Artists Master the Basics at the Florence Academy of Art

It’s the rare school that teaches core skills such as drawing, with an emphasis on the spirit and rules of Classicism.

T o achieve anything that lasts, talent, skill, and discipline are essentials. I can’t say what means the most. I know lots of sloths with talent, and they’re fun at parties. And the meticulously skilled, though without vision or pizzazz, well, they make the trains run on time. Skill, though, what I would call a mastery of technique, seems decisive. It’s not only facility with tools, and the eye’s a tool, but it’s materials. Developing that facility takes concentration and thought as well as hones intention. Even when talent’s a physical gift — like the flexibility of the hands that Picasso, Goya, and Fragonard had — it needs to be trained.

The Florence Academy of Art (FAA), near the Arno in Florence, is one of the few schools in the world teaching art through the mastery of basics, primarily drawing. I’ve known about it for years through my interest in the old French atelier system, the zenith of which was the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 19th century. It wasn’t the French pupils that drew me but the Americans. Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, John La Farge, Abbott Thayer, William Morris Hunt, and Thomas Dewing were Paris-trained in atelier. There were many others. After the Civil War, affluent Americans who were aspiring artists went to Paris to study at the best schools where French artists learned. Before this, American artists sometimes traveled to Europe, took a course or two, but mostly absorbed the scenery, art, and cultures ad hoc.

The French atelier system had an exacting pedagogy based on drawing and lots of it, typically using a live model. Its heyday, in France at least, ran from the time of Jacques-Louis David in the 1780s to Jean-Léon Gérôme’s reign as atelier king in the 1870s. Its anchor, historically and aesthetically, is a reverence for Classicism. This doesn’t mean that everything has to look like the Apollo Belvedere. It means the spirit and rules of Classicism. That doesn’t mean idealizing everything. It means seeing things as they are, down to their essence. It’s the search for truth.

When I was in Italy, I visited the Academy, located in a perfectly renovated 15th-century stable that once belonged to Florentine aristocrats, so the horses lived like princes. Today, it’s a proper, well-equipped art school. It’s not big, with about 100 students from all over the world, and a drawing, painting, and sculpture program that’s radically traditional. There’s a branch of the FAA near Gothenburg in Sweden that has around 25 students.

The atelier system withered away starting around 1900. Official and dogmatic styles weren’t what Modernism favored. Art schools did their own thing, some privileging commercial skills, others expression or theory. Atelier teaching and learning hadn’t gone totally dodo-bird yet. There were little pockets in Italy, the U.K., and America where drawing undergirded art education, nothing formal, usually run by an artist or two, each leading, more or less, to a bracingly realist or representational style. Around 30 years ago, Daniel Graves, an American artist trained by one of those keepers of the flame in Florence, established the Florence Academy.

Even in Florence, home of Giotto, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Bronzino, and even at the Accademia, home to Michelangelo’s David, drawing wasn’t foundational. And drawing isn’t just rote copying, though at first it is. Through looking closely, using pencil, the simplest medium, the artist dissects the object and puts it back together, faithfully. And faith isn’t a rote thing. Over time, with the artist’s vision in play, drawing becomes the white heat of art-making. The hand and mind move spontaneously, not ploddingly.

Drawing figures in American art study today, but it’s in the mix and hardly essential. I looked at the curricula of a dozen American art schools. At Cranbrook, students design a bespoke curriculum suiting their own interests, and few punish themselves through learning how to draw. It’s a fantastic place but very American. A big menu meets the idiosyncratic consumer. Cal Arts is multidisciplinary. Founded by Walt Disney in 1961, it’s invested in film, photography, and technology. UCLA focuses on new genre art, too. Both are great places but, near Hollywood, high and low culture mix, and the movie business is always there.

Columbia’s in New York and smitten by a different kind of star culture. Yale, RISD, and the Maryland Institute College of Art offer something for everyone and strength after strength, but it’s easy to think the basics are fuddy-duddy and to get gobbled by a niche. The big private schools are expensive, with $50,000 a year the norm, and that’s just tuition. If I were to find one fatal flaw in American art teaching, it’s the surfeit of both variety and specialty. They’ve connived to make jacks of all trades and masters of siloed niches.

I’ll focus on Yale simply because I went to school there, and it’s got an all-encompassing art school that’s very, very good. A student can spend his entire time there studying graphic design, film, or photography with no exposure to drawing or painting. There are courses in basic drawing, color practice, and sculpture basics, but they’re one-semester classes that meet twice a week. I’m sure it’s a great place for some students, but, philosophically, something’s missing if a student finishes art school without the facility to draw a figure.

