The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, is an important exhibition running in London at the Tate Britain from June 4th, 2008 through August 31st, 2008. The exhibit provides a somewhat critical look at Orientalism, the genre commonly associated with nineteenth-century Western artists who depicted the peoples and cultures of an imagined Near and Middle East. The Tate is displaying over 120 paintings, prints and drawings created by British artists from 1780 to 1930, and given the current occupation of Iraq - the timely exhibit inadvertently calls into question the West’s modern-day accepted wisdom regarding the Islamic world.

Until the late 1960s, Orientalist painting was purely evaluated on aesthetic terms, with little or no attention paid to the socio-political aspects of the works. Aware of the failing to take into account the legacy of colonialism, the Tate exhibit offers a reassessment of Orientalist painting. As part of that reexamination, the museum presented a June 12th symposium titled Orientalism Revisited: Art and the Politics of Representation - a day long panel discussion by distinguished professionals and intellectuals on the subject of “art, politics, and representation of the nineteenth century to today.” The entire exhibition was curated with the views of scholar and writer, Edward Said (pronounced sah-EED) in mind. In the Tate’s words:

“In the 1970s the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said published his treatise on Orientalism, initiating a global debate over Western representations of the Middle East. For many, such representations now appeared to be a sequence of fictions serving the West’s desire for superiority and control over the East. The argument for and against Said’s Orientalism has continued for thirty years. Its resonance for an exhibition such as this one, however, is as strong as ever given that, by the 1920s (the end of the period covered by the exhibition), Britain was in direct control of much of the newly-abolished Ottoman Empire, including Egypt, Palestine and Iraq. As Said’s followers argued, these images cannot be viewed in isolation from their wider political and cultural context.”

Representations of the “exotic Orient” have appeared in Western art from antiquity, but after General Napoleon Bonapart and his invading French army conquered Egypt in 1798, European penetration and colonization of the Near and Middle East began in earnest. There was a concomitant explosion of Orientalist painting that fed European flights of fancy regarding the entire region. Some Western artists actually traveled through the area, painting, sketching, and making field studies for works that would be created or finished in the studio - while many others never left their European homes, instead finding inspiration for their canvases from written accounts of life in the “Orient”. In either case, the artists approached their subjects with presumed Western superiority.

A long train of events brought ever more European artists and writers into the region after the French subjugated Egypt. France took possession of Algiers in 1830, and along with Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire - fought Russia for control of the Holy Land in the Crimean War of 1854-1856. The French built and opened the Egyptian Suez Canal in 1869, increasing European incursion into the region. The Ottoman Turkish Empire was itself finally dismembered at the close of World War I, with its territories of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen becoming European possessions. While a good deal of Orientalist art is magnificent, that does not mean it should or can be disassociated from the European imperialist expansion it was a part of. As Said declared in Orientalism;

“One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda - which is what it is, of course - were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists. . .writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners.”

While some Orientalist art depicted the Islamic world populated by a despotic and brutish race in need of being rescued by enlightened Europeans, not all of it was so odious. With a keen eye for observation, Orientalists created paintings and prints of nearly everything, from landscapes and cityscapes to portraits of the high ranking and the humble. If these works set Islamic peoples apart as exotic others, they also clearly expressed awe and wonderment over Near and Middle Eastern societies.

The French neo-classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867/pronunciation) was certainly not the only artist to misrepresent and mythologize harem life, but his Orientalist themed La Grande Odalisque (1814) and The Turkish Bath (1862) helped to permanently imprint upon the Western mind the archetypical vision of lascivious Arabs. Remarkably, Ingres never traveled to the Near or Middle East - his paintings were pure conjecture and created in his Paris studio. Moreover, since the harem was a women’s quarters whose entry was forbidden to all men, save for Eunuch guards - Western depictions of harem life were largely based on sheer fantasy, hearsay, and rumor.

From his studio in Paris the French Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) painted pictures of harem life based on sketches of buildings he made while traveling through Egypt and Turkey. Into these backdrops he painted gorgeous Parisian models who posed as harem girls. In point of fact, of all the Orientalists who painted harem scenes, only the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1853) actually managed to step inside of one.

