New York Academy of Art
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The New York Academy of Art or Graduate School of Figurative Art is the only accredited school of its kind in the world. Blending the traditions of the Italian and French Academies, the Academy focuses on the study of the human figure by rigorously studying anatomy, art history, sculpture, painting, and drawing. The goal of the Academy is that those seeking training in figurative art have the same access to this knowledge as the great artists who have come before them.
The Academy was founded by a group of artists, critics, and art patrons in 1982. One of the most notable was the pop-artist Andy Warhol. His reasons were that he felt hindered in his art by his lack of training, and he wanted to give other artists access to the knowledge to which he never had access. Many other artists did not feel the same way, however, and often the Academy has been thought of as outmoded and anachronistic. All of the Professors teaching at the Academy are practicing artists themselves, who were often skeptical about the Academic approach and its relevance to contemporary art. In the words of Eric Fischl "Before I taught there, my impression of the place was that it was extremely reactionary and based on an outmoded idea of what figuration could be. When I got there, I found students were very open to attempting to apply figurative skills to contemporary subject matter." He adds that "at most graduate schools where I've lectured, the students have such attitudes that they're almost impenetrable, but these students are there because they didn't learn anything they wanted to learn in college. It's a very interesting situation. They are hungry." Many of the graduates from the school are now themselves practicing artists and teaching across the world. Now, the name of the Academy has become synonymous with skill.
In the past twenty years there has been a revival, especially in New York City, of traditional and figurative art. This is by no means solely due to the New York Academy, but it has certainly played a strong role in this change. Through Artists such as Vincent Desiderio, Eric Fischl, Stephen Assael (All of whom teach at the Academy), Lucian Freud, and the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum, the figurative tradition has become one of the significant movements of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Art critic Donald Kuspit has played an integral role in the art-critical discourse through his book The End of Art. In which he put forth a more iconoclastic view of modernist heroes such as Marcel Duchampand instead nominated many of the above mentioned artists as the "New Old Masters".[1]
Instruction is held in the Academy's five-story building, which is located near the heart of New York City's downtown art community in Manhattan's TriBeCa district. The facilities include six classrooms, numerous student studios, a collection of anatomical specimens that contains rare skeletons and a unique set of plaster dissection casts made from specially prepared cadavers, and a fine arts library that features books, slides and videos that emphasize the historical periods in which figurative art flourished--ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the Baroque and Neo-Classical periods, as well as representational art and artists of the twentieth century. The Academy's lecture and exhibition hall contains an extensive collection of plaster casts of Classical, Renaissance and later European sculpture.[2]
It is now funded by donation from the Prince of Wales and art auctions such as "Take Home a Nude" and The Tribeca Ball, organized by Eileen Guggenheim, among others. The New York Academy is located in TriBeCa, Manhattan.
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