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The Bad Art Gallery’s show of work turned down for the RHA Annual Exhibition may not make the same impact as the French Salon des Refusés, but it is a valid exercise in cultural democracy, writes AIDAN DUNNE

THROUGHOUT THE 1850s, the French Royal Academy ruthlessly excluded artists it didn’t approve of from its annual exhibitions in the Salon d’Apollon. So many painters cried foul that, in 1863, Napoleon III set up an exhibition of the work rejected by the academy. A list of the exhibitors at the Salon des Refusés, as it became known, is virtually a roll-call of the French Impressionists, who ultimately became much more famous than their academic counterparts.