Appointed to an official French delegation to Morocco in 1832, Delacroix made a four month trip to Morocco and the conquered nation of Algiers. He was infatuated by the Arab people, but no less inclined to have a distorted view of them than did his rival, Ingres. Delacroix wanted to visit a harem, but this proved impossible in Morocco because of stringent religious rules. Occupied Algiers however proved a different matter. A French harbor engineer “persuaded” a powerful Algerian to allow Delacroix a visit to his harem under a vow of secrecy. The artist spent hours sketching the women there, and said of them, “This is woman as I understand her, not thrown into the life of the world, but withdrawn at its heart as its most secret, delicious and moving fulfillment.”

Back home Delacroix would paint Women of Algiers in their apartment (1834) from the sketches made in Algiers. It would be a tour de force, possibly the most influential of all harem paintings. Renoir swore he could smell incense when close to the painting and Cézanne was effusive over the color of the slippers belonging to one of the odalisques, a red that “goes into one’s eyes like a glass of wine down one’s throat.”

Orientalism in art was by no means restricted to the 19th century - think of Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Trousers. Picasso ended up painting fifteen variations of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers. Orientalism in Western art, academia, and politics by no means melted away with the passage of time - it still informs our opinions and actions even today. Certainly those experts who assured us that “Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk” were suffering from the latest virulent strain of Orientalism. As Dr. Said noted in the 2003 revised edition of Orientalism; “Without a well-organized sense that the people over there were not like ‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values - the very core of traditional orientalist dogma - there would have been no war.” Writing on the mess in the Middle East for The Independent from his home in Beirut, Lebanon, British reporter Robert Fisk said the following:

“I despair. The Tate has just sent me its magnificent book of orientalist paintings to coincide with its latest exhibition (The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting) and I am struck by the awesome beauty of this work. In the 19th century, our great painters wondered at the glories of the Orient. No more painters today. Instead, we send our photographers and they return with pictures of car bombs and body parts and blood and destroyed homes and Palestinians pleading for food and fuel and hooded gunmen on the streets of Beirut, yes, and dead Israelis too. The orientalists looked at the majesty of this place and today we look at the wasteland which we have helped to create.”

Fisk’s assessment is unquestionably a bleak one, but I find it difficult to disagree with. Putting aside all criticisms of Orientalist art, the fact that the West once found inspiration and bedazzling beauty in the Near and Middle East should jar our collective memory. If Western perceptions of “the Orient” focused on the mysterious, exotic, and sensual, there was always a subtext of evil, cruelty, and depravity. However, today we are being shown only the latter, and we have largely accepted this worldview. How we arrived at this historic juncture is not hard to determine, but a thorough reading of history regarding empire and imperialist depredations in the region is required for a full understanding of present circumstances. The Tate’s exhibition can be seen as one small step in acquiring such knowledge, especially now that the United Kingdom once again militarily occupies Iraq and Afghanistan, albeit as a junior partner in U.S. plans for the region.

I am left to wonder, not about the enormous influence Orientalist art had in times past, but how contemporary artists will act in response to the crisis in the Near and Middle East. Although a small layer of artists have dealt with the ongoing catastrophe, indifference or resignation still seems to be the art world’s general attitude. Artists can not permit impassiveness and lack of concern for the incalculable misery being experienced by humanity in the Near and Middle East to become the hallmarks of 21st art. The artistic community must refute the barbarity seen all around us - without prejudice, false hopes, or creating new strains of Orientalism.

What possible relevance could Adolphe-William Bouguereau, a French academic painter from the Victorian age, have in today’s world? That in essence is what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked when it interviewed me regarding a display of the painter’s works at the Frick Art & Historical Center of Pennsylvania. The Frick exhibit, In the Studios of Paris: William Bouguereau & His American Students, runs from July 6th, 2007, to October 14th, 2007, and it’s the first show of its kind to examine Bouguereau’s past position as a leading teacher of painting.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette thought my input as a contemporary realist painter and critic of Bouguereau and his present-day followers, would make for a well rounded examination of Bouguereau in current times. In addition to me, the newspaper interviewed Dr. Eric M. Zafran, an authority on French academic painting and the Curator of European Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Also interviewed was art historian Charles Pearo and artist-writer, Claudia Giannini. Not to be left out of any discussion pertaining to Bouguereau, opinions regarding the legacy of the academic painter were expressed by his chief devotee, Mr. Fred Ross, Chairman of the Art Renewal Center. You can read the full Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview here.

