauty does not make it a work of art.
    A work of art is the selective recreation of reality for the purpose of communicating some aspect of what it means to be human or how we perceive the world.
    The greatest works explore beauty or tragedy in life. The most profound and universal of human emotions that are timeless, and could have occurred in the ancient past and will be experienced again in the distant future. The same kind of subject matter is explored by the greatest poetry, novels, and plays. Our hopes, our dreams, our fears. Jealousy, greed, lust, ambition, traumas from prejudice, war and even just growing up. The cruelty possible to humanity - as well as its compassion and idealism ...
Abstract Art is Not Abstract and Definitely Not Art




Book review of Roger Kimball's <u>The Rape of the Masters</u>
Any enthusiast of the Art Renewal Center (ARC) will find Roger Kimball's stirring book The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art of great interest. In fact, the aims of the Center and Kimball are quite similar. While ARC strives to restore integrity to the technical training and production of art from its present denigrated state, Kimball attempts to redeem art history from a study of liberal political theory to a focus on the actual work of art and its aesthetic presentation ...



In 1913, the arrival in America of a simple idea drastically revolutionized the Art World. The occasion was the Armory Show in New York, the first exhibition of Modern Art in this country, and the simple idea was this: The proper role of the artist is to express himself.
    That was utterly new. It turned all the preceding centuries of Art History on their head.
    Fast-forward to the end of the same century: that same simple idea, that the proper role of the artist is to express himself or herself, was being taught as gospel in virtually every college and university in America, as well as in the art departments of essentially every high school, middle school and elementary school across the country. All major art publications accepted that idea as an unassailable given, as did virtually all art critics and art writers. And virtually every city council with a public art program anywhere in America supported that same idea, using tax money for the purchase of public artworks that were, almost always, examples of the artist expressing himself. By Y2K, in other words, that new, revolutionary idea had become entrenched and established-something that everyone had repeated for so long that nobody even questioned it anymore ...
Storm Warning to the Art World: Everything is Going to Change, Drastically, Soon




Review of the Millais Exhibition at the Birmingham Art Gallery
I visited BMAG on 25 November 2004, to have a look at their exhibition 'John Everett Millais: Illustrator and Narrator'. The exhibition is in Gallery 11, and the works on show are mainly from the permanent collection of the gallery. This is not an extensive exhibition of large pictures. What it does, however, is to show the draughtsmanship of a great artist. Like many other artists of the time, Millais illustrated poetry and novels by leading writers of the day. Many of the drawings date from the 1850s and 60s, very early in the painter's career. Amongst works on show are many illustrations of the poetry of Tennyson. They range from early preparatory works, where the artist was visualising them on paper, to highly finished immaculate drawings, ready to be sent to the engraver ...



Although based in the heart of Renaissance Italy, The Florence Academy of Art was spawned in modernist America. The origins of The Academy go back to 1969, when an eccentric artist and educator named Richard Lack started a new kind of art school in Minneapolis. Much like The Florence Academy of Art, which was not founded until 1991, the Atelier Lack was a radical, new kind of art school that attempted to revitalize art education by reintroducing rigorous training in traditional drawing and painting techniques ...
A New Direction in Art Education




Review of Hockney's 'Secret Knowledge'
Secret Knowledge is David Hockney's thesis on his theory that the leap in artistic realism which started in the 15th Century was due to the invention and use of the lens. He claims that artists could not have drawn or painted so perfectly without the use of those well-known early devices that "projected" the image onto a flat surface and was then "traced" or filled in by the artist ...



The Art Renewal Center is very pleased to announce the winners of the 2004 Annual Scholarship Competition. Now in its fourth year, the ARC Scholarship program has been helping students from all over the world continue their studies at ARC Approved Ateliers and Schools. With a minimum of $10,000 awarded annually and over $50,000 awarded to date, ARC is helping ensure that our future generations of artists are receiving proper instruction in the traditional and classical methods of representational art ...
Winners of the 2004 ARC Scholarship Competition




The Fine Art of Sneering: A Response to New York Times columnist Joe Queenan's Attack on Academic Art
Usually, a criticism of representational art coming from the modernist camp includes at least a pretence at an argument, or some kind of implied standard - such as newness for its own sake, or shock value - which, however wrong it may be, at least acknowledges the human need of standards in the judgment of art. Not so in the case of Joe Queenan's New York Times column, 'Rogue's Gallery' ...



