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Category: Enlightenment

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Yes, art is a business

The problem with worshiping genius is that for every Albert Einstein, there’s an Adolf Hitler.
Aristocratic Heads on Pikes, authorship unknown

Yesterday, a reader sent me an interview with painter Larry Poons. It was in The Art Newspaper as part of the run-up to the release of The Price of Everything on HBO.

Larry Poons is an abstract painter who currently teaches at the Art Students League in New York. He had valuable things to say, but this struck me as absolutely wrong:
“Success is in the studio. That’s the only success there is. The only other type of success is business: it’s not art. There’s nothing wrong with business and there’s nothing wrong with art but they’re two separate things. If you define success as being able to sell something to pay the rent, then that means you’re successful at paying your rent. It doesn’t mean that your art is any good or not.”
Napoleon on his Imperial throne, 1806, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, courtesy MusĂ©e de l’ArmĂ©e
I sympathize with his frustration with the high-end art market, but his attitude, shared by many of his peers, is part of the problem. This is the Cult of Genius that has beleaguered art since the Enlightenment—the idea that artists are above the struggles that drive mere mortal men. Prior to the 18th century, artists were considered craftsmen. While they may have been very successful and well-paid, they had no intellectual pretensions.
The Enlightenment asked artists to talk about civics and politics instead of religious values. This raised their status to that of intellectuals, almost gentlemen, in fact. Their training moved from the old apprenticeship/atelier model to formal art schools. For example, the Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768. Its mission was to raise the professional status of the artist by establishing a sound system of training. Along with these formal schools came the idea that artists were intellectuals.
Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, 1704, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, courtesy National Portrait Gallery
The idea of genius was born in the Enlightenment. It was the age of Newton and Napoleon, and it created a curious dichotomy. While governments were being formed on the idea that all men were created equal, certain men—geniuses—were growing ever more more equal than others.
More and more, these geniuses, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, began to operate outside the norms of society. The Cult of Genius brought us some great art, but it also ushered in a dreadful time in Europe. This included Robespierre’sReign of Terror in France, the genius cult of the Nazis, and Stalin’s Cult of Personality. All were possible because Great Men were more influential than unyielding values.
Self Portrait (dressed as an academic, not a craftsman), 1776, Sir Joshua Reynolds, courtesy Uffizi Gallery
As counterintuitive as it seems, in the end this has landed us in the modern dilemma of having so much banal, boorish, casual and ultimately meaningless material foisted on us as art. The genius doesn’t communicate; he proclaims. That means he doesn’t have to listen.
Ultimately, a person who is above money is completely out of touch with almost everyone else. In the end, that kind of attitude is what’s given artists such a terrible reputation in modern America, and why parents don’t believe their kids can make livings in the arts.
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Selective Roman virtues

Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1783. A Welsh former lady’s maid, Sarah Siddons went on to be recognized as the greatest tragedienne of her age. As an actress she was outside social mores. She was painted by both Gainsborough and Reynolds, whose portrait of her is more typical of a male “status portrait” of the time.
In the late 18th and early 19th century, women  were essentially invisible in the public sphere. This was in part due to society’s selective embrace of Roman values.
The ancient Romans, although in some ways progressive for their time, were explicitly patriarchal. The paterfamilias maintained strict authority over his family and household. Nevertheless, Roman women did have important rights and privileges, such as the right to carry on business, remarry, and own property. Women played a prominent role in the official cults, including the Vestal Virgins, who were Rome’s only full-time professional clergy.
Comtesse de la ChĂątre (Marie Louise Perrette AglaĂ© Bontemps), 1789, painted by Élisabeth Louise VigĂ©e Le Brun, who was the most famous woman painter of the 18th century. This is a more typical female portrait in that the subject’s social status is conveyed by her dress and surroundings.
What a surprise that the men of the Enlightenment selectively chose what Roman virtues to apply! Once again, we can look to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Ă‰mile for insight into their interpretation of Roman patriarchy.  Émile, as the ideal man, is educated to be self-governing.  Sophie, the ideal woman, is educated to be ruled by her husband.

Rousseau’s theory of sexuality is still repeated by some today:

Who can possibly suppose that nature has indifferently prescribed the same advances to the one sex as to the other and that the first to feel desire should also be the first to display it. What a strange lack of judgment! Since the consequences of the sexual act are so different for the two sexes, is it natural that they should engage in it with equal boldness? How can one fail to see that when the share of each is so unequal, if reserve did not impose on one sex the moderation that nature imposes on the other, the result would be the destruction of both and the human race would perish through the very means ordained for its continuance. Women so easily stir men’s senses and awaken in the bottom of their hearts the remains of an almost extinct desire that if there were some unhappy climate on this earth where philosophy had introduced this custom, especially in warm countries where more women than men are born, the men tyrannized over by the women would at last become their victims and would be dragged to their deaths without ever being able to defend themselves.
Is it any wonder that Mary Wollstonecraft felt compelled to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in 1792? Not that it had much of an immediate impact: Feminism would not get traction until the middle of the 19th century.