Today as painting evolves and struggles to find its place in the early 21st century, Bouguereau (1825-1905; pronounced: boo-ger-Oh), becomes relevant since he represents one of two elemental paths contemporary painters can choose from - painting as a conservative expression of tradition, or an innovative expression of change. Obviously Bouguereau embodies the former, and aside from the fact that I believe we have many things to learn from academic artists when it comes to the technical handling of paint, I stand with those who seek new approaches to the problems of modern-day painting.

In a notice on the official Frick website announcing a talk by Dr. Zafran on the subject of the academic painter, it’s stated that: “To appreciate Bouguereau one has to essentially forget the twentieth century and modern art and enter into the spirit of the nineteenth century.” I might add that one would also have to forget what was happening in the 19th century as well, as Bouguereau’s art represented a headlong flight from the pressing realities of his time. We shouldn’t feel smug about this either, as many of today’s artists share that same zeal for their ivory towers.

As a youth Bouguereau studied at the conservative official academy, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and eventually he would be elected to head the Académie des Beaux-Arts. But Bouguereau lived during a period of earthshaking change, witnessing the rise of industrialism and the working class, women demanding the vote and inclusion into positions of power, the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the wave of reprisal killings that took the lives of tens of thousands of Parisian Communards. Yet, in Bouguereau’s paintings there is not the slightest inkling of any of this. And therein lies the problem with an uncritical appreciation of William Bouguereau. It’s as if his meticulously painted Satyrs, winged celestial angels and plump innocent cherubs were intentionally meant to conceal the grinding poverty and growing class conflict of his day - and indeed, that’s exactly the role his escapist canvases filled.

Defenders of Bouguereau will point to his “sympathetic” portraits of the poor, which for the most part are sweet nonthreatening portraits of healthy young peasant girls that reveal nothing about the lives of the dispossessed. Such paintings were popular with Victorians, who preferred grimy reality be covered by a veneer of sentimentality. One need only compare Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) to Bouguereau’s The Haymaker (1869), to understand my point. Van Gogh gave us a harshly realistic and unromanticized portrayal of people who worked their fingers to the bone just to maintain a subsistence level existence. His peasants are the color of the earth they dig. Their backbreaking labor under a merciless sun has turned them old before their time. They eat their modest dinner of boiled potatoes with calloused and knobby hands. Van Gogh has shown us real life. By contrast, one can’t imagine Bouguereau’s fair-skinned and rosy-cheeked peasant girl engaged in the exhausting work of pitching hay from sunrise to sunset - let alone breaking out in a sweat over any type of manual labor. Bouguereau’s pleasant creature may make the more luminously beautiful painting - but she has nothing to do with real life.

Bouguereau once said, “One has to seek Beauty and Truth. There’s only one kind of painting. It’s the painting that presents the eye with perfection.” One can just imagine the rejoinder from those young upstart Impressionist painters of the late 1800’s, “Yes, but whose beauty? Whose truth?” Clearly, there was more than one kind of painting going on in Bouguereau’s day.

When it came to aesthetics, Bouguereau was a stalwart conservative who opposed the onrush of modern painting that was surging all around him. As a commanding figure in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Monsieur Bouguereau was able to successfully block, for a time, the rising tide of the Impressionists, who wanted to paint real life with all of its roughness. Instead of theatrical, highly finished paintings devoid of brushstrokes and based upon long past historical themes, the Impressionists concentrated on the world around them, insisting on colors and techniques as vibrant and bold as their chosen subject matter. Paul Cézanne blithely commented on Bouguereau’s success at hindering the Impressionists by referring to “the Salon de Monsieur de Bouguereau.” And it was Edgar Degas and his circle of associates who mocked the polished artifice of academic painting by referring to it as Bouguereaute (”bouguerated.”) In a letter written by Vincent Van Gogh, his opinion of Bouguereau couldn’t have been any clearer;

“I already told Gauguin in my last letter that if we painted like Bouguereau we could hope to make money, but the public will never change and likes only what is sweet and slick.”

However the most amusing story I know of concerning the clash between Bouguereau and the Impressionists came from Gauguin himself. In his autobiography, The Writings of a Savage, Gauguin tells of visiting the office of Henri Roujon, director of the Beaux-Arts. Hoping the academy would purchase some of the paintings he made in Tahiti, Gauguin wrote:

“So here I am in the office of the august Roujon, director of the Beaux-Arts. He said to me: ‘It is out of the question for me to encourage your art, which I find revolting and do not understand; your art is too revolutionary not to cause a scandal in our Beaux-Arts, of which I am the director, seconded by the inspectors.’ The curtain twitched and I thought I saw Bouguereau, another director (perhaps he’s the real one, who knows?). Undoubtedly he was not there, but I have a wayward imagination, and as far as I was concerned he was there. What! I a revolutionary, I who adore and respect Raphael? What is a revolutionary art? When does it cease being revolutionary? If the fact of not obeying Bouguereau or Roujon constitutes a revolution, then I confess I am the Auguste Blanqui of painting!” [Gauguin refers here to one of France’s most incorrigible revolutionists.]

