✦ This month's exhibition
The Academy
September, and order returns — Roman virtue, cool marble, perfect line.
Closes September 30
Jacques-Louis David · Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Angelica Kauffman · Benjamin West
Enter the exhibition →StellartThe Academy
September asks an unfashionable question: what can rules make possible? Four rooms follow artists trained by academic ideals — and four different ways of obeying, bending or changing them.
After summer's scandals, order returns. Academic painting treated art as something teachable: drawing before colour, study of the antique, and a hierarchy with history painting at the top. This month follows four negotiations with that tradition — David, who mastered its system and later helped dismantle its royal institution; Ingres, who defended line while bending anatomy; Kauffman, who reached history painting without equal access to life study; and West, who used academic composition for a recent event in modern dress. Decide at the end: do rules make artists, or do artists remake rules?