Dahesh collection exhibit

New York, NY -- February 26 - April 29 2010, the Dahesh Museum of Art will present Becoming An Artist: The Academy in 19th-Century France at Syracuse University's Palitz Gallery, Lubin House in New York City, 11 East 61st Street off Fifth Avenue.


Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824-1904)
Working in Marble, or The Artist Sculpting Tanagra, 1890
Oil on Canvas, 19 7.8 x 151/2 in.

Becoming An Artist features a remarkable selection of 28 works drawn from the Dahesh Museum of Art's distinguished collection, including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by well-known academic masters: William Adolphe Bouguereau, Paul Delaroche, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, as well as their lesser-known but equally popular contemporaries.

The exhibition explores the technical and intellectual training offered by the internationally famous Paris art school, the école des Beaux-Arts. The flowering and international influence of the French Academy and the école des Beaux-Arts in the 19th century made Paris the artistic capital of the Western World, and aspiring artists flocked there. Those artists elected to the Academy virtually ruled the French art world, and acceptance at the école was a crucial step to a successful career.

The exhibition highlights the rigorous, broad-based curriculum that attracted students from France and abroad; the competitions that rewarded excellence; the hierarchy of preferred subject matter; and the unexpected variety of artistic expression generated by this exacting system.