Bouguereau openly proclaimed his aversion towards modern painting when he said, “In painting, I am an idealist. I see only the beautiful in art and, for me, art is the beautiful. Why reproduce what is ugly in nature? I do not see why it should be necessary. Painting what one sees just as it is - no - or at least, not unless one is immensely gifted. Talent is all redeeming and can excuse anything. Nowadays, painters go much too far, just as writers and realist novelists do. There is no way of telling where they’ll draw the line.”

Having defined painting and beauty in such a narrow manner, it’s hard to imagine that Bouguereau’s definition of good painting would have included Goya’s 1808 masterwork, The Third of May, which depicted a massacre of Spanish civilians at the hands of Napoleon’s invading army. Aside from rubbing our faces in an ugly and most unpleasant scene, Goya’s canvas must have appeared a raw, unfinished and crude monstrosity to the genteel eyes of academic painters like Bouguereau. Yet, does Goya’s tour de force not possess a terrible beauty? This is the reason for art critic Robert Hughes calling Francisco de Goya the first modern artist and an exemplar of modernism. All the same, Bouguereau reserved a special ire for those defiant painters of his own day, “One shouldn’t believe in all those so-called innovations. There is only one nature and only one way to see it. Nowadays, they want to succeed too fast, this is how they go about inventing new aesthetics, pointillism, pipisme! All this is just to make noise.”

Considered one of the top painters of his day, Bouguereau attracted thousands of aspiring artists, who joined his seminars and workshops at the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Those students fervently sought instruction and criticism from the master, and in the last quarter of the 19th century, he offered training and advice to some 200 American student artists. The Frick exhibition combines 80 paintings, drawings and prints by Bouguereau as well as artworks by some of his more promising American students like Robert Henri, Elizabeth Gardner, Minerva Chapman, Cecilia Beaux, Eanger Irving Couse, Arthur Wesley Dow, Henri Tanner, and Lawton Parker.

Interestingly enough, while the American painter Robert Henri (pronounced ‘hen rye’) was one of Bouguereau’s star pupils at the Académie Julian, he would come to entirely repudiate academic painting and embrace Impressionism, only to reject it later on as a “new academicism.” Henri became one of the founders of the Ashcan School, the early 20th century movement of American realist painters whose works focused on the social realities of big city life. Ironically, Henri represented the modernist trend Bouguereau hoped to thwart, and essential lessons learned from the academic master were used by Henri as a springboard for the Ashcan revolution in art.

As an academic painter, Bouguereau’s hand provided endless melodramatic oil paintings dealing with Greek myths, Christian religious stories and genre scenes. That Bouguereau produced dazzling realist canvases demonstrating clear mastery over technique should be apparent, that these were saccharine works pleasing to the elites of his day and supportive of the status quo, should also go without saying. But I have a twofold question for contemporary artists that rises out of a study of Bouguereau and all that swirled around him, a query that accordingly makes a reconsideration of Bouguereau vital; do you have mastery over your chosen discipline, and if so, are you using it simply to please and support today’s equivalent of the academy?

The article When Art Becomes Inhuman was written by neo-conservative Karl Zinsmeister for a 2002 edition of The American Enterprise magazine. Zinsmeister’s commentary was a general condemnation of modern art, with a sharp focus upon the extremes of postmodernism - which he described as a “left-wing cause.” Zinsmeister sarcastically declared, “Surely you’ve noticed that the art smarties never lay out Cuban flags for gallery visitors to trample on, or decorate Martin Luther King’s picture with elephant dung.” He mocked the mental state of abstract artists by saying, “mightn’t it tell us something that Willem de Kooning’s abstract expressionist compositions didn’t change in quality after he lost his mind to Alzheimer’s disease?” Zinsmeister even compared Gays to child molesters when he wrote that works singing the praises of “voyeurism, drugs, homosexuality, and pedophilia” filled the nation’s trendy art galleries.

