LLEI D'ART 13

Swansong Academicpainting from theSalondeParis Muséed’OrsayCollections FundaciónMapfre (Madrid) Until the 3rd of May 2015 Commissioned by Pablo Jiménez Burillo and Guy Cogeval Exhibition organisedwith the scientific collaboration and special loans from theMusée d’Orsay During the19th century academicpaintingdominated artistic output. Academic art was a reply to the taste of France’s AcadémiedesBeauxArts, andwas focussedon the study of the nude, stylistic correction, the greater presence of drawingover colour andbalance in composition. Starting with classical traditions, academic arts looked for away to emulate the great genres of traditionpainting: historical painting,myth and the nude, religion, Orientalism, portraits, landscapes andgenrepainting, which included still lives and anecdotal scenes. Academic artists have always been traditionally seen as the counterweight to realist or impressionist art, whichwould end up feeding straight into the 20th century avant-gardes. Todaywe can affirm that painters like Jean-LéonGérôme, AlexandreCabanel orWilliamBouguereau attempted to modernise a traditionbasedon adevotion to an ideal of eternal beauty that found itsmaximum expression inGreek sculpture. All of this tookplaceduring aperiodof upheaval andprofound changes thanks to the successivepolitical, economic and social revolutions of the 19th century. At the time archaeologywas showingus anAntiquity that was both heterogeneous and changing, and it was also a timeduring which themoral and aesthetic formulas of Neoclassicism were runningout of steam. In addition, these academicpainters did not always find public, Academy or indeed critical favour, but they did try to adapt the traditions of great painting to aworld that apparently preferred todiscover the inherent volatility of tastes and fashions. In themiddle of the 19th century, the FrenchAcadémiedesBeaux-Arts slowly become apublic institution, dependent on eminently bourgeois power. The Salon that it dependedon, whose origin canbe found in the 1763 exhibition celebrated at the SalonCarré at the Louvre (hence its name), came toopen itself up andbegan to spread fashions and tastes, earning itself an influential position inFrench andEuropean culture. From thenon, theSalonwouldbring together the various forces that came to configure the tastes of the time. Thesewere the jury, representing the last days of theAcadémie, public authorities, themainbuyers of the artworks on show, and for the first time, the general public and the nascent world of art criticism. The latter twowere themainprotagonists of thedemocratisationof art in themeaningwe give to it today. The artists and intellectuals of the timewereparticularly sensitive to the unease themodernworldwas creating, to thepositivism and industrialisation (Baudelaire’sSpleen) and to this disconcerting, changeableworld that was losing the great immovable convictions of previous traditions. These questionswere answeredwith a flight to thepast, but also to the far-away and exotic. These artists did not deny themodernworld, but rather helped to shape it. They substituted aperfect, harmonious and stablemodel of tradition and theAcademywith another unstable, changing, even violent and frenziedone. This substitutionwas done via a kindof painting that reflected a society and aworld that woulddisappear in the 20th century with the arrival ofWWI. Jean-JacquesHenner. Jesús en la tumba (también llamado Cristo muerto )/ Jesus inhis grave (also known as DeadChrist ) , 1879 MuseodeOrsay, París. ©RMN-GrandPalais (MuseodeOrsay) FotoHervé Lewandowski LawrenceAlma-Tadema Alfarero romano / RomanPotter , c. 1884-1910 MuseodeOrsay, París ©RMN-GrandPalais (Muséed’Orsay) FotoHervé Lewandowski 13