VIENNA.- The exhibition The Great Michelangelo Is Dead! Avant-Garde and Academicism aims to give new form to an age-old debate. It will not use academicism a pejorative label for all that is outdated, nor credit the avant-garde with a monopoly on the new. Rather, the objective is to uncover the creative dynamic playing out between these two poles – both in a deep historical perspective and as it currently demarcates positions in the field of contemporary art.
The occasion is a tercentenary of what is now the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna – the anniversary of the drafting of its statutes, modelled on those of the French academy, by Jacob van Schuppen in 1726. Yet the exhibition presents not a detailed history of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna but a journey through the history of the academy (and the academies) as well as its anti-academic adversaries in fifteen chapters that pinpoint key junctures. In so doing, it also frames a new perspective on the academy’s current role and its responsibilities in the future and touches on the explosive debates around identity politics, diversity, and geopolitical shifts that shape the discourses of education and society today. The institutional frame is defined by the unique situation of having three eminent art collections within a single academy. Their extensive holdings of paintings, graphic art, and plaster casts present an opportunity to subject the historical collections to fresh scrutiny and to initiate a conversation about contemporary art in light of these special circumstances.
The exhibition’s conceptual point of departure is a fundamental schism within the conception of art that is reflected in the lasting influence of Giorgio Vasari. His writings extol the ideal of the autonomous, authentic, and original artist; meanwhile, he is an enterprising cultural official busy with helping to consolidate absolutist rule in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. This contradiction leaves its mark on the founding of the first art academy, the Accademia del Disegno, by Cosimo I in Florence in 1563. Its true symbolic founding event comes a year later in the pompous funeral of Michelangelo Buonarroti, whom Vasari regards as the epitome of the ‘divine’ artist.
The tension between ideal and real practice lingers in the discourses of the academy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it gives rise not only to the refinement of academic training methods in accordance with theoretical, ethical, and pedagogical principles, but also to an anti-academic critique that objects to the practice of copying plaster casts for years on end no less than to the academies’ proximity to absolutist power. These internal discrepancies within the academic discourse lead to a tipping point during the French Revolution, when the academy is briefly abolished as an institution, only to be deemed worthy after all of revolutionary democratic transformation and conceptual realignment.
The exhibition will reconstruct this interplay between the founding of academies, critique of the academy, and academic reform, which has continued to the present day, and illustrate it with selected examples. For instance, the master class reform model – envisioned by the Nazarenes, a movement founded in Vienna, and first established in Dsseldorf, it stands in opposition to the classical normative teaching of the Paris academy with its emphasis on rules and theory – has had a long life alternating between critique and self-assertion. The exhibition will trace its career from the early nineteenth century to the present day, showing how it inspires efforts to institutionalize the avant-garde in the 1920s at the Bauhaus as well as the Russian reform academy Vkhutemas, is in play in the turbulent events at the Dsseldorf Academy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and arguably even resonates in the discussions surrounding the Bologna Process in the early twenty-first century, the establishment of new academies around the world, the educational turn, and the so-called New Institutionalism.
The exhibition presents a selection of major works of European painting from the sixteenth century onwards, rounded out by significant loans, in dialogue with prominent positions in contemporary art. Besides a large number of originals, it also features copies – a segment of the legacy collection largely devalued by the avant-garde’s cult of originality – and contemporary works, some of which have been created specially for the exhibition. This arrangement is meant to draw attention to a specific quality of contemporary art since the 1960s: that it conceives of the copy no longer as a mere reproduction or teaching aid but as an artistic medium in its own right, one that employs strategies of appropriation and re-enactment to implement academic practice as an avant-garde method.
With historical works from the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna – Paintings Gallery, Graphic Collection, and Plaster Cast Collection – supplemented by numerous loans:
Sandro Botticelli, Sbastien Bourdon (attributed), Heinrich Friedrich Fger, Artemisia Gentileschi (attributed), William Hogarth, Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder, Charles Le Brun, Franz Anton Maulbertsch, Francis Picabia, Nicolas Poussin, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Joachim von Sandrart, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Jakob van Schuppen, George Stubbs, Pierre Subleyras, Titian, Giorgio Vasari, Ferdinand Georg Waldmller, Januarius Zick et al.
Plaster casts after Michelangelo Buonarroti, Antonio Canova et al., as well as corch (anatomical figure) by Johann Martin Fischer
Contemporary artists: Abel Auer, Alice Creischer, Vaginal Davis, Stephan Dillemuth, Thomas Eggerer, Michaela Eichwald, Abdulnasser Gharem, Wolfgang Hollegha, Andy Hope 1930, Jrg Immendorff, Stephan Janitzky, Martin Kippenberger, Jutta Koether, Louise Lawler, Roy Lichtenstein, Markus Lpertz, Birgit Megerle, Ariane Mueller, Chris Reinecke, Gunter Reski, Katharina Sieverding, Hong Zeiss und and Heimo Zobernig
Presentation of works from the Flemish, Dutch and Old German schools from the collection of the Paintings Gallery as a ‘gallery painting’
Curated by Helmut Draxler
With curatorial contributions by Claudia Koch (chapter Gallery Painting) and Hans-Jrgen Hafner (chapter Dsseldorf Academy)
