The Avant-Garde on the Syllabus

Martin Ferdinand Quadal, The Life Class of the Vienna Academy in the St Anna Building, 1787. Gemäldegalerie, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Art as collective work within an institutional framework. Reproduction: Wikimedia Commons, public domain (PD-Art).

DOKUNST

An exhibition opening at Vienna’s Academy today takes the institution hosting it as part of its subject. “Der große Michelangelo ist tot! Avantgarde und Akademismus” (The Great Michelangelo Is Dead! Avant-Garde and Academicism), curated by Helmut Draxler, opens at the Gemäldegalerie on 2 October. Marking three hundred years since Jacob van Schuppen drew up the Academy’s statutes in 1726, its fifteen chapters trace the relationship between academic order and its challengers. What interests me most is a difficulty the title leaves unstated: an art school is expected to foster independence while also selecting, assessing and deciding which forms of independence it will recognise. Its students encounter both the promise of freedom and the conditions attached to its recognition.

The painting accompanying this article takes us straight into that difficulty. Martin Ferdinand Quadal’s “The Life Class of the Vienna Academy in the St Anna Building” of 1787, also featured in the exhibition materials, presents art as collective work within an ordered teaching space. Such an order can train the eye; it can also determine what is considered worth looking at. Draxler’s concept reaches further back, to Giorgio Vasari, whose ideal of the autonomous artist coexisted with his service to princely power. That tension deserves attention because it unsettles the comfortable story of the free genius and the institution that merely stands in the way. Artistic independence is also made possible by training, access and support. That is precisely why their rules deserve scrutiny.

I find the proposed examination of copying particularly revealing. The exhibition connects historical teaching practices with contemporary appropriation and reenactment. The same act can be regarded as a derivative exercise or a sophisticated artistic decision. Who performs it, the context in which it appears and who invests it with significance evidently matter too. Here the academic question touches the art market: institutional recognition does not set a price, but it can influence which works come to the attention of galleries and collectors in the first place.

An academy examining its own premises deserves our interest. My reservation begins where every historical act of opposition is retrospectively made to demonstrate the institution’s capacity for renewal. Even dissent would then have its allotted place. The Vienna exhibition will have to be judged on whether it also makes visible those exclusions that cannot be resolved by celebrating rebels who eventually won recognition. The hardest question concerns the present: which forms of artistic independence still go unrecognised because they challenge the expectations of those who control access?

Der große Michelangelo ist tot! Avantgarde und Akademismus
2 October 2026–22 August 2027
Gemäldegalerie, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna
Curator: Helmut Draxler, with curatorial contributions by Claudia Koch and Hans-Jürgen Hafner.

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