Against the Modern: Dagnan-Bouveret and the Transformation of the Academic Tradition

Gabriel P. Weisberg
Rutgers University Press, 2002
ISBN 0-9135-3156-X, paperback, 178 pp.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher <mosher@svsu.edu>,
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA.

This reviewer’s own engagement with academic painting was tested thirty years ago in nearly being tossed out of an art history class dealing with the nineteenth-century by Professor John Jacobus, who became quite flustered to find a student praising Bougereau. More entranced by the subject matter of roseate nudes, cavorting nymphs and shaggy satyrs in moments sexy as the movie ‘Emmanuelle’ as one was of Bougereau's technique, this reviewer nevertheless continues to find the work worthy of interest and revived study. This is a good time to re-evaluate the academic tradition, and the mainstream public art in nearly all European capitals (and the U.S.) of a hundred years ago. One of its most interesting aspects at that time was its negotiation of the tension between photography and hand drawing. The seemingly antithetical realms of traditional technique and new, developing technology actually came together in numerous memorable works,

Against the Modern concerns the work of Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929). A student in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of the painter of Orientalist scenes Jean-Leon Gérôme Dagnan-Bouveret won several awards in the 1880s and 1890s at the annual Salons. His first Salon prize was for a victorious nude ‘Atlanta’ in 1874, for he was skilled at nudes both male and female, as well as clothed portraits. At 24 he painted a male nude in the studio reminiscent of Thomas Eakins’ nudes. Dagnan-Bouveret soon gained public notice with works that applied his classical training to genre scenes. ‘Wedding at the Photographers’ (1878-79) was significant in that it depicted in paint a posed, photogenic moment in the photographic studio, from a vantage point behind the draped photographer.

He was inspired by the rural life of the Franche-Comte region of France, his wife’s home where the couple spent summers. In The Accident (1878) a doctor tends to the injured arm of a farm boy. Author Weisberg provides us the prepatory photographs for The Vaccination (1882) and Horses at the Watering Trough (1884). His best works have a subtlety of composition and handling, complex rhythms of white shirts or white wimples as in The Pardon in Brittany (1886), combining realism and symbolism--and a certain moodiness--under a of dour gray sky, in a churchyard or deep in the woods. Breton Women at a Pardon (1887) show provincial religious processions, and the contemporary viewer pauses at the rhythm of white areas—shirtsleeves, dress, an older man’s hair, a napkin in a picnic basket. It is a skilfully composed painting, subtle in coloring and among this artist’s best. A Marxist might appreciate the dignity of these agricultural workers; does John Berger like these works? This reviewer is reminded of 1970s work of Michigan painter Richard Wildt, who painted slightly abstracted dappled cows in deep twilight assembled into educated, complex compositions

Critics have often noted how the academic style prefigured the cinema, and many big populous paintings (nicknamed ‘machines’) look like a scene unrolling before the movie camera. To the cineaste of silent films, Dagnan-Bouvert’s late works evoke Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical or Roman epics or D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. His Christian subjects like The Lord’s Last Supper (1895) may have been more powerful if, like Rembrandt, he put religious tales in modern dress. Dagnan-Bouvert continued this work after World War One—perhaps to console himself for the loss of his only son on the battlefield—and through the 1920s, but his work showed no awareness of twentieth century trends in painting. Perhaps comparable to stretches when rock n’ rollers’ Little Richard or Prince gave up pulsing secular rock for religious music, Dagnan-Bouvert dedicated the last years of his life to painting big, populous religious scenes. In reproduction they look like illustrations to a volume of Bible stories for children, narrative and complicated but somehow undistinguished.

The use of photograph in painting was the subject of Weisberg’s previous book, though Dagnan-Bouveret uses imagery first captured by the camera for very different ends than the Photorealist painters of the 1970s in Berlin, New York (Estes, Cottingham, Flack)or San Francisco (Bechtle, McLean). Whereas their methods included projection of a photograph upon the canvas to minimize the demands of the drawing process, the academic tradition–for all its tight control—affirmed the primacy of drawing. Drawing skills remain important to many contemporary cyber-artists. Recently the University of Michigan School of Art revamped its curriculum to stress a combination of computer skills and a mastery of drawing.

As they resurrect the careers of nineteenth-century academic artists, the historians brought in by the Dahesh museum for exhibits like the one that birthed this book seem willing to acknowledge the artists limitations. Gabriel P. Weisberg’s book bears the title is ‘Against the Modern’ but instead it seems as if, at various points in his career, Dagnan-Bouvert consciously asked himself: What aspects of the Modern can I best use?