[fatbird]

Picasso twice completed copying the entire series of Bargue drawings, a set of 70 lithographs sold all over Europe in the 19th century as a course in academic drawing. His copies are excellent; he'd certainly mastered the academic realist techniques.

He failed to produce great realist work because he found those techniques boring, repetitive, and mechanical, and thus didn't try to work in that mode. He moved on to keep pace with the many radical departures from the French Academy that surrounded him. He had the skills, he just didn't use them.

[pjlegato]

Accurately copying Bargue perhaps qualifies Picasso as a serviceable mediocre realist. It doesn't mean he was "great," which was the assertion here. His early realist works were bland and uninspired, if technically proficient.

In other words, doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt.

[WastingMyTime89]

> Accurately copying Bargue perhaps qualifies Picasso as a serviceable mediocre realist.

The things you read on this website sometimes... Accurately copying Bargue requires far more that mediocre skills. Caravaggio is a great painter in the sense that Mozart is a great composer. If that’s where you put the bar, I probably have enough fingers to count the great painters in the whole human history. Amusingly for this discussion Picasso might still be amongst them.

[d12345m]

I think Bargue did the world a great service in collecting his set of plates, and I think the sight-size method has a lot of merit. I really wish I could escape for a few years into one of the ateliers that employ it to train artists. It would be a pleasant break from doing IT work in the defense industry. :)

That said, Bargue's process was intended for communicating good taste to 'lesser' commercial and decorative artists as much as it was used for training fine artists. It's a method that essentially boils down to copying pictures of sculptures which are twice removed from nature.

Before and since Bargue, we've had great artists who gained their chops by being students of nature. Many of them never saw a Bargue plate. Many of them didn't use the sight-size method. And there were a lot of skilled Bargue disciples who never had any real impact on art history.

All that to say, I don't think the parent comment is at all out of line. Copying Bargue plates is a fine warm-up or substitute for life drawing, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to becoming a great realist (we had those long before Bargue). Plus, the world has churned out countless nobodies skilled in the art of copying Bargue plates (which I say as someone who would like to be one of those countless nobodies). It's just not as important as people think.

[fatbird]

Arguably, Bargue accelerated the decline of the French Academy. Once his drawing course started reliably producing skilled draughtsmen, skilled draughting became less interesting and important as in fine art. It's a common observation in the field of art history that the 19th century, in "perfecting" academic realism, set the stage for the 20th century's rejection of it, since there was nothing left to say with it.

Regardless, I've done several Bargue drawings, and they're wonderfully meditative once you get into them. You don't need an atelier, though it would help. You can find copies of the plates online, and many videos of artists doing one, to show you the method. If you want further guidance, email me (look in my profile) and I'll set you up. I've actually run lunchtime classes at work making Bargue drawings.

[fatbird]

You can't judge whether someone was "great" in a particular field if they didn't actually practice in that field. Bargue drawings are very technically demanding, but they're exercises. They don't even count as works of art in themselves.

Just as we can't really say he was a great realist, we can't say he was a mediocre one. He didn't make realist art. We can say that he mastered the skills, so if he'd worked as a realist, he'd probably have been pretty great, if only because once he found a preferable mode of expression, he was actually great.

[pmoriarty]

"doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt"

I'm not sure the original poster meant "great" in the sense of Caravaggio or Rembrandt.

To a lot of people being technically proficient is all it takes to be a "great" artist, so by that standard Picasso would qualify.