THE ACADEMY AND THE AVANT-GARDE IN FRANCE The artists of the French Academy and the artists of the French avant-garde are often presented as being protagonists, but, in fact, each group defined itself in terms of the other. The French Academy was the bastion of the...
NEOCLASSICISM AND THE ANTIQUE The Rediscovery of the Past Classicism, since the Renaissance, had been the foundation of an expression of all that was superior and exhaled in the fine arts. Capable of morphing, the classicism of the Renaissance, of Raphael and...
ROMANTICISM AND NATIONALISM Romanticism was a form of modern consciousness that was expressed as art style, as an attitude of individualism, as a political stance, and as a new way of being an artist. In the nineteenth century, modern nations were beginning to take...
ART AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT Rococo and Revolution From the early eighteenth century on, the visual arts, from painting to interior décor, were markers of class and harbingers of the Revolution to come. A late expression of the pompous and grandiose Baroque, the soft...
THE NEOCLASSICISM OF JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID (1748-1825) Jacques-Louis David, the most prominent Neoclassical painter in France, shifted his artistic allegiances from a king to a revolution against that king to an emperor. Was the artist a man without principles or was he...
THE RISE OF NEOCLASSICISM The origins of Neoclassicism in art, architecture and interior décor was the excavation of long buried Roman cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid-eighteenth century. A popular correction of the late Baroque style and the ornamental...