In David Hockney's 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, the author proposes a strange theory. He claims that the Old Masters didn't really know how to draw and paint realistic images by direct observation, memory, or imagination. Instead Hockney claims they used the same method Hockney uses when he wants to create realistic images: using a projector and tracing the image. If the intellectual state of the art world were healthy, this kind of nonsense wouldn't be more than a curiosity. Unfortunately the hucksterism, taste for fashion, and lack of knowledge and skill in the academic art community have conspired to create a strange gullibility that makes ideas more attractive and 'popular' the more obviously absurd they are. In order to dispel this kind of gullibility I have decided to outline the reasons why I think that any thinking person should reject Hockney's theory in this article ...
Why David Hockney Should Not Be Taken Seriously




MIA shamefully to sell masterpiece by Bouguereau
Following now in a shameful tradition of infamy, yet another major American museum is being lead into disastrous decisions by curators or directors who were trained by modernist ideologues during the mid-20th century. The Minneapolis Art Institute under the guidance of Patrick Noon has decided to sell a major masterpiece, La Bohemienne, by William Bouguereau, perhaps the greatest artist of the entire 19th century, in order to purchase a major work by Albert Joseph Moore, an important member of the English Aesthetic Movement, but at best a rather emotionless member of that movement who took their ideology to an extreme by purposely removing any feelings in order to emphasize pretty women in carefully worked out elements of design and color. Globally speaking, a 2nd or 3rd rank master ...



The Art Renewal Center takes great pride in presenting the winners of ARC’s First International Salon Competition.

Above all, the quality of the art and artists is beyond all of our highest expectations. No doubt that in just another few years, ARC's Living Masters(tm) and ARC Approved Ateliers and Art schools will be producing masters and masterpieces the likes of which the world hasn't seen in one hundred years.

There has been an overwhelming response to the competition, as the ARC received well over 1,100 entries from all over the world. From the USA to China, the very best artists from over a dozen countries have enthusiastically participated ...
ARC's First International Salon Competition




Illustration is to fine art as poetry is to prayer
Let it be said here and on ARC first. Let it be said unequivocally, and let it be said unabashedly and unafraid, that illustration and fine art are as one and the same as poetry and prayer. The term illustration is but a term of description of what was intended by the artist and the subject. The value of the illustration rises or falls on the value of the work of art of which it is a descriptive part. But in no way is it true, or was it or will it ever be true, that the fact of a work of art illustrating a story, subject, or theme, in any way detracts or reduces even one iota from the greatness of the finished product.

Clearly there are endless numbers of great themes and stories worthy of being illustrated in works of fine art. And clearly, there are endless quantities of inane, vapid and worthless themes possible that even in the hands of the most brilliant of technicians will be unable to overcome the worthlessness of their subjects ...



In her first work of fiction, CROSSPOINTS: A Novel of Choice, Alexandra York has written the perfect contemporary Romantic novel. By skillfully using the conflicts found in a classic love triangle, whose participants are strong and memorable characters, she is able to bring to life the tensions and conflicts of the society and culture in which we live today. This creates the opportunity to meld the excitement of a passionate romance with the seriousness of critical literature. York takes hold of this opportunity and succeeds. Her characters become the embodiment of the varied and real cultural and spiritual upheavals, disillusionments, corruptions and pressures that weigh upon our world ...
Review of Alexandra York's CROSSPOINTS




Winners of the 2003 ARC Scholarship Competition
The Art Renewal Center takes great pride in announcing the winners of the 2003 Scholarship Competition. It was indeed a very competitive year as the number of applicants has more than tripled from the previous year. This is due to the fact that our approved atelier and school listing has also tripled in size. Our esteemed judges have expressed that their task was a difficult one due to the exceptional quality of the work submitted. The panel of judges for 2003 consisted of Allan Banks, Richard Whitney, ARC's Chairman Fred Ross, and Educational Program Director Paul McCormack ...



