The Academy and the Salon
In 1648, France founded the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and from 1667 its exhibition, the Salon, began. What got decided there was an order: what subjects were permitted, and in what rank. History painting, myth, religion, history, stood at the top, then genre scenes, then portraits, then landscape, and at the very bottom, still life. Painting the gods was considered nobler than painting an apple. This hierarchy, enforced by a jury, ruled European art for more than two hundred years. Nearly everything on this map's nineteenth century moves in relation to that wall: Courbet built his own pavilion in 1855 to defy it; in 1863 came the Salon des Refusés, an exhibition for the rejected; in 1874 the Impressionists staged their own show. Then in 1881, the state let go of the Salon altogether. The wall spent two centuries raising up the very people who would climb over it, then quietly stepped aside. A word about the name. Salon was originally the name of a room in the Louvre: the Salon Carré, the square room. From about 1725 to 1848 the exhibitions were held there, and in time the name of the room became the name of the institution itself. On this map the names of styles are usually given later; here a room's name moved onto a system. And 1863 deserves a little more. That year the Salon let through fewer than 2,218 works out of more than 5,000 submitted, and the protests of the rejected grew loud enough that the emperor himself acted: Napoleon III ordered an exhibition showing all the refused works. The Salon des Refusés. In a hall the public came to laugh at, Manet's Luncheon on the Grass was attacked hardest of all — and burned itself into the eyes of the younger painters. The wall, in other words, built the first exhibition room for the people who would break it. The ranking has a coda too. Out of still life, the genre placed at the very bottom, came Cézanne's apples, and out of those came Cubism. The twentieth century begins at the bottom of the list.