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PARTISAN REVIEW
developed their own styles, founded their own ateliers, and became tnasters
in their own right.
This atelier system was possible because technical, stylistic or themat–
ic originality was neither expected nor prized at the outset of a painter's
career. What
was
expected of a future master was
educated
originality
steeped in learned tradition rather than
ignorant
originality arising
autonomously from innate genius.
It
should be noted, however, that the
medieval atelier system was not universally carried over into the
Renaissance. Leonardo, for instance, worked alone, wi thout help from
assistants or apprentices. His notion, eccentric in its time, that the artist
needs solitude anticipated the lone-painter studio of the modern master.
Peter Paul Rubens still ran an archetypical factory atelier in seven–
teenth century Antwerp, whose assembly-line production methods
resulted in a prodigious output of high quality paintings. Rubens laid
down his original concept for a picture in a preliminary sketch or cartoon.
He also executed the most vital details, such as the face, or assigned them
to a highly accomplished journeyman, such as the future master, Anthony
van Dyck. The rest-the subject's shoes or his hat-was done by assistants,
just as one of Liebig's chemist-assistants added an amino group to the
molecule here and another removed a carboxy group from it there. The
price Rubens charged for a painting ro e with the amount of work he had
personally invested in it.
By Rubens's time, however, the traditional atelier system had already
begun to decline with the founding of art academies. They took over the
training of aspiring painters in formalized courses of instruction, thus
depriving the masters of their apprentices. The academies also replaced the
medieval guilds as regulators of the profession, with official appointments
and commissions tending to be reserved for their members. The academi–
cians' idea of artistic pedagogy was to teach their students the classical ideal
of ancient Greek art as the esthetic
ne plus ultra
and to minimize the
achievements of post-Renaissance art.
With the rising Romanticist urge for unfettered self-expression at the
end of the eighteenth century, many painters canle to view the academies as
just as stul tify1ng as the guilds they had replaced. So a new type of atelier
came into being, in which a master taught his personal style to paying stu–
dents, rather than apprentices taken in to help him with his own work. One
of the most influential of these teaching ateliers was that of Jacques Louis
David, anointed as Napoleon's
premier peintre.
At its height, David's atelier had
about sixty students, who cherished the cachet of being an
eleve de David.
The mega-teaching atelier started to disappear in the latter part of the
ninteenth century, when a new breed of painters, the Modernists, came to
dominate the artistic scene. They made the capture of reality-the modern,
workaday world as they saw it, warts and all-the touchstone of their art,
