Salon des Réfusés

Already in 1667, the idea of a juried group exhibition came about. The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture held a semi-public exhibition of works of art by Academy members considered worthy of Royal Commissions ...  an interesting topic in and of itself. It won’t surprise you that besides members of the Academy,  the jury for these Salons included government officials.

What interests me here is the rebellion just under 200 years later in 1863 when out of 5,000 artist submissions only 2,000 were accepted for the Salon. There was such an uproar that the Emperor himself, Napoleon III, sanctioned an exhibition of the rejected artists in a different part of the Palais de l’Industrie and the Salon des Refusés was born. Fearing a backlash, or being seen as inferior, 1200 artists bowed out leaving an exhibition of only 800 works of art.

Needless to say, the Salon des Réfusés show of rejected artists work was panned, as anything new and innovative invariably is. Here is one of the rejects. Imagine how many millions, no hundreds of millions, it would bring if it were to come on the art market today.

It is not a stretch that nudity was one of the issues for its original rejection, but it was the setting in a major Paris park, Bois de Boulogne, that made the work totally unacceptable. The Emperor, himself, acquired The Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel, from the official Salon for his personal collection. Here a female nude was meticulously depicted in virtuoso technique in a lascivious pose, but the eroticism was cloaked in mythology!

As we all know history always repeats itself in one guise or another. Today we move from Paris to New York and the Brooklyn Museum. In an article in Hyperallergic, Rhea Nayyar announced “Opening on October 4, The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition will celebrate the museum’s 200th anniversary by spotlighting talent across the borough.” For this show, only 216 artists out of 4,000 submissions were accepted, a much smaller percentage than the Paris Salon about 150 years earlier. Do note from this how many artists must live and work in Brooklyn today. President of the Artists’ Coalition, Alicia Degener, said: “We didn’t want people to get rejected twice”.

Maybe not so surprisingly the “Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition” is presenting many of the rejected works in its own exhibition to be known as the “Salon des Réfusés 2024”. The rules are that there can only be one submission per artist, and it may not measure larger than 4x6 feet. A copy of the rejection letter from the museum must be submitted along with a $20 fee “to keep the lights on”. The plan is to include 200 artists and they have already been chosen. The show can be seen from September 21 to October 13 at the Artists Coalition in Redhook, Brooklyn.

To state the obvious, roughly 200 artists in both shows comes to 400, still only 10% of the original 4,000 submissions … can there be a Salon des Refusés des Refusés?!