Study for Taming of Bucephalus (1978) Drawing by Edwin Loftus

Bucephalus was the warhorse of Alexander the Great. The story is that he was a very large horse and considered untamable until the young Alexander gentled him by force of his will. He was Alexander's favorite steed until he died of battle wounds in 326 B.C. during Alexanders last campaign in Pakistan.
Having studied Academy Style under Thomas Sherwood, I was experimenting with adapting those techniques to something more practical in the American Market, (which, under 'Progressive' domination has been authoritarian and actively suppressive of and dismissive toward, representational art). This represents an advanced stage in a process including skeletal and muscular studies and which culminated in a final drawing in black and white, (now in a private collection).
In the history of Western Art, the Academies and Salons of the 19th Century into the 20th achieved the highest degree of perfection in the reproduction of the visual experience since the Golden Ages of Greco-Roman civilization, and thanks to technological breakthroughs, probably exceeded that height. Under the influence of figures like David and Ingres, this system became authoritarian and oppressive, leading to revolutions like the "Salon of the Refused" and the anti-establishment revolutions of the Realists and Pre Raphaelites, (who wanted to irradicate all post-Medieval art to "free" art from its authoritarianism.)
These revolts were needed, but opened the door to a new system of oppression which promoted art as a vehicle for a conceptual revolution, in which the significance of artist's work became a hypothetical exploration of the nature of perception. Wrapped in terms like; "leading, pushing, cutting edge, pushing the envelope, compelling, challenging, expanding, and on and on ... and enforced by an incestuous New York centered Art Establishment, which dictated to art museums, galleries, journals, schools, grant agencies, award and prize juries, etc. what could and could not be called "Art" as opposed to "mere" craft and commercial illustration.
This dictatorial system thrived in the United States, virtually eliminating that option, while surviving in places like the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact Nations and People's Republic of China, (where "Modernist" arts were considered "decadent" and unworthy of support).
In the United States of America, the oligarchy-bureaucracy-market influencer triad continues its stranglehold on the Art Market and Representational Art continues to have to fight for the recognition it deserves. This drawing has a place in the history of that struggle. Thomas Sherwood was an academy trained student of Geno Barcsay's teachings, unable to get recognition or support in the American Art establishment. Representational Art students at the University of Western Washington in the 1970s staged a protest and petition campaign demanding more options for representational arts and Sherwood was hired as a part-time temporary in response to that effort.
So, this drawing is also an historic artifact of an early stage in the on-going "Revolution of the Representationalists" in the American sphere of influence in the on-going evolution of Art and its future history.
The Academy/Salon history of suppression WAS foolish.
The Modernist/Oligarchy/Establishment history of suppression HAS BEEN and IS foolish.
Someday Representational and non-Representational arts will be judged on their own merits and neither will be able to claim to be the One True (important) Art. This will be the predictable future of Art, but a future that will, predictably, not come so long as Authoritarianism, (of one design or another), is the norm in our transnational civilization.

Related themes

Representationalist RevolutionBucephalusFuture History