Mme de Wailly, sculpted by Augustin Pajou, 1789. After the second century BC, the wearing of togas by respectable women was a faux pas associated with prostitution and adultery. Women wore the stola, which was a long, pleated dress, worn over an undergarment called the tunica intima. In other words, real Roman matrons did not wander around with their breasts hanging out.
This week I am considering six forms of portrait painting that reached maturity during the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. These posts are based closely on the Royal Academy of Art’s 2007 show, Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Enlightenment family values

Sir Robert and Lady Buxton and Their Daughter Anne, 1786, by Henry Walton.
Those of us who look with dismay on recent trends in family structure might be surprised to learn that we are not the only age that has redefined family relationships.
Prior to the Enlightenment, very few children appeared in paintings. Unless you were the Baby Jesus, John the Baptist, a royal prince, or a bit player in a grand historical melodrama, the chances of you appearing in a portrait were slim. Of course, that reflected the role of children in society in general.
The Braddyll Family, 1789, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The strong pyramidal structure emphasizes their familial stability, and if you missed that they embody virtue and citizenship, then the copy of the Medici Vase (a famous Roman antiquity) is there to remind you. 
That changed with the need to explain society in terms of intellectual, rather than religious, values. To the eighteenth century man of letters, the family was the cradle of virtue and good citizenship. Children were no longer seen as stained by Original Sin; rather they became symbols of innocence. The child’s relationship with his parents changed (at least in the homes of the educated classes). It was less formal and more affectionate.
Gainsborough’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, 1756. Thomas Gainsborough painted his daughters many times. They are exquisitely affectionate portraits.
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a great impact on the attitude of the Enlightenment toward children. “If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated,” said Rousseau. Rousseau believed that the countryside was a more natural and healthy environment for children. He believed children learned from the consequences of their actions, so their teachers should be more along the lines of a Roman tutelary deity—keeping the kid from hurting himself—than an old-fashioned pedagogue.
If any of this wants to make you snort milk up your nose, bear in mind that Rousseau gave up each of his children as newborns to a foundling hospital. Like all the best educational theorists, he was an idealist, not a practitioner. Nonetheless, his ideas influenced child-rearing across Europe, although in practice they were modified to meet the exigencies of reality.

The Byam Family, Thomas Gainsborough, 1762-66. George Byam and his wife Louisa sat for the original portrait in the early ‘60s. A few years later, they returned with their first child, Selina, and Gainsborough added her to the portrait.
Rousseau and other 18th century thinkers were borrowing from the classical writers in extolling the virtues of the countryside over city life. This extended to their preference for informal gardens in the naturalistic English style over the formal gardens of old Europe.  As one father told his son, “one of the main reasons we live in the country both summer and winter is to teach us from an early age that simplicity, moderation and industry are inextricably bound to our basic happiness.”*
Thus the family portrait on the grounds of an estate was meant not primarily to express the wealth of the sitter, but to place the family in a natural environment, with all the blessings that implied.
This week I am considering six forms of portrait painting that reached maturity during the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. These posts are based closely on the Royal Academy of Art’s 2007 show, Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830. 
*Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary by Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker, and Diane Webb. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Portrait of the artist

Sir Joshua Reynolds painted himself as a man of letters, in his robes as a Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford (1776). Note the absolute absence of any paint on that outfit.

Prior to the middle of the 18th century, fine artists were considered craftsmen. While they may have been very successful and well-paid, they had no particular intellectual pretensions.

The Enlightenment cast artists in the role of communicating the civic virtues. This raised the social status of artists from artisans to gentlemen. Their training moved from the old apprenticeship/atelier model to formal art schools. The Royal Academy of Arts in London is representative. It was founded in 1768. Its mission was to raise the professional status of the artist by establishing a sound system of training and expertise in the arts.

Portrait of a rather emotional French sculptor, Antoine Denis Chaudet, by miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin. I feel like I should give him a cookie.
The Enlightenment also brought us the Cult of Genius, with its handmaidens, Feeling and Creativity. The artist no longer primarily tried to render beautiful images; he was engaged in profound and creative thought.

Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio, 1798, by Louis-LĂ©opold Boilly, in which a bunch of artists apparently get together and talk about art instead of making it. Not that that ever happens.
As counterintuitive as it seems, this is what has landed us in the modern dilemma of having so much banal, boorish, casual and ultimately meaningless material foisted on us as art. The intellectual mind can always be seduced by the idea of transgressing limits, whereas a craftsman generally seeks to raise his standards to the highest degree possible.
The problem with transgression as one’s sole intellectual concept is that it keeps extending the limits. Thus today’s portrait of the artist has become Kanye West and a topless Kim Kardashian on a motorcycle.

This week I am writing about portrait painting during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These posts are based closely on the Royal Academy of Art’s 2007 show, Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830. 

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!