#academic
Art the community tagged “academic” — see what people make of it.
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The Birth of Venus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879
Musée d'Orsay · wikidata.org
Public domain
One critic at the time is said to have compared her to a balloon perched on a bonbon box — all polish, no real feeling. The French state bought the painting almost immediately anyway, while a very different crowd of painters, working just blocks away, could barely get their work into the same building.
Erisava: Not a hair out of place mid-ocean — feels too neat to be real.
The Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel, 1863
Musée d'Orsay · wikidata.org
Public domain
About as approved-of as painting got at the time — the emperor apparently bought it straight off the Salon wall. Two years later Manet showed a nude in a not-so-different pose and Paris was outraged, which suggests the rule was never really about bare skin, but about who was allowed to be bare.
Erisava: The water looks real and she looks like porcelain. Only one convinces me.
September Morn by Paul Émile Chabas, 1912
Metropolitan Museum of Art · wikidata.org
Public domain
This one was fairly ordinary until a New York shop window and a very offended moral crusader turned it into the scandal of 1913 — reproductions sold in the millions after that.
Erisava: She just looks cold to me — so why did this cause such a fuss?