Art Renewal Center
Encyclopedia
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
millionaire, businessman, and art collector Fred Ross dedicated to the promotion of what it terms classical realism
Classical Realism
For Classical Realism in International Relations, see Realism Classical Realism refers to an artistic movement in late 20th century painting that places a high value upon skill and beauty, combining elements of 19th century neoclassicism and realism.-Origins:The term "Classical Realism" first...
in art, as opposed to the Modernist developments of the twentieth century. It exists primarily as an online
ONLINE
ONLINE is a magazine for information systems first published in 1977. The publisher Online, Inc. was founded the year before. In May 2002, Information Today, Inc. acquired the assets of Online Inc....
art gallery
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
.
History
The Art Renewal Center (ARC) was founded in 2000 by a group of artists, art collectors, historians, and enthusiasts, and is chaired by Fred Ross. It is a visual arts organisation which advocates the rejection of ModernismModernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
and the current art establishment, in favour of what it defines as the previously established "standards of craftsmanship and excellence". The ARC sees the acquisition of academic skills as being essential for the art of the future. It operates primarily through a web site sponsored by Fred Ross, a millionaire New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
businessman and art collector, who is a strong campaigner for its ideas.
The web site examines values of art with articles, messages, and a detailed statement by Fred Ross, the ARC chairman. It is a campaigning site that is harshly critical of most modern art, and equally fervent about prior art. The site contains nearly 63,000 images of past works as examples of the art it endorses, as well as listing contemporary artists, schools and studios of which it approves. Particular emphasis is given to the work of French nineteenth-century Salon painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.-Life and career :William-Adolphe...
, who is represented by over 226 images on the site; Ross says that Bouguereau's work is accessed twice as often as any other artist on the site, including such esteemed artists as Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
.
Ross wrote in an essay:
- For over 90 years there has been a concerted and relentless effort to disparage, denigrate and obliterate the reputations, names and brilliance of the academic artistic masters of the late 19th century. ... It is incredible how close Modernist theory, backed by an enormous network of powerful and influential art dealers, came to acquiring complete control over thousands of museums, university art departments and journalistic art criticism.
_-_nymphs_and_satyr_(1873).jpg)
- Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine, I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast. Years of undergraduate courses and another 60 credits post-graduate in art, and I had never heard [Bouguereau's] name. Who was he? Was he important? Anyone who could have done this must surely be deserving of the highest accolades in the art world.
Images on the ARC site include many works of Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
, Rococo
Rococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
, Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
and French Academic art
Academic art
Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism,...
. It includes some Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
and Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
, but other than Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...
, it does not include any of the Post-impressionists, such as Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
or Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
, nor any other Modernist school except the Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
exemplified by Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
and Yves Tanguy
Yves Tanguy
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.-Biography:Tanguy was born in Paris, France, the son of a retired navy captain. His parents were both of Breton origin...
. The group is critical of much twentieth-century art, arguing that it demonstrates weak technique and conveys ideas ineffectually, if at all, and focuses on false, obscure, or trivial subject matter, in addition to being weird for weirdness' sake. Exceptions include such twentieth-century artists as Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery.-Life:...
, Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell
Norman Percevel Rockwell was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening...
, and a number of contemporary realist painters featured in its Living Masters List.
The ARC says it abides by a concept of art exemplified by art produced from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. ARC's concept of art is defined by this quote from their FAQ:
- Specifically, the way that art accomplishes its expression is through the manipulation of a medium as a selective recreation of some aspect of reality. That is to say that the artist "fictionalizes" reality in order to highlight some idea he thinks is important, and to diminish ones he considers irrelevant to his intended message.
The most recent famous modern artists to be discussed on their site are Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
and Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
, and they are uniformly dismissed. Later postmodern artists are not mentioned.
The group actively promotes the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.-Life and career :William-Adolphe...
, considering him not only the greatest French artist of the nineteenth century but also "unquestionably one of history's greatest artistic geniuses." Several Art Renewal Center members are, in addition, involved with the "William Bouguereau Catalog Raisonné" project.
The group is openly hostile to contemporary art education and dismissive of contemporary art history from the Impressionists onwards. Among the published polemics, there are attacks on David Hockney for his thesis that many artists used lenses and visual aids.
The Art Renewal Center also encourages the development of supposedly traditional painting styles and methods such as instruction by atelier
Atelier Method
Atelier is the French word for "workshop", and in English is used principally for the workshop of an artist in the fine or decorative arts, where a principal master and a number of assistants, students and apprentices worked together producing pieces that went out in the master's name...
for painters.
The ARC has received criticism even from some people with reservations about Modernism. Artist and blogger Mark Vallen
Mark Vallen
Mark Vallen is an American activist with Chicano and other issues, curator, figurative realist painter, and blogger, who runs the Art for a Change web site; he founded The Black Moon web site for Japanese culture.-Life and work:...
posted on his web site that the ARC "are not incorrect when noting the follies of modern art, but their total rejection of it is beyond the pale and thoroughly reactionary." Vallen was also critical of Bouguereau: "Bouguereau's strength was his dedication to the craft of painting, and his technical mastery of oil painting can't be denied. If today's artists knew but a fraction of the painting skills possessed and employed by Bouguereau, they would be better off. Nevertheless, Bouguereau was also imprisoned by his extremely conservative vision of what painting could be—and that was his greatest weakness."
Prizes
The ARC runs a scholarship project and also an annual Salon competition since 2003. Dana E. LevinDana E. Levin
Dana Levin is an American Classical Realism painter. Trained in Florence, Levin is established as a portrait, landscape, still life, figurative, and interior painter.-Life and work:...
was one of the ARC International Scholarship winners in 2001 and 2002. Daniel Gerhartz won the Best in Show in 2004 and Paul G. Oxborough in 2005. Donato Giancola
Donato Giancola
Donato Giancola is an American artist specializing in science fiction and fantasy illustration.-Biography:Donato Giancola was born in 1967 and raised in Colchester, Vermont, near Burlington, Vermont...
won first place in the figurative category in 2004.