The Great Michelangelo Is Dead! Avant-Garde and Academicism revisits the longstanding tension between academicism and the avant-garde without reducing either to fixed categories of tradition or innovation. Marking the 300th anniversary of the statutes of what is now the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the exhibition traces the evolving relationship between academies, anti-academic critique, and institutional reform from the sixteenth century to the present. Taking Giorgio Vasari, the founding of the Accademia del Disegno, and Michelangelo’s symbolic role as key points of departure, it follows debates around artistic autonomy, pedagogy, power, originality, and the copy through the French Revolution, nineteenth-century master class models, the Bauhaus, Vkhutemas, the Düsseldorf Academy, and more recent discussions around the Bologna Process, identity politics, diversity, and institutional change. Historical works from the Academy’s Paintings Gallery, Graphic Collection, and Plaster Cast Collection, together with major loans, are placed in dialogue with modern and contemporary positions, showing how practices such as copying, appropriation, and re-enactment have shifted from academic tools to artistic strategies in their own right. The exhibition brings together works by artists including Botticelli, Courbet, Gentileschi, Hogarth, Poussin, Titian, Vasari, Lawler, Lichtenstein, Kippenberger, Picabia, Katharina Sieverding, Vaginal Davis, Jutta Koether, and Heimo Zobernig.
Curated by Helmut Draxler
With curatorial contributions by Hans-Jürgen Hafner and Claudia Koch (Paintings Gallery)
Katharina Sieverding / Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Art Collections, Vienna, Austria
Group Exhibition
2 October 2026 to 22 August 2027
