Since the Renaissance, love and friendship have frequently been invoked by artists, connoisseurs, and critics as necessary predispositions for their activity. In taking up this idea, Johann Joachim Winckelmann shifted its meaning, making love into an ability in the strongest sense of the word. Desire traverses descriptions by the art historian, who would end his History of Ancient Art (1764) with the eloquent image of a tearful lover, watching as the sails of a boat, on which their beloved has embarked, disappear further across the sea. The art of antiquity is hence described in terms of an intense presence, necessitating a discourse of desire, yet also as an irremediable absence. In the wake of Winckelmann, this language of love would further develop around 1800, particularly among artists who, like the Primitives (secte des Barbus) in David’s atelier, would make pure love an essential ingredient of their condition and even of their activity.
This article looks, through the lens of gender, at the historiography of studying sculpture in the late 19th century. It is an area long underestimated in studies of women artists, usually confined to painters, as well as in the history of the medium, wherein Camille Claudel serves as an apparent exception in the milieu of sculptors. Even so, the varied paths of sculptresses has come to light over the past forty years thanks to lively international research. We know more than ever about such artists’ works, which museums are rediscovering today, but also about their educations. In Paris, many learned to sculpt at the private academies of Julian or Colarossi, before the École des Beaux-Arts allotted women a dedicated atelier in 1900. Today, a comprehensive investigation is needed to locate the sometimes scant traces of this education, whether through diaries, classifieds, official registers, Salon catalogs, or the period’s visual culture.
This article offers a historiographic assessment of the spaces and places of artistic during the Ancien Régime. Pushing against a binary reading that opposes academies and guilds, it teases apart a space of profuse, stratified education characterized by circulations, overlaps, and hierarchies based variously on class, gender, and origin. One of the main threads here is an attention paid to archival regimes: over-documentation of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture contrasts with the rarity, dispersal, or disappearance of other corpora, an imbalance which has persistently tilted how the history of artistic education is written. Leaning on recent studies, the article illustrates several blind spots in such research: peripheral institutions, non-institutional learning paths, competition between pedagogic models, the concrete practices and material conditions of teaching, the careers of teachers and students, and the central albeit elusive role of the atelier.
After the “golden age” of studios in Nigeria, training models evolved and photographers slowly freed themselves from the hierarchical relation between teacher and student. In 1992, Don Barber inaugurated his “salon” in the Surulere neighborhood, being a convivial space, which favored the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and practice. The Photographers Association of Nigeria (PAN), founded three years later, sought to bridge the lack of a formal institutional framework. This ultimately incomplete attempt to collegially structure access to training left in its wake a new generation anxious to prolong its spirit. In 2001, the Depth of Field collective emerged, developing a pedagogical approach grounded in collaboration and horizontality, again breaking with the hierarchical logic of traditional studios. The present article assesses the importance of these collectivist dynamics in the training of photographers in Lagos since the end of the 1980s. Often fueled by the bonds of friendship, these networks of conviviality encouraged a shared artistic reflection, contributing both to the recognition of photography as an artistic medium in Nigeria and to the international diffusion of the photographers’ work.
The work of Lygia Clark (1920–1988) is examined here through a pedagogical angle, showing how, from Neo-Concrete “propositions” to sensory tools developed at the Sorbonne (1972–1976), the artist’s practice elaborated a perceptual emancipation founded upon bodily experience. Clark shifted learning from a process of conceptual transmission to one of collective sensory activation. Her propositions – elastics, masks, tactile objects – impeded all distancing postures, turning the body into a site for reconfiguring received perceptual hierarchies. In the circumscribed space of the university studio, these arrangements produce a localized verification of the equality of sensory abilities. The body hence becomes the locus of a transformation, one that moves beyond the dissolution of perceptual conditioning and turns collective sensory experience into a site for emancipation.
Though the capacity to learn was considered a fundamental quality of humanity made “in God’s image,” medieval commentaries on artistic learning are few and far between. Likewise, art historical scholarship on craft learning in the Middle Ages is surprisingly thin. Looking across four studies by art historians and historians that address the topics of creativity, craft treatises, guild regulations, and the apprenticeship system, this article considers the unique historic and historiographical challenges to studying premodern artistic training and highlights how these challenges have been addressed in recent scholarship. It focuses specifically on material from north of the Alps, particularly in northwestern Europe.
While studies on artistic pedagogy have long privileged the analysis of specific national contexts, several recent works seek to renew this approach by employing methodologies anchored in post- and decolonial studies. These have highlighted the processes of transformation resulting from historical cultural contacts, evolving pedagogical notions, and the transfer of models of artistic education in non-western spaces. Drawing Education: Worldwide! (2019) recomposes the history of transfers in the aesthetic norms and institutions of drawing education across Arab, Asian, Latin American, North American, and European countries. Disrupting Schools (2021) studies the role of artistic education not only for the building of a career but the formation of self, open to the other. El modelo beaux-arts y la arquitectura en América Latina (1870–1930) (2022) broaches the diffusion of the Beaux-Arts style in the process of constructing new cities, where French ideas constituted a foundation, while showing forms of adaptation in action.
This article offers an interpretation of unlearning in ateliers, based on accounts left behind by Étienne-Jean Delécluze (1781–1863) and Amaury-Duval (1808–1885), students and biographers of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). It examines the way in which these texts, composed retrospectively, constructed memories both of artistic education and the master’s authority, particularly in the context of an institutional reorganization of education between the 18th and 19th centuries. If such works returned to the past experiences of youth, they also spoke to the authors’ present moment, one marked by the decline of a unified academic model. Unlearning here appears as an injunction, one by which the master invited the student to part with acquired habits. Inseparable from the work of dispossessing the gaze, it engages the student in a type of conversion, being the precondition for a renewed access to artistic experience. In such accounts, this unlearning also functions as a central moment in the transmission and memorialization of artistic education.
