Art Chowder September | October 2016, Issue 5 | Page 42

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everal impacts resulting from the ascendancy of Modern Art in the 20th century are worth noting.
The art history survey texts when I was in school in the ‘70s basically covered the development of styles, with
focus on individual artists who advanced or epitomized each one in turn: Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo,
Neo-Classicism, Romanticism. Then, after describing the next style to come along, the short-lived Realism
of Courbet, they turned attention to the Impressionists in considerable detail.

A significant part of their story involved the reluctance of the academic art establishment to embrace the

innovations the Impressionists were developing. But the textbooks didn’t cover any of the numerous, popularly successful academic artists whose works filled the Salons, with the exception of maybe a Bouguereau or
a Gérôme, to illustrate why they should be disregarded, in favor of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism,
after which the texts immediately moved on to Modern Art it its various manifestations.
Something similar happened with museums. With Modernism in the ascendant, popular academic paintings
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were moved into storage, they had fallen so far out of critical favor.
The market for the once highly celebrated academic artworks was naturally also affected. One rather startling example is by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), a Dutch painter who settled in England when
he was 34. His work is best known for genre scenes from the ancient classical world, painted with singular
precision. The Finding of Moses (1904) illustrates the story in the book of Exodus where the daughter of
Pharaoh, king of Egypt, discovers a basket floating on the Nile, inside of which is the infant Moses, whom
she adopts and raises as her own. The painting was a commission, for which the artist was paid £5,250,
which is calculated to amount to around £570,635 in 2014. By 1960, when abstract art was at the zenith
of critical acclaim, academic paintings were at the nadir of their appreciation. The Finding of Moses sold
that year for £252. Fast-forward to 2010 when the picture came up for auction to find that fashion had
changed. The auction estimate in the catalog was $3,000,000 -$5,000,000. It sold at Sotheby’s New York for
$35,922,500, setting a record.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
The Finding of Moses
1904
Private Collection

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