Thomas Hart Benton: Academie Julian, Pt. 1

"The Studio" [Academie Julian] by Marie Bashkirtseff

"The Academie Julian vied with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for supremacy as the top art school of the world. It was famous everywhere as a factory for turning out draughtsmen. Training procedures at the Academie were not different from those I had encountered in Chicago, but were more rigorously applied and enforced. 

The figure-drawing classrooms were large and lit by skylights. At one end of each was a model stand, and radiating in a semicircle from that, stools and easels were set in such a way that all students could see the model, though those in the rear usually had to stand to do so. The seats nearest the model were reserved for the more advanced students who, while they were closer to their subjects, had problems of acute foreshortening to deal with. These 'master draughtsmen' took pride in handling such problems and often would remain in the Academie year after year for the pleasure they took in solving them. For some of these students this kind of exercise became the 'all in all' of art. They became perpetual students and never did anything else.

On each easel in the classroom was a drawing board to which was thumbtacked a lightly grained sheet of drawing paper. Each sheet on each board was the same size. The students drew with thin sticks of charcoal and always held erasers for corrections. Each and every one kept a plumb line handy, which was held up now and then to determine the correct angles of things, the angles which, for instance, the model's shoulders or hips took, in the perspectives resulting from the student's particular position. In working out these angles, it was the practice to close one eye to establish a fixed point of vision - an exact point of focus - somewhat as a camera does.

The whole method was strictly visualistic, and in a most narrow and rigid sense. But it had a philosophy. This went about as follows. Drawing and painting were visual arts. In order to make sure that you visualized correctly you were supposed to divest your visual experiences of all the conditioning effects of non-visual experiences. Such experiences distorted your visual ones. They made you see incorrectly. You were to get rid of your memory, your imagination, and all preconceptions they might engender and learn to see 'purely,' with what John Ruskin and the American philosopher William James called an 'innocent eye.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)