"Is it not dangerous to have students study together for years, copying the same models and approximately the same path?"
About this Quote
Gericault frames conformity as a health hazard, and the phrasing matters: “dangerous” isn’t a mild pedagogical complaint, it’s an alarm bell. He’s not just worried about boredom in the studio; he’s worried about an artistic immune system weakened by too much shared air. Years of “study together” suggests the institutional pipeline of the French academy, where talent is processed through group discipline, not cultivated as an unruly, individual appetite.
The real target is in the double repetition: “same models” and “approximately the same path.” Models are literal (plaster casts, approved nudes, sanctioned history scenes) and metaphorical (approved tastes, approved ambitions). “Approximately” is a subtle twist of the knife: even when students think they’re diverging, the system keeps them within a narrow bandwidth of acceptable difference. It’s diversity as a decorative variation, not a structural break.
Context sharpens the critique. Gericault comes of age when French art is still dominated by the Neoclassical ideal of David: clean line, moral clarity, composure. Yet his own trajectory points toward Romanticism’s messier truths and contemporary subjects. The Raft of the Medusa doesn’t just break rules; it treats lived catastrophe as worthy of grand painting, something academies tend to sanitize.
So the quote is less “let everyone do their own thing” than a warning about how institutions reproduce themselves. Train artists to copy, and you get competent echoes. Train them to risk, and you get work that can actually see its time.
The real target is in the double repetition: “same models” and “approximately the same path.” Models are literal (plaster casts, approved nudes, sanctioned history scenes) and metaphorical (approved tastes, approved ambitions). “Approximately” is a subtle twist of the knife: even when students think they’re diverging, the system keeps them within a narrow bandwidth of acceptable difference. It’s diversity as a decorative variation, not a structural break.
Context sharpens the critique. Gericault comes of age when French art is still dominated by the Neoclassical ideal of David: clean line, moral clarity, composure. Yet his own trajectory points toward Romanticism’s messier truths and contemporary subjects. The Raft of the Medusa doesn’t just break rules; it treats lived catastrophe as worthy of grand painting, something academies tend to sanitize.
So the quote is less “let everyone do their own thing” than a warning about how institutions reproduce themselves. Train artists to copy, and you get competent echoes. Train them to risk, and you get work that can actually see its time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Student |
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