Strictly Academic: Life Drawing in the Nineteenth Century

A loan exhibition organized by the University Art Gallery, State University of New York at Binghamton. From the "The Academies in the nineteenth-century assumed great importance for the training of artists, and the practice of life-drawing - the focal point of academic curriculum - which contributed to many of the ideas of nineteenth-century art has regrettably been overlooked. This exhibition and catalogue are a beginning toward understanding the importance of life drawing for the curricula of the academies and art in general. In exploring the international role of life drawing, the exhibition includes French, German, Italian, English and American drawings, some representing preliminary figure studies for paintings, some made to satisfy the artist's own inquiring mind, and others produced as exercises in the classroom. Not only is the enormous subject of life drawing being presented here for the first time, but also over half of the drawings are unpublished, thereby uncovering the work of artists who are little known. The real joy, however, of this study is the realization that the subject is valid both in terms of the discipline of art history and the practice of contemporary art..." With an introductory essay by Albert Boime, former professor and chairman of the Department of Art and Art History, SUNY-Binghamton.