You might think Karl Zinsmeister to be just another intransigent stick-in-the-mud who takes the furthermost right-wing position on every social issue, a narrow-minded individual to be dismissed and forgotten - and you might be right - save for the fact that he’s a newly appointed member of the Bush administration.

In May of this year, President Bush picked the 47 year old Karl Zinsmeister as his principal domestic policy adviser. Over the years Zinsmeister has played a leading role in America’s “culture wars,” working for the past 12 years as editor in chief for The American Enterprise magazine. That glossy periodical is associated with the American Enterprise Institute - a think tank for neoconservatives that has done much to shape the policies of the Bush White House. Glancing at Mr. Bush’s list of favorite books, it’s not hard to imagine the Commander in Chief being flustered by writings beyond his reading level, so perhaps President Malaprop first noticed Zinsmeister by way of a comic book published by Marvel Comics in 2005. Combat Zone: True Tales of GI’s in Iraq, was written by none other than Karl Zinsmeister, and supposedly based on his experiences as an “embedded” journalist with the American 82nd Airborne in Iraq.

I mention Zinsmeister’s political views because they have a direct correlation to his likes and dislikes concerning art, and a man in such an influential position should be carefully listened to. It comes as no surprise that conservatives and traditionalists have applauded Zinsmeister’s cutting remarks against modern art - he has a powerful mass base that represents a populist backlash against contemporary art. The Art Renewal Center, those champions of all things conservative in art, have reprinted Zinsmeister’s article in its entirety - though they neglect to inform their readership of the author’s neo-conservative political orientation or the fact that he works for the Bush administration.

I’m not a supporter of the postmodernist super-stars of the art world Zinsmeister attacks in his article, and any regular reader of this web log knows I’m one of their staunchest critics. But where the right sees politically correct left wingers bent on destroying western heritage, I see apathetic apolitical intellectuals who are socially disengaged. There are few sectors of society less interested in political theory and activism than the contemporary art world, as a cursory view of international art web sites and web logs makes perfectly clear.

It is natural for art to overthrow the established order, and the name for such upheaval is progress. Historically artists have always been visionaries ahead of their times and at odds with the status quo. The Dadaists, Cubists, Surrealists, Expressionists, Constructivists and Abstract artists all hurled their contempt at comfortable society and we’re better off for it. But these eruptions didn’t take place simply because a small group of artists fancied a new style - the ruptures were necessary because established orders became ossified and essentially had nothing left to offer. We have reached another such point in time. While the spirit and motivation of the aforementioned groups was revolutionary in intent, and a similar stance may have once moved today’s early postmodernists - no such spirit stirs in them presently. They merely clamor for wealth, press, accolades, and awards from the established circles of power - of which they are a part. Postmodernism is certainly due for an unseating, but Zinsmeister and crowd are not the ones to oust it.

Zinsmeister and his followers decry avant-garde art as the workings of an ultra-liberal and politically correct art establishment that does its best to “shock, flout, insult, and otherwise chuck rocks at polite society.” But it is hypocritical and duplicitous for Zinsmeister to condemn modern art for its supposed inhumanity, while at the same time supporting a presidency that has sanctioned torture, preemptive war and the abrogation of the constitutional rights of American citizens. In barbarous times there can be no polite society, and Zinsmeister evidently cannot understand, or refuses to admit, that “art becomes inhuman” only when society itself has become a horrid charnel house.

On June 6th, some 400 people packed the Harold M. Williams Auditorium at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to hear a lecture titled, The Great Bouguereau Debate. The academic painter William Adolph Bouguereau was the president of the painting section of the Paris Salon in 1881, and depending on how you see things he was either the defender of western civilization or a major obstacle to progress. There’s no doubt that he was a tenacious opponent of the Impressionists, and that he used his position to keep that malcontent rabble at arms length - for that alone I can’t help but view Bouguereau as a reactionary and I count myself amongst his many detractors.

[ As a contemporary painter who is also an advocate of the painter’s craft, I’m at times mistakenly regarded as a "conservative", a laughable assertion if there every was one. In December of 2005, I wrote a critique of the Art Renewal Center, a group that actually deserves the reputation of extolling conservatism in art - in fact they are downright reactionary. My article, A Return to the Past, assailed the ARC for being new Victorians, Eurocentric demagogues who espouse a right-wing aesthetic populism. My essay struck a cord with Mr. John Nutt, an arts educator in the UK, who shared with me an open letter he composed and sent to the Chairman of the ARC, Fred Ross. Not surprisingly, the ARC has not published Nutt’s letter - so I present it here in its entirety. ]

An open letter to Fred Ross

Dear Mr. Ross

Your response to my criticism of ARC indicates that my feedback comments concerning the Art Renewal Center upset you. It was not my intention to poke a stick in a hornet’s nest but I feel it is necessary to reply in the interests of the truth of which you do not have a monopoly.

