Posts for March, 2026

“The Guiding Significance of the ARC Salon Competition in Contemporary Realist Art" by Zhang Hongbin & Ji Yinglun has recently been published on the ARC website.

The article details how the Art Renewal Center and the Salon Competition represent a significant opposition to modern conceptual art.  Centered on the principle of the "unity of technique and meaning," ARC reestablishes a direct connection between art and lived experience, revitalizing realism within the contemporary context.

To read the article, please click here. 

Image shown: 
Mark Pugh - "An Unsatisfying Ending"
17th ARC Salon - Best in Show 

Dive into the artistic process of one of history’s most beloved and influential artists. A true titan of the Italian Renaissance, Raffaello di Giovanni Santi (1483–1520)—better known as Raphael—matched ambition with lyricism to create works with both intellectual heft and emotional depth, a necessary skill in the complex political landscape of Renaissance courts. In his short life of only 37 years, he achieved such profound success as a painter, designer, and architect that he was regarded as the pinnacle of artistic perfection for centuries after his death.

Raphael: Sublime Poetry is the first comprehensive exhibition on Raphael in the United States, bringing together more than 200 of the artist’s greatest masterpieces and rarely seen treasures to illuminate the brilliance of Raphael’s extraordinary creativity. The son of a painter and poet, Raphael engaged with the foremost writers and thinkers of his age in Rome, displaying a poetic sensibility that captivated his peers and generations that followed. Follow the full breadth of his life and career, from his origins in Urbino to his rise in Florence, where he began to emerge as a peer of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to his final, prolific decade at the papal court in Rome.

The exhibition takes place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10028.

Click here to learn more. 

Visit the ARC Calendar for more exhibitions.

The coastal town of Étretat has become a myth—and continues to fascinate to this day. Its cliffs, located in Normandy on the Atlantic coast, captivated numerous artists in the 19th century. 

Around 170 exceptional paintings, drawings, photographs, and historical documents on loan from leading French, German and other international museums as well as several private collections will be on display in the exhibition. Among them are no fewer than twenty-four works by Claude Monet. In addition to works by Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet, the exhibition brings together a host of other important figures in modern and contemporary art, including Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Eugène Le Poittevin, as well as Camille Corot, Eugène Boudin and Elger Esser.

The exhibition runs from March 19 – June 5, 2026 at the Stadel Museum, 63 Schaumainkai, Frankfurt am Main, 60596, Germany.

To learn more, click here.  

For more events, please visit the ARC Calendar.

Visit Texas Academy of Figurative Art on Gallery Night for their Spring Salon, an exhibition celebrating the Academy’s traditional, atelier based approach to drawing and painting. Enjoy wine and light bites while you experience their philosophy in practice and see how rigorous training develops into beauty. This show features contemporary realist works by students and faculty, including cast drawings, Old Master copies, portraits, figurative works, still lifes, and landscapes.
 
Spring Gallery Night takes place at the Texas Academy of Figurative Art, 415 S  Main Street, Fort Worth, Texas 76104.

Click here to learn more.  

Visit the ARC Calendar for more events and exhibitions.

This exhibition, co-organized with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, reexamines Renoir’s fundamental contributions to impressionism and 19th-century art history through the complex, universal notion of love, the central driving force of his work. It provides a new perspective on paintings that are so well-known that it has become difficult to perceive how radical they are. For the first time since 1985 (the year the last Renoir retrospective was held in Paris, at the Grand Palais), some of the artist’s and impressionism’s greatest masterpieces will be brought together in France.

Taking place at the Musee d’Orsay, Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Paris, France, the exhibition runs from March 17 – July 19, 2026.

To learn more, click here.  

For more events and exhibitions, please visit the ARC Calendar.

Like many great stars, Caravaggio is known by just one name. His work—sensual, shocking, audacious, and dramatically lit—is instantly recognizable. This extraordinary exhibition, featuring Old Master paintings from the prestigious and rarely seen collection of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, Italy, celebrates the genius of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and his profound influence on Baroque art.

This collection of Baroque paintings, assembled by scholar Roberto Longhi, captures the essence of Caravaggio’s legacy and the thrilling artistic revolution he ignited. Longhi’s keen eye and groundbreaking research revived nearly forgotten artists, ensuring that their masterpieces—and the movement they helped shape—continue to captivate us today.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to experience the drama, intensity, and beauty of Caravaggio’s world and his enduring impact on art and culture.

The exhibition ends in a few days, on March 22, 2026 at Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, FL, 33701.

To learn more, please click here.   

Visit the ARC Calendar for more events and exhibitions.

American Classical Realism features approximately 40 paintings produced by four generations of artists. The term ‘American Classical Realism’ is associated with R.H. Ives Gammell (1893–1981), one of the last American artists whose training is traced back to the French academic tradition of the late 18th and 19th centuries. 

After 1949, Maryhill Museum of Art hosted solo and group shows of work by Gammell and those within his circle. The museum collection is now home to more than 50 American Classical Realist works. The 2026 exhibition will include four generations of artists, including Richard F. Lack , Robert Douglas Hunter, Samuel Rose, and Stephen Gjertson. The museum is also borrowing several works by related artists for the display.

The exhibition runs from March 15 – November 15, 2026 at Maryhill Museum of Art, 35 Maryhill Museum Dr., Goldendale WA 98620.

Click here to learn more.

Visit the ARC Calendar for more events and exhibitions.

ARC is pleased to welcome La Milan Academy of Art as a new ARC Approved Atelier!

The Milan Academy of Art is a contemporary atelier inspired by classical tradition, located right in the heart of Milan. Founded in 2019, the Academy promotes the teaching of figurative drawing and painting through a highly academic and skill-based approach.

The Milan Academy Experience Students who apply to the Milan Academy of Art seek an education rooted in realism, valuing the accurate and detailed representation of nature and the human figure. To accomplish this, their methodology is built around a personalized, tailor-made path that adapts to the needs and level of each individual—including absolute beginners. They aim to bring out each artist's unique potential by equipping them with solid technical skills, with the ultimate goal of training painters who are deeply conscious both technically and expressively.

To learn more about La Milan Academy of Art, please click here. 

ARC is pleased to welcome El Taller del Aire as a new ARC Approved Atelier!

El Taller del Aire was founded with the purpose of offering rigorous artistic training focused on the study of classical principles and their application to contemporary practice. Since its creation, it has become a meeting place for artists, students, and thinkers, combining technical instruction with humanistic education. Today, it offers classes in academic drawing and painting alongside theoretical courses in aesthetics, art history, and creativity.

“For us, art is a language that connects reason and emotion, technique and expression. A fully formed artist must not only master the craft but also understand its meaning, its historical context, and its transcendent potential.”

To learn more, click here.  

This exhibition explores the relationship between works by period-defining English artist Thomas Gainsborough and fashion, a concept and industry that touched nearly every aspect of British society in the eighteenth century. The artist’s painted images were subject to the same forces of fashion as the people they depict. In Gainsborough’s world, the trappings, trade, and power of fashion were everywhere—from magazines to tailor shops, from the opera to promenades—and his portraits were at the heart of it all.

The museum’s first special exhibition dedicated to the artist—and the first devoted to Gainsborough’s portraiture ever held in New York—this show brings together over two dozen of Gainsborough’s most spectacular portraits from across North America and the United Kingdom, representing each stage of his four-decade career.

The exhibition takes place at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021 from February 12 – May 25, 2026.

To learn more, click here. 

Visit the ARC Calendar for more.