One of the enduring myths about the so called modern "art" is the need (?) to understand it. According to its apologists without understanding there is no real or proper appreciation of the painting/sculpture that one is looking at. In other words a process that naturally begins and ends at the heart must begin in our brain. That means we have already made a wrong start. I remember a quote from Renoir, a painter who is not a favourite of mine but who, nevertheless, hit the nail right on its head when he said: "... art is about emotion, if art needs to be explained it is no longer art." With these words in mind we may proceed to unravel this web of lies that pretends to create something out of nothing. ...
Understanding (?) Art




Charles-Amable Lenoir (1860 - 1926)
Un événement important a tout récemment attiré l'attention des amateurs d'art attachés à la Tradition. En effet, après des années d'anonymat, les descendants directs de Charles-Amable Lenoir se sont enfin décidé de sortir de l'anonymat!

Rappelons tout d'abord brièvement pour nos lecteurs que Charles-Amable Lenoir fut à la fois élève et ami proche de William Bouguereau. Tous deux étaient au demeurant natifs de la même province, l'Aunis et la Saintonge, c'est à dire plus précisément de la Charente Inférieure (aujourd'hui, la Charente Maritime) ...



Nineteenth-century paintings are on view all over Manhattan this fall. The Metropolitan Museum has two shows, "Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism," through Jan. 4, and "A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings From the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University," which opened yesterday and runs through Jan. 25. Nineteenth-century paintings have gained cachet since the enlarged Dahesh Museum opened last month in its new home at 580 Madison Avenue, at 56th Street ...
The 19th Century Running Rampant




Scandal of paintings sold for a mere pittance
Works of art worth tens of millions of pounds today have been sold off quietly by museums over the past 50 years for a few pounds. British art institutions such as the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Exeter City Museum have disposed of pictures by masters such as Van Dyck and Henri Fantin-Latour. They were sold without public notice, dismissed as too unimportant to keep. Among the most serious cases is a painting by the 19th-century master, John William Waterhouse. In 1965, the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro sold it for £200 ($300) to a private collector; today it is worth more than £5 million ($7.5 million) ...



Frederic Leighton was born on the 31st December 1830 in Scarborough, Yorkshire, a town this writer has known and liked all his life. He was the son of a medical man Frederic Septimus Leighton (1799-1892), and his wife Augusta Susan Nash, daughter George Augustus Nash of Edinburgh. His paternal grandfather was Sir James Boniface Leighton (1769-1843), who had been physician to two Tsars of Russia, Alexander I, and Nicholas I. Alexandra Leighton, the elder sister of Frederic, was the goddaughter of the Tsarina of the same name. The Russian Imperial connections of James Leighton had made him financially independent, and on his death his son inherited this fortunate position ...
Biography of Lord Frederick Leighton




Biography of Antonio Canova
Canova, in a certain sense, renovated the art of sculpture in Italy, and brought it back to that standard from which it had declined when the sense both of classical beauty and moderation, and of Titanic invention and human or superhuman energy as embodied by the unexampled genius of Michelangelo, had succumbed to the overloaded and flabby mannerisms of the 17th and 18th centuries. His finishing was refined, and he had a special method of giving a mellow and soft appearance to the marble ... Of his moral character a generous and unwearied benevolence formed the most prominent feature. The greater part of the vast fortune realized by his works was distributed in acts of this description. He established prizes for artists and endowed all the academies of Rome. The aged and unfortunate were also the objects of his peculiar solicitude. His titles were numerous. He was enrolled amongst the nobility of several states, decorated with various orders of knighthood, and associated in the highest professional honours ...


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