Imagine a prestigious, hard-to-get-into art school full of fiercely competitive students who regard making art as a career choice as much as a creative necessity. Their course of study is designed to foster correct thinking, according to the dictates of the leaders of the institution. A single aesthetic dominates. Concept is deemed to be as important as execution, but technical skill is highly prized. Drawing is valued, as is evidence of time and labor expended on making works; sleek finish is admired. The most ambitious students concentrate on mastering modish techniques and exploring well-sanctioned “strategies” whose long-term goal is to assure them of lucrative careers within the art establishment.
Today’s Yale, the School of Visual Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, or even Columbia? No—the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, as it was from its foundation in 1648 as the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (the name changed after the French Revolution) until its transformation during “the academic reforms of 1968.”
Well into the nineteenth century, the most powerful and successful artists in France were products of this most eminent of art schools. Whether it was called the Académie Royale or the Ecole Nationale Supérieure, the exhaustive program of training was intended to turn the most gifted and ambitious candidates into history painters (and sculptors), adept at staging instructive narrative dramas from the mythological, biblical, and historical past, enacted by groups of large-scale figures. (Less accomplished and less able students were doomed to