Your website is an art educational site, but it assumes a narrow definition of education and it would seem that its main function and purpose is the rehabilitation of 19th century academic art. Its stance is to argue that academic art has been castigated and marginalized by the art establishment. It is quite possible that it was merely ignored because it was so poor, most UK and European Municipal galleries have a collection on permanent display but they are not usually humming with visitors like the Tate Modern or the Louvre. One exception is the Musee D’Orsay but that also exhibits Impressionism and Post Impressionism.

There are many definitions of education (as there are of art,) which should be about informing, enlightening, valuing and releasing the mind from the chains and restrictions of its environment. This is most effectively achieved in western education through the Socratic method of dialectic or informed philosophical debate. I am disappointed by your anger and unsubstantiated hostility to 20th century art and failure to engage in dialectic. Your site is visually quite stunning but its written dialectical content seeks only to limit and restrict thought and debate by promoting one representational art movement above all, whilst denigrating everything done since. It is also the primary source of the visual material displayed on worth1000.com, a website of visual and cultural vandalism, which recycles and denigrates the labours of great artists work as simple one line jokes. Very laudable educationally, considering the work displayed is an abuse of the open commons license.

In the UK, HM government prescribes the content and contextual studies of the art education curriculum. This is the culture which we inhabit. Your site shows little or no evidence that you seek a wider truth. It shows little concern to balance ideas or engage with dialectic, only pander to the popularist rhetoric of the tabloid press, by smearing and abusing the achievements of 20th century art. You have accused me of being brainwashed by an art education establishment, despite the fact that I have had fifty years of study to make up my own mind about what I personally believe about art and education. I venture to suggest that your definition of drawing is narrow, and restricted to a particular nineteenth century visual representation of reality. This view is of little practical use to a multi-cultural inner city art teacher.

You attack David Hockney and openly accuse him of lying - despite the true fact that there is a substantial amount of well documented scholarly evidence including that of the National Gallery, London, that Vermeer (to take just one example) used optical aids. Have you never heard of the “Camera Obscura” that was used by Canaletto, Guardi and others? In his book Secret Knowledge, Hockney and Professor Martin Kemp discuss known visual procedures and their evidence is presented in such a way as to allow a reader to make their own judgment. Your site doesn’t allow the reader to make an informed balanced judgment, its content brow beats him with opinion. Education is concerned with enlightenment not with enforcement as you well know. It takes 2000 years to create a civilization but the price of ignorance is that it can be knocked down over-night. Witness Nazi Germany. Hockney is a respected academic painter whose knowledge is based on a lifetime of practical working experience. These are artistic and not aesthetic judgments. Would you seek to condemn a nuclear physics professor in his math? You state that modern art is a prejudicial product of two world wars, and it’s obvious that these wars didn’t begin to touch your own world frame. In Europe we still live under their cloud, visit any UK or European village and examine a war memorial! Classicism is elitist, it served the culture of Napoleon and Nietche which in turn sowed the seeds of the twentieth centuries miseries.

Here in the UK, 19th century academic artists and academicians represent a rigid bourgeois class system, the exploitation of women as objects and hypocrisy that typifies “Victorian values”. When Mrs. Thatcher used this phrase in the eighties it was not without irony. In the UK - where there is still a class system, we are unable to simply admire 19th century academic art work without being also grimly aware of its faults, its hypocrisy, its posed faked content, yet you promote it as the paradigm of all that is good and true. Art students have to be taught to look at nature, not to copy from the plaster cast where they repeat others faults. When I was a student I was taught Slade school academic life drawing - I speak from an informed viewpoint based in practice! This is despite the fact that photography has been around since 1820 and had superseded representational painting in every single respect. Lord Leighton and Alma Tadema had very little appreciation or real understanding of the truth about the Roman Empire, they had only the knowledge of their day. As typified by their confections and middle-aged male fantasies. (Their knowledge of Roman society was limited and their images are the result of 19th century archaeological knowledge). Like Degas they made extensive use of photography as you know.

