Volume 31, Number 14 · September 27, 1984
Visions of the Grand Prize
By Bernard Knox
Paris–Rome–Athens: Travels in Greece by French Architects in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 420 pp., $45.00 (paper)
The Grand Prix de Rome: Paintings from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts 1797–1863
by Philippe Grunchec
International Exhibitions Foundation, Washington, DC, 160 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Le Grand Prix de Peinture: Les concours des Prix de Rome de 1797 à 1863 the US by the National Academy of Design)
by Philippe Grunchec
Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (distributed in, 446 pp., $55.00 (paper)
When we think of the history of European art in the nineteenth century we are thinking almost exclusively of what happened in Paris. Goya had no worthy successor in Spain; Italian painting of the period is known only to specialists; Germany and the Low Countries are a blank page, and England's Constable, Turner, and the enervate pre-Raphaelites cannot challenge the brilliance of the French makers and shakers—from David, Ingres, and Delacroix through Manet and Rodin to the Impressionists and the creative explosion of the nineteenth century fin de siècle and the beginning of the twentieth. And yet it was precisely in Paris that throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, painting, sculpture, and architecture were taught to men selected for their talent and supported by the state in an institution which for rigid didacticism, bureaucratic inflexibility, and sheer hide-bound conservatism can have had few rivals in the history of the arts.
Review, 5248 words
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