Continuing through September 14, 2025
When I enter a gallery containing many works of art, I oftentimes ask myself a question: if the building was on fire, which one of those works would I transport to safety? In the case of “Reform to Restoration: French Art from Louis XVI to Louis XVIII from the Horvitz Collection,” my choice would be “After the Storm” (1788) by Claude-Joseph Vernet, a powerful little oil painting on copper sheet depicting two prostate figures lying atop a seaside rock as the warm sun finally breaks through turbulent storm clouds. Given that the picture was painted one year prior to the onset of the French Revolution, it comes across as both wishful and prophetic. It is painted in a style that anticipated Romanticism by nearly 30 years, running counter to most of the Rococo and Neo-Classical manners featured in this exhibition’s selection of 30 paintings and 79 works on paper.
Can anyone recall the last major exhibition of French academic art from the 18th and early 19th century to appear on the West Coast? Not me. Like the vast majority of art folks, I long ago accepted the avant-gardist casting of academic art as an evil affront to artistic individualism. But over the past five decades, those attitudes have themselves become academic, meaning that avant-garde practices have gradually fallen into a stale banality of exhausted self-replication. In a controversial 2004 book titled “The End of Art,” Donald Kuspit advanced that point, concluding that artists who used Old Master techniques wedded to contemporary content were more avant-garde than those making institutionally sanitized avant-garde art. This perhaps accounts for the fact that so much of the work in “Reform to Restoration” seems (dare I say it?) … uncanny.
Hovering in the background of this exhibition is the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, best known to us as the French Academy, founded in 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia finally ended the century-long warfare between Catholics and Protestants. From about 1700, the Academy promulgated its famous hierarchy of genres, elevating epic history and mythological subjects above portrait painting, which in turn was held above genre scenes, landscapes and still-life. After the Salon of 1846 (called “the hospital of painting” by Charles Baudelaire), the hierarchy was upended, but that is another story.
In “Reform to Resotration,” examples of History and Mythological painting are plentiful. In Georges Rouget’s “Death of Demosthenes” (c.1805), or Étienne-Barthélemy Garnier’s “Socrates and Alcibiades” (1793), we see dramatic indoor scenes capturing moments of heroic self-realization. The foreground dramas are set against classical architectural elements and rigid pictorial compositions. This combination of elements highlights the allegorical import of the paintings’ narratives, which are intended to take on a kind religious import minus the religion. Male bodies are muscular and rigid, while female bodies are passive and voluptuous, both inhabiting stilted, over-balanced, and brittle compositions. A more Rococo approach to pictorial organization can be seen in “Summer: Festival of Ceres,” (nd) by Antoine-Francois Callett, featuring languid female figures arrayed near a somber statue as if they were dancing around a maypole. This work is less static than most of the other paintings, reaching back to the earlier academic conventions of Nicolas Poussin and Jean Siméon Chardin.
The exhibition does not include major paintings by the most renowned artists of the era, Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, or Jean Dominique Ingres. Their absence serves to illustrate how widespread and formulaic their underlying academic conventions were. Those artists, along with many others, are represented by works in the more impressive selection of works on paper, where we see some mind-boggling drawing skills mixed with some graceful improvisation in the handling of materials. David is represented by five works, Greuze by three, Prud’hon by five and Ingres by five. Drawings by Pauline Anzou and Henriette Lorimier remind us that the French Academy included women in their ranks, albeit on a selective and politically connected basis.
In David’s “Andromache Mourning the Death of Hector” (1783), we see the eponymous female figure weeping next to the lifeless body of her slain husband while her child tries to comfort her. The scene is developed in a layered pen, brush and ink technique that suggests the work is a preparatory study for a painting of the same title that Davide executed later that year. Ingres’ “Apollo Lyceus” (nd) is an exquisitely rendered charcoal study of an adolescent male figure casually leaning on a tree stump that hides a sinister-looking snake coiled about it. No doubt, this work is drawn from a Roman copy of a Greek statue, but Ingres’ addition of an ominous cast shadow says something about the lurking peril described in the scene. In Prud’hon’s “Torso of a Female Nude Silhouetted by Drapery” (1819) an idealized female figure stretching skyward against a powder blue background is rendered with crystalline precision.
How do these drawings by French Neoclassical artists compare to those made by Renaissance masters three centuries earlier? From the standpoint of sheer draughtsmanly skill, they are every bit as good and oftentimes better. But in their brittle precision they also lack the empathetic feeling of lived humanity that suffuse the drawings of the Renaissance masters.
There is a lot of useful knowledge to be gained here about French art before, during and after the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, but it has other notable resonances as well. At the time of the founding of the Republic, American art was also influenced by Neo-Classicism, witness the Greco-Roman revivalism of the White House, Capitol Building and the history paintings contained within. Neo-classicism’s aesthetic of masterful control was also embraced by official Nazi propaganda art and architecture, advanced as a government sponsored backlash against the avant-garde art that it vilified in its 1937 “Entartete Kunst” exhibition. Indeed, the neoclassical aesthetic has been consistently embraced by authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries, lending the authority of mis-remembered tradition to mendacious policies.
For example, on the day of his most recent inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order called “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” directing the General Services Administration to operate on the premise that Federal public buildings “should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” This foreshadows the kind of government support for the arts that we can expect for at least the next three years or more, even as that same system of self-government crumbles before our very eyes. The academy and the avant-garde alike are in peril.