In our belief in the crucial importance of good sound academic drawing, we are probably in agreement, (although I affirm that your definition of good drawing is far more restricted and purely skills based than my own) especially when it comes to the desire to improve the skills and training of art-students. Nothing in art can be gained from re-hashing the past, even Pre-Raphaelite painting is eclectic and derivative), art moves forward not backward, just as nuclear physics does. You know this as your website contends - whether or not you yourself subscribe to a modernist paradigm.

Regards
John Nutt

The Art Renewal Center promises a renaissance in contemporary painting but otherwise seems determined on a return to the past. Founded by millionaire, Fred Ross, the ARC maintains a sprawling website that houses over 58,000 images created by European master artists. The online collection includes everyone from Italian High Renaissance painters like Raphael, to English 19th Century academic painters like Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Interestingly enough, the ARC seems fixated on the art of the Victorian age, and their adulation of it goes hand in glove with a belief that great art ceased once modernism came into being. The ARC has some influence, and occasionally here in Los Angeles I come across working artists who regularly visit their site and carefully read their opinions. As with demagogues of all stripes, the ARC builds a following through populist rhetoric that masks a hidden agenda. They are not incorrect when noting the follies of modern art, but their total rejection of it is beyond the pale and thoroughly reactionary.

Ross, the Chairman of the Art Renewal Center, is particularly smitten by European academic painters, and has singled out William Bouguereau for lavish praise - which reveals much about the philosophy of the ARC. Among his many honors, Bouguereau was elected president of the painting section of the Paris Salon in 1881, and as such was a resolute foe of the Impressionists. As if under the control of Bouguereau’s ghost, the ARC web site only begrudgingly gives a nod to Impressionism. Regular columnist Ted Seth Jacobs flatly stated in his essay Impressionism Revisited, “We need to reassess Impressionist painting, and stop valuing it for qualities it does not possess. This will also allow us to better appreciate the virtues of other Nineteenth-Century work, which has been downgraded because it is dissimilar to Impressionism.” Yes, even the Impressionists are too avant-garde for the ARC! One would not be incorrect in assuming that in their headlong retreat into the bygone Victorian era, the ARC yearns for a world without the likes of Paul Gauguin.

While staff at the ARC barely acknowledge the Impressionist school, they fly into fits of rage over modern art. In his ridiculously titled article, Abstract Art is Not Abstract & Definitely Not Art, Fred Ross rebukes modernists by writing: “They may mix colors prettily as they please (most of them aim for ugliness) but without selection based on knowledge of the forms of the real world they do not make works of art - and they are not artists.” Elsewhere on the site he pontificates, “You had to be taught to love Picasso, because nobody would love him otherwise. But people don’t need to be taught to love Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Bouguereau, or for that matter Chopin.” Ross’s assertion is of course utter nonsense, as people have never gained entrance into the ephemeral realm of art without first receiving some degree of education and acculturation. The abilities necessary to appreciate the arts are innate to some, but certainly are acquired skills to most everyone else. Much like our use of language, understanding aesthetics is a learned behavior.

But the Art Renewal Center really veers into dangerous territory by proclaiming Greco-Roman classical civilization - and by extension European culture - as the only source of momentous artistic achievement. Such a position in today’s world is untenable and simply smacks of racism. On the ARC website, Mr. Ross makes clear his position with the following remark: “I can explain why it is important that students should have a substantial understanding of ancient Greek culture and history. Can you tell me why a student ought to understand Cherokee culture and history? I’m not saying that there’s something inherently bad about learning about Indian tribes. I’m saying that it is a minor and optional topic of study, not one that ought to be placed at the core of how we understand the world and educate our children.” Exactly whose children is Mr. Ross speaking of? Elsewhere on the ARC website it is said that “our heritage” is being threatened by modernist art. Again, whose heritage is being referred to?

In opposing the narrow-minded and Eurocentric view of what the Art Renewal Center considers classical art, I need only mention the sophisticated and influential artistic splendor of the bygone Han dynasty of China; a civilization from 2,200 years ago that rivaled anything occurring in Europe at the time. I could also mention the glories left to humanity by the Japanese, Indian and African empires of old. Mr. Ross and his followers need to be reminded - or taught - that the ancient Egyptians with their magnificent arts not only predated the Greeks, but inspired them.

