Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian
An Exhibition Organized by the Dahesh Museum

Marie Bashkirtseff In the Studio, 1881 Oil on Canvas Collection: Dnipropetrovsk State Art Museum, Ukraine

by J. David Farmer, Ph.D.
Director, Dahesh Museum, New York City

What was this Académie Julian that one so frequently finds mentioned in discussions of 19th and early 20th century art? Beside the fact that celebrated artists as diverse as John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri and Henri Matisse had studied there, I personally knew very little about the school and its founder, Rodolphe Julian (1839-1907). However, my lack of knowledge was for good reasons-to my understanding, there is not a single study of the Académie, and there has never been a museum exhibition devoted to this influential school.
 
In fact, from its inception in Paris in 1868, the Académie Julian was the outstanding private art academy in France. For decades it was recognized as probably the most famous private art school in the world, and by the 1880s its student enrollment grew to over 600. The Académie Julian was conceived by its founder as an alternative to the official and very competitive École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Rodolphe Julian was a canny businessman and quickly established his academy as a premiere destination, which was open to anyone who could afford the tuition. It had a renowned faculty, boasting of the most famous and successful artists of their time, including William Bouguereau, Jules Lefebvre and Jean-Paul Laurens. Some illustrious American artists who studied under these masters were Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Dewing, Gari Melchers, J.C. Leyendecker, Arthur Mathews, John Henry Twachtman, and Joseph Sharp. Furthermore, the Académie Julian was instrumental in training many California Art Club artists, to name a few, Alson Clark, Guy Rose, and Granville Redmond. Monsieur Julian also had the brilliant idea that there was a place for an art academy that could offer women the same training that men received at the École des Beaux-Arts (the École finally began to accept women as students in 1897). This combination of progressive ideals and business opportunism opened the way for a new generation of women artists who could, and did, compete as professionals in the art world.
 
Overcoming All Obstacles: Women of the Académie Julian is an exhibition at the Dahesh Museum that explores the first thirty years of the school's innovative program. The theme of the exhibition concentrates on a few of the many women who succeeded in creating careers at a time when the public and the art establishment, in general, were not quite ready to accept women as fine artists.

The basis of academic study at the École des Beaux-Arts and most other art academies was drawing from the live model. For mostly moral reasons, it was considered improper for women to draw from the nude. Therefore, women who were lacking this training were put at a distinct disadvantage in an art world that still valued figural work as the highest kind of subject. The core of the exhibition at the Dahesh focuses on figure and head studies made at the Académie Julian in its early years and fortunately preserved by its current owner and director, Andr‚ Del Debbio. They have never before been seen publicly, and the level of finish and quality in these drawings and oil sketches testifies to the excellent, intensive training the women received, as well as their skill and dedication. Monsieur Julian is quoted in a contemporary interview as noting that women won the frequent internal competitions as regularly as men. Seeing these superb works should motivate any art educator today to realize the essential value of learning to draw.
 

Marie Bashkirtseff Self-Portrait with a Palette, c. 1883 Oil on Canvas Collection: Musée des Beaux-Arts (Jules Chéret), Nice

Continue to next page