Publish at October 12 2022 Updated October 12 2022
The history of art is made up of breaks. At the end of the 19th century, hundreds of painters attended the prestigious and demanding workshops that dispensed academic knowledge. Julian, Bouguereau, Lefebvre, Gleyre, Delaroche, Gérôme were all stars now forgotten. It was difficult to get in, they worked very hard, and they came out with an impressive know-how. No error in the drapery, the anatomy, the perspectives, the compositions. But what a bore!
Yet, more than a century later, trainers are trying to recover the pedagogical methods that brought so many students to an almost unparalleled level of virtuosity.
Among them, Ramon Alex Hurtado, has searched through all the correspondence, stories, biographies and workshop drawings to reconstruct the pedagogical progression of the workshops of the late 19th. He approached dozens of archives with professional questions: How does one hold the pencil? Is a precise drawing made before painting? Do we start with the shadows? What are the reference points for proportions? What level of knowledge was required in anatomy?
A few years ago, a young woman, Nabilla, was experiencing impressive notoriety as a result of reality TV shows. An unimpressed columnist points out to her that at her age, Rimbaud had already written all his poetic work. He has little time to savor his pique. The star answers him spontaneously: "Yes, but he had neither television, nor Internet; he had only that to do". And indeed, this is one of the first lessons that the study of workshops brings us. It's also the lesson left to us by Kim Jung Gi, a Korean artist who died at age 47 and moved hundreds of people every time he drew in public.
You have to work at it, put in hours. Mornings, afternoons and evenings, and probably part of the night. But there is also a method, often far from contemporary pedagogical precepts.
There seems to be no question of individualization or personal project. One enters the workshop to follow a curriculum. Among the steps, work on reproductions of plaster sculptures, to become familiar with volumes, shadows and lights. When one is mature enough, one can hope to move on to life model drawings.
The writings of the time testify to a great deal of hubbub and lack of space. A studio is a hive of activity. The steps may be taken more or less quickly, but they remain unchanging, and much the same from one workshop to another, and lead from plaster reproductions to painting models.
This method is found in some contemporary academies, such as the Florence Academy of Arts
The archives also show the spirit of competition in the workshops. Regularly, the master evaluates and ranks the work. These rankings anticipate competitions, and in particular the Prix de Rome, which all artists aspired to and which allowed them to be welcomed in residence in the Eternal City.
The Prix de Rome constituted a certainty of obtaining numerous commissions. The archives show that as soon as they entered the studios, the students were ranked. A good classification allows, for example, to choose his place in front of the models. Does this mean that the atmosphere among students was bad? It does not seem that the question interests the teachers, but the testimonies of the artists in the making, their letters and writings also show a spontaneous mutual aid between them, which does not seem to be encouraged or accompanied by the teachers,.
The studio painters do not think of themselves as artists but as people who make art. Inspiration, genius, intuition have little place in the educational progressions. It is mostly a question of construction, of precise knowledge of anatomy and rules of composition. Like Leonardo da Vinci before them, these artists consider themselves as geometers. They live their art as craftsmen. What are the bones that make up the skeleton? Where are the muscles attached? What proportions are related to the ancient canons? We study again and again.
From a more contemporary perspective, one would be tempted to propose a course in which training would be more free and open as students gained in technique. One could also imagine that part of the training would be freer from the start, and oriented towards imagination, personal creation... It does not seem that the workshops of the late nineteenth take this direction, with the exception of a few, such as Gustave Moreau's, where artists like Rouault or Matisse apprenticed.
When do we stop studying and move toward creation? The answer is never... Whatever the workshops, and Alex Ramon Hurtado presents us with almost a dozen of them, live models in full-length, elevated from the students succeed the plaster casts, with the same attention to volumes, lights, proportions and modeling. Even Henri Matisse or Albert Marquet, who will soon revolutionize painting, bend to this apprenticeship.
In other registers, we obviously think of Flaubert and the lessons he gives to Maupassant. No question of invoking the muses and taking inspired breaks. In an article published in the magazine Lire, Emmanuel Schmitt draws inspiration from this author to warn against faith in the "gift" that would make it easy to produce a masterpiece.
"In the literary field, we often see this: such a person possesses the gift of dialogue, such a person of characters, such a person of the sentence, such a person of the detail, such a person of the image, such a person of the movement, such a person of the musicality. However, one person rarely receives them all. This is what prompts one to roll up one's sleeves, diagnose one's qualities, one's faults, one's shortcomings, and fill in the blanks with hard work."
Without being spaces for "copying," the workshops share a culture in which the Renaissance figures as an unsurpassable horizon. The teachers refer on a daily basis to Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, or even to Raphael. And here again, they cannot help but establish classifications! These classifications are still found among teachers. Who of Cabanel or Gérôme is the greatest? Fortunately, each excels on some criteria, and falls short of his colleague and rival on others!
These workshops remained spaces of study. Those who have left a trace in the history of art have often fled or turned away from them. The search for perfection, rigor and craftsmanship has stifled the madness or spontaneity that makes art.
Writing this article a few days after the death of Kim Jung Gi, one can hope. This virtuoso cartoonist, tireless worker gifted with an impressive memory also carried a surreal, violent, tortured imaginary world and carrier of a pop culture where images literally collided.
Resources:
Ramon Hurtado: website: https://ramonhurtado.com/
Stan Propenko - interview with Kim Jung Gi - 2018:https://youtu.be/aoqu5SEFqRI
Florence Academy of Art: website: https://www.florenceacademyofart.com/
Kim Jung Gi: website: https://www.kimjunggi.net/fr/
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt - "The Genius and the Talent" - article published in Lire magazine - September 2022
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