structural:summarization, information:highlighting, linguistic:paraphrasing
Critical recovery

Despite the widespread discredit into which academicism fell, several researchers throughout the 20th century undertook the study of the academic phenomenon. Art historian Paul Barlow stated that despite the wide dissemination of modernism at the beginning of the 20th century, the theoretical bases of its rejection of academicism were surprisingly little explored by its proponents, forming above all a kind of "anti-academic myth", more than a consistent critique. Of all those engaged in this study, Nikolaus Pevsner was perhaps the most important, describing in the 1940s the history of academies on an epic scale, but focusing on the institutional and organizational aspects, disconnecting them from the aesthetic and geographical ones.

Many authors agree that the birth of modernism can be described as the end of collective values and the denial of art as essentially a vehicle for moral principles. It is true that moralizing and historical works continued to be produced throughout the 20th century, but with a completely different impact, when in the Victorian period morality had come to mean above all chastity. Modernism has also been described as responsible for a process of pulverizing hierarchies and for the beginning of the reign of individualism and subjectivity in art, in a much deeper way than had already been suggested by the Romantics or even by the Mannerists much earlier, creating a multiplicity of personal aesthetics that were not consolidated into a common and uniform language, with little or no concern for inserting production into an organized system or creating socially engaged art. They are even accused of having practiced their own version of the elitist dictatorship that they condemned in academicism.

With the goals of Postmodernism in giving a fuller, more sociological and pluralistic account of history, academic art has been brought back into history books and discussion. Since the early 1990s, the creation of academic art has even experienced a limited resurgence through the Classical Realist atelier movement. In museums and art galleries, L'art pompier (a term supporters mostly avoid) has also enjoyed something of a critical revival, partly caused by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where it is displayed on more equal terms with the Impressionists and Realist painters of the period. The opening of this museum in 1986 did not go without heated debate in France, as it was seen by some critics as a rehabilitation of academicism, or even " revisionism ". The art historian André Chastel, however, considered as early as 1973 that there were "nothing but advantages in replacing a global judgment of disapproval, the legacy of old battles, with a quiet and objective curiosity." Some other institutional agents of this rescue are the Dahesh Museum of Art in the United States, which specializes in academic art of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the Art Renewal Center, also based in the United States and dedicated to promoting academicism as a basis for the qualified training of future masters. Additionally, the art is gaining a broader appreciation by the public at large, and whereas academic paintings once would only fetch a few hundreds of dollars in auctions, some now fetch millions.