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Read moreI. The Rise of the Modern Artist
Probably at no other time in history have artists devoted so much energy to self-portraits as in modern times. Through hairstyles or clothing exhibiting different degrees of eccentricity and soon to become commonplaces, the modern artist shows off his rebellious individualism to society, sometimes as a dandy, sometimes as a bohemian. But what is more significant in these new galleries is the profusion of portraits of figures making up the artist’s closest circles: poets and writers who, in the exercise of their new mission as art critics for periodicals and magazines, were to become an essential instrument for integrating modern art in mass society.
I. The Rise of the Modern Artist
Compared with the supposed freedom of the studio, in which is expressed the individual nature of the artist, the academy, from the beginning of modernity, became a byword for the staleness of artistic rules that had become as outmoded as they were hypocritical. The modern artist responded to the abstract affectation of the academy with his subjective sincerity and made this confrontation one of his principles, Nevertheless, academic training was still the basis of the modern artist’s apprenticeship and the nude, drawn from life or copied from a new medium like photography, the basic exercise of that apprenticeship.