In the late 1920’s dozens of Mexican artists viewed ancient Maya and Aztec art as the very root of modernism. Artists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, created a national art that took indigenous artistic splendor as its ultimate source of inspiration. The Greeks and William Bouguereau had nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, there’s only one passage on the entire ARC website that I could find which refers to the artistic achievements of Mexican artists, a missive written by ARC executive advisor, Virgil Elliot: “Frida Kahlo could not paint worth squat. She was a primitive. A primitive is someone who knows next to nothing about painting, but tries anyway. She was an accessory to Diego Rivera, another primitive more highly rated than his talent warranted. The concept of greatness is demeaned when unworthy people are called great.” While I don’t at all agree with the assessment of Rivera’s work as being “primitive,” at the same time I have to ask - just exactly what is wrong with primitivism? Overall I’d prefer the blunt charm, honesty and mysticism of a single Frida Kahlo creation over a hundred “technically perfect” classical academic paintings.

Much of the artwork presented on the Art Renewal Center website is without a doubt superlative, and the old masters extolled by the ARC deserve all due praise. Any serious arts professional or student by necessity should be conducting a vigorous and ongoing study of classical European art - but the ARC website with its traditionalist agenda and biased claptrap is not the place for such instruction.

As a realist painter I often write about the excesses of the postmodernist art movement, but when hard-right reactionaries join the fray to denounce modern art - my loyalties ultimately are with the artists under attack. One such clarifying moment has arrived. I received word that on October 6th, Gallery C in Hermosa Beach, California, will host an evening with “New York Art Critic,” Roger Kimball - who is nothing more than a purveyor of the Bush/Neo-Conservative agenda. Billed as “Today’s most controversial voice on art,” Kimball will discuss his most recent book, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. In his screed Kimball rails against the supposed influence “feminism, cultural studies, post-colonial studies,” and “the whole armory of academic anti-humanism” has had on the art world, arguing that a cabal of left-wing academics have succeeded in recasting the entire art world to fit their “radical ideological fantasy.” Oh, if it were only true!

The publishing house behind The Rape of the Masters, Encounter Books, says the book “provides an engaging antidote to the tendentious, politically motivated assaults on our treasured sources of culture and civilization.” Whose culture? Whose civilization? The press release from Gallery C states that Kimball shows how “great works should be understood through a series of illuminating readings in which art, not politics, guides the discussion.” Kimball feigns a neutral stance - insisting that politics should have nothing to do with art. But it’s not politics in art that bothers Mr. Kimball, it’s politics he doesn’t agree with that he finds problematic. In an article he wrote for the conservative National Review in 2004 on the subject of the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Kimball wrote, “The Left keeps screaming about how dim George Bush is, but in the meantime, he has illuminated one area of public life after another with immensely talented and articulate people.” Not exactly a politically neutral position. When Gallery C refers to Kimball as a “New York Art Critic,” they are wise to leave out the part about him being a radical right-wing ideologue.

Roger Kimball is a columnist for FrontPageMag.com, the voice of diehard neo-conservatives organized around the fanatical anticommunist demagogue, David Horowitz. The pugnacious Mr. Horowitz wrote an article for FrontPage that dismissed the massive September 24th antiwar demonstration in Washington D.C. as a gathering of “100,000 Zarqawi supporters.” The odious Ann Coulter, who accuses liberals of being disloyal anti-Americans, also writes columns for FrontPage. Now you know the company Mr. Kimball keeps.

In February of 2003, as tens of millions of people all over the world protested against the impending war on Iraq, Roger Kimball wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, in which he said, “Every report I have seen has dilated on the extraordinary efforts of US military planners to minimize civilian casualties by the use of precision weapons, tactics to isolate Saddam from control of his weapons of mass destruction, and so on. But somehow the headline ‘US Strives to Remove Brutal Dictator, Liberate the Iraqi Populace, While Keeping Civilian Casualties and Damage to Infrastructure to a Minimum’ doesn’t play well to the gallery.” Now, two years later most everyone can see the truth. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, U.S. bombs have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis - and they don’t seem too thankful for being “liberated.” Still, Mr. Kimball is not one to let facts get in the way. Western Civilization presses ever onward, from reconstructing colonialism in Iraq, to reconstructing traditional power relationships in the art world. Roger Kimball will appear at Gallery C on October 6th, 2005, from 7 to 9 pm. The $20 door price benefits LACMA education programs. For more information visit the Gallery C website, at: www.galleryc.com