The Great Michelangelo Is Dead! Avant-garde and Academicism
Martin Ferdinand Quadal, The Life Class of the Vienna Academy in the St Anne Building, 1787 © Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Avant-garde and Academicism aims to give a new twist to an age-old debate. Academicism is not seen as a pejorative term for everything that is outdated in art, nor is avant-garde perceived as having a monopoly on all that is new. Rather, it seeks to reveal the creative tension between these two concepts, both from an in-depth historical perspective and its place within the field of contemporary art.
The title of the exhibition alludes to a paradox: Giorgio Vasari, who was directly involved in the founding of the first modern art academy, namely the Accademia del Disegno in Florence (1563), regarded Michelangelo’s works as the unsurpassable apogee of art, achieved for the first time since Antiquity. That perfection, in a sense tantamount to the end of art as such, represented the starting point for the academy, the essential purpose of which is to provide the divinely inspired artist with an academically accomplished counterpart capable of emulating this great role model without necessarily having to be a creative genius himself. Accordingly, the celebrations marking Michelangelo’s funeral (1564) represented the Accademia’s first public activity. Clearly distinct from the traditional model of the bottega and its guild-based organisational structure, the academy positioned itself within the ambit of modern institutional structures precisely because of this division between ideal and efficiency. In doing so, it also triggered the anti-academic reactions discernible since the 18th century and, later, its equivalent expression in the avant-garde.
The exhibition aims to trace this fundamental interplay between the founding of academies, the criticism thereof and academy reform through selected examples, through to the present day. That interplay can be understood as the truly productive and dynamic moment of modern art; it is evident in individual artistic practices as well as in theoretical reflections and institutional structures.
Working from the extensive inventory of the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna complemented by important loans, major works of European painting since the 16th century are correlated with the emerging discursive and institutional field of the academies. The image of the 17th century gallery, in which modern collections are reflected for the first time, is re-enacted as it were, in a sort of revival in the three-dimensional space of a studio-like setting with alternating protagonists.
The exhibition is designed to coincide with a special anniversary, namely the refounding by Jacob van Schuppen in 1726 of the Imperial & Royal Court Academy of Painters, Sculptors and Architecture based on the French model as well as the heated debates surrounding such topics as identity politics, diversity and geopolitical shifts that continue to shape contemporary education policies and present-day society.
On display are works by – among others – Giorgio Vasari, Sandro Botticelli, Titian, Charles Le Brun, Nicholas Poussin, Sebastien Bourdon, Joachim von Sandrart, Pierre Subleyras, Franz Anton Maulbertsch, Johann Heinrich Füger, William Hogarth, Joseph Wright of Derby, Johan Zoffany, George Stubbs, Januarius Zick, Asmus Jakob Carstens, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Friedrich Overbeck, Johan Peter Hasenclever, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Gustave Courbet, Herbert Boeckl, Albert Paris Gütersloh and Wolfgang Hollegha. The original paintings and prints are complemented by academic practice as such: the copy, in our case old and new copies after Raphael, Michelangelo, Claude Lorrain, Titian and Poussin, as well as re-enactments by contemporary artists such as Abel Auer, Alice Creischer, Stephan Dillemuth, Thomas Eggerer, Michaela Eichwald, Abdulnasser Gharem, Andy Hope 1930, Stefan Janitzky, Martin A...cademy of Fine Arts Vienna Art Collections 9 Press Release, Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Kippenberger, Jutta Koether, Louise Lawler, Ariane Müller, Chris Reineke, Katharina Sieverding, Heimo Zobernig, and others.
Curated by Helmut Draxler