And New Haven’s not Florence.

Graves, the founder of the Florence Academy, learned art in a tiny atelier in America, a one-man operation, and these never entirely disappeared. They were and still are pronounced outliers. America, unlike France, never had a regimented, official style like Academicism, exemplified by Gérôme’s gladiator and harem paintings. To be sure, American aesthetic taste was, until the 1940s and the New York School, conservative, representational, and inspired by everyday life. Art training was a loose proposition, though, with schools emphasizing drawing but in programs that were shorter and more often than not informed by commercial needs.

The Florence program emphasizes composition, light, and shadow, color theory, memory drawing, anatomy, perspective, modeling, and materials. It’s a three-year program of full-time study, 36 hours a week of supervised instruction. There’s an art-history component, and, after all, the school’s in Florence. A feast of Old Master art awaits on every street.

It’s an intense program. Intensive drawing begins with lithographs of Classical sculptures. Charles Barque is the man here. Barque (1826–1883), a French painter and lithographer, developed, along with Gérôme, a drawings curriculum using 197 lithographs of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures. Copying Barque’s lithographs was a staple of art training in Paris as Modernism was born. Manet copied them, as did Cézanne and Van Gogh — twice — and Picasso.

Copying these lithographs, which ascend in complexity, is still the first step at the Academy. Students move from pencil to charcoal. Short poses when using a model are typically three hours. Long poses could last weeks. When Graves started to organize a school, only two complete editions of Barque’s lithographs still existed. That’s how far the mighty atelier system had fallen. He photographed the set at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and started using them.

Subsequent study aims at proportions and écorché, which is the study of the human figure sans skin. Painting starts with grisaille, then a combination of lead and titanium white, yellow ochre, English red, ultramarine blue, and ivory black. It’s Sargent’s palette and all-purpose. Then, intensity and warmth of color follow.

Sculpture students start with drawing, too. Écorché, the study of what’s beneath the skin, clay figure modeling, use of tools, and depicting functional movement and balance follow. Forms like a rib cage or a pelvis don’t float in space. They sit on something, so the study of gravity is relevant. Working in clay and plaster starts with a bell pepper, a cow’s femur, and then features of Michelangelo’s David. This leads to male and female figures — yes, they’re different and stay different — and then contrapposto and reclining figures.

The school is developing a print program. I started as a print specialist. In the field of art history, no talent or skill is required, and the only discipline I needed to develop was in stoically accepting how talentless and skill-deficient I was, even after taking a print-making class. Some profiles in courage go unheralded. The print program will be a great addition. Prints are their own thing and demand a focused expertise.

The school has just developed two new graduate programs. This summer, it’s launching a new MA program in studio art. In autumn 2022, it will start an MFA program in painting. The studio-art degree is designed with art teachers in mind to provide them with a Classical methodology. It’s a three-summer intensive program. The MA program serves artists who already have a substantial visual and technical base as well as a serious commitment to both representational painting and a career as an artist. It’s a full-time, two-year program located at a new FAA branch in Jersey City.

I think that both degrees might very well revolutionize art education. In the first case, children will be taught that art is a skill they can learn, like music and ballet. In the second case, more classically trained instructors will be available to teach at the college level. Both will shake-rattle-and-roll the status quo, and these days I’m nearly always a proponent for this. The arts, at least in America, are both risk-averse and susceptible to petty fads. I almost never see lightning. We’re living in the age of the lightning bug, and anxious, narcissistic bugs at that.

I want to say something about realism. Most of the artists trained at the Florence Academy enter careers as painters and sculptors working in a realist style. What we call realism, or representational, means many things. I’d call Americans as disparate as Bellows, Charles Sheeler, Warhol and Lichtenstein, and Jeff Koons realists, and I’m not even considering photographers like Cindy Sherman or Catherine Opie. Realism’s the default style in American art, starting with Copley. I’m working on a big project now involving Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Though known now as Abstract Expressionists, they were superb draughtsmen and learned art when drawing and the atelier system still ran, though on fumes.

Artists making a living today are strong, distinct personalities, and in the art of today, there’s something for everyone. It goes in a million directions. Taste is still driven by dealers and New York fancies, though this has diminished with the emergence of outsider art as collectible and respectable and the Internet as an effective marketing tool.

Few New York contemporary art dealers sell work by Florence Academy alumni. It’s not cutting-edge, as the chattering class defines avant-garde art, and critics don’t write about it, except me. The artists, I’ve learned, have powerful networks. Since I like to think of myself as finding quality in obscure as well as obvious places, which means I’m not a snob, artists from the Florence Academy are among those I champion.