The Académie Julian

Rudolph Julian

I mentioned in my previous post that the narrator of Confessions of a Young Man moves from studying at the École des Beaux Arts to working in a smaller school based in the passage des Panoramas off the Boulevard Montmartre in the 2e arrondissement of Paris. The Académie Julian was founded in 1868 by Pierre Louis Rodolphe Julian (1839-1907), who had moved to Paris from the South of France. Moore was fascinated by Julian* and also wrote about him in an article entitled 'Meissonier and the Salon' for the Fortnightly Review in July 1890:

M. Julian was once a shepherd in the south of France. In his native village he established a reputation for extraordinary strength and artistic capacity. He had thrown every young man within twenty miles in the wrestling contests, and he had astonished every one by the skill he showed in drawing. For a time his fate hung in the balance. A great wrestler or a great painter, which was he to be?

Moore seems to have been greatly impressed by Julian's background, personality and entrepreneurial spirit. The narrator in Confessions remarks:

I had never met such a man before, and all my curiosity was awake. He spoke of art and literature, of the world and the flesh; he told me of the books he had read, he narrated thrilling incidents in his own life; and the moral reflections with which he sprinkled his conversation I thought very striking.

In terms of Julian's teaching methods, this seems to have been reflected in a willingness to take on foreign students and to take on women as students. (In comparison, the École des Beaux Arts did not admit women until 1897.) The narrator of Confessions notes:

In the studio there were some eighteen or twenty young men, and among these there were some four or five from whom I could learn; and there were also there some eight or nine young English girls. We sat round in a circle, and drew from the model. And this reversal of all the world’s opinions and prejudices was to me singularly delightful; I loved the sense of unreality that the exceptionalness of our life in this studio conveyed. Besides, the women themselves were young and interesting, and were, therefore, one of the charms of the place, giving, as they did, that sense of sex which is so subtle a mental pleasure, and which is, in its outward aspect, so interesting to the eye – the gowns, the hair lifted, showing the neck; the earrings, the sleeves open at the elbow.

Although the narrator denies that he ever fell in love with other female students, the erotic charge in this passage (slightly creepy to modern ears) provides ironic confirmation of conservative attitudes towards women and art in the period. There were fears about the corrupting effect upon women artists of drawing from nude models, but Moore's account also insinuates the female students were at risk from other male artists.**  

Nevertheless, it is notable that several prominent women artists studied there: Marie Bashkirtseff is the most famous but others included: Anna Klumpke, Elizabeth Gardner, Marie Louise Catherine Breslau; Anna Nordgren and Amélie Beaury-Saurel. 

I suspect that Julian's liberal attitude towards female students may have had more to do with his canny entrepreneurial skills, than any progressive views about sex and gender. He was famous for gaming the system and ensuring that work by his students was entered into the annual competitive Salon exhibition at the École des Beaux Arts. 

Marie Bashkirtseff,
'The Studio' (1881)

The narrative of Confessions of a Young Man is set in the 1870s, but Moore's article on Julian for the Fortnightly Review (published two years after his novel) was occasioned by a power struggle within the Paris art establishment that came a bit later. In 1890 the ‘Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts’ (The National Society for Fine Art) split from the ‘Société des Artistes Français’ (Society of French Artists) which had been formed in 1881 to take over administration of the annual Salon competition from the state. This split worsened the divisions that had arisen when avant-garde artists such as Monet and Degas started their own alternative exhibitions because their work was refused by the establishment. (These include the Salon des Impressionists described in my previous post.) 

So this period saw power struggles over aesthetics and artistic value; over who had the right to study and exhibit art in Paris; and over who controlled artistic institutions in Paris. I'm not sure I've done justice to the complexity of this here (I'm not sure a short blog post could do justice to it.) But all of these elements are important to Moore's writing, which is sensitive to the ideologies and the aesthetics of late nineteenth-century French art.

* This did not stop Moore from mis-spelling Julian's name as 'Julien' in every edition of Confessions that I have consulted.

** Sian Reynolds provides a striking account of the precarious and vulnerable position of unaccompanied women in Paris at this time in Paris-Edinburgh: Cultural Connections in the Belle Epoque (2007). Parisian men seem to have considered any woman without a chaperone as fair game for sexual assault. A lot of the information I've gleaned for this blog and my critical notes comes from Catherine Fehrer's excellent article, 'Women at the Académie Julian in Paris', The Burlington Magazine 136 (1994); as well as John Milner's influential study, The Studios of Paris (1988).