Academic art

Academic Art (also called Academic Realism or Academicism, more rarely Academicism or also Salon Painting) was a European art style from the 17th to the 19th century. It placed its emphasis on strict adherence to the formal technical and aesthetic rules of the art academies.

Academic art includes paintings and sculptures created under the influence of the European academies, where many artists of the time received their formal training. Academic art was based on a predominantly literary, mythological and historically motivated canon of permissible or desirable themes. Its artists rarely showed interest in depicting the mundane or profane. Thus, Academic Art is predominantly idealistic rather than realistic.

Stylistically, academic art cultivated the ideal of perfect and at the same time selective imitation of reality (mimesis) that had existed since Aristotle. With perfect mastery of color, light and shadow, forms were worked out quasi-photorealistically. Some paintings show a "polished finish" in which no brushstroke can be discerned in the finished work. This ideal of art was shaken to its foundations in the mid-19th century by the invention of photography.

Particularly formative for the style was the French École des Beaux-Arts, which was under the influence of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. The Academic Art of later times synthesized these two styles, which can be seen very well in the paintings of William Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture and Hans Makart.

With the advent of later art styles, especially Impressionism, Academic Art was scorned and dismissed as "eclecticism". From the beginning to the end of the 20th century, it was not considered worthy of attention by most art experts, so it was barely mentioned and disappeared into museum repositories; occasionally it was disparagingly called "art pompier". The academic style of painting was further discredited by the fact that it was elevated to an absolute standard by National Socialist art policy. Only a few, mostly older artists remained faithful to it until the 1960s.

It was not until the 1990s that fin de siècle academic art was gradually "rediscovered" and has since been gaining increasing esteem again. While painting, reflecting on and questioning its own presuppositions, went its own way, historical film in particular, especially the sandal film, continued academism's desire to reconstruct the past.

Important representatives