Notes

The Truth About William Adolphe Bouguereau In Three Little Words
Up until a few days ago, I didn't know who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was and in actual fact, I find it difficult to pronounce his name correctly.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with suspicion after reading some of the information available on the internet. Based on the soaring name and the date of his works, I immediately imagined a boring artist, some servile French academic, one of those who paint lavish portraits of nobles and hunting events. A painting from another century, which is, in a nutshell, old and dated.

But judging too quickly I made a mistake.

It was a quick lesson, and it didn't take me long to become enchanted by the works of Bouguereau that I found on Open Art Images.


Before I tell you about these beautiful things, I will reveal the fateful lesson learned, which is also what motivates my desire to talk about art, without being an academic in the field of art the art must be looked at and felt by emotions it creates upon our body. Our senses and our instincts are the best guides to know if an artist has able to connect with us. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau and, if I didn't, it would have been the same, because his paintings captivated me, touched the most ancestral archetypes that shaped my soul, and changed all I believed I knew about art in academia.

That's what art does by sending us unconscious information that transports us to parallel and past worlds, it lets us enter for a short time into the head of a stranger, who in turn has entered ours, without knowing us. We and he, individuals distant in time and space, are in the same space for a moment. Our worlds intersect and merge in the territory made by a piece of art.

Bouguereau is the one who was abused by modernists
My error, however, was made by many other people before me, by those who, as they stepped into the modern age and following a long and acknowledged career, decided that Bouguereau wasn't adequate and that he wasn't modern enough or modern enough and was not "cool" enough and, in a matter of minutes, relegated him to a simple academic artist, a member among the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies a masterful technique but often empty and false to the point of bad taste), devoid of any talent.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
There was no greater error. It's enough to look through the painting of Pieta to understand it, to feel an emotion that reaches to the internal organs. In Bouguereau's Pieta carries a universal message that is universal in the sense that Christ symbolizes the suffering of the world and the Madonna, a black and esoteric woman, is the bearer of the truth and of Justice and conscience, all at once She hurls in our faces all the facts, both uncomfortable and concealed, about the ugly that is ours. This dark, black Mary is enveloped and imprisoned by guilt, represented by these lovable characters with a somewhat dramatic appearance, who have surrounded the dead body of Christ. The woman, smug and angry, really desperate, appears to be someone who is a refugee, a gypsy who holds her dead son in her arms under the wreckage of the bombings. It's an image of an official war photographer however, we see that image on the walls of an academic of the 19th century who, with no pleasantries and smacks us with a slap in the face.


Pieta Pieta is just the second chapter (the one that is fun and the final), of a story about a woman called Mary however, it could be a different one. The story starts with the painting The Madonna of the Roses and where Mary appears as a young girl and a young mother. She is round and white. She doesn't look us in the eye, instead she looks upwards, to the sky, like someone looking for help from God or destiny, conscious of the daunting task she has just begun. The task is held by her arms and she holds a small Jesus who, through his eyes (he does, he gazes us in the eye) we can sense the significance of fate. She wraps him around in a motherly pose, one that is practical, functional poses, not emotional. The two, facing us, seek compassion. Then, in Pieta the embrace transforms into the hand of a mother who can't bear the weight of her son's death and life slips away. This feeling was very familiar to Bouguereau, who had lost three of his children as well as his spouse. In the painting, while Bouguereau expresses his complete despair, Mary declares her defeat or, more accurately she declares the end of the world. Prayers to heaven as well as her doubts, prompted by her awareness of her mission, break into a certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed-out skin, stare at the perpetrators directly in the face and the faith of humanity is dissolved into the conviction that evil is present and we are the ones responsible.

Bouguereau The intense one of the Academy
Like I said the major mistake that modernists made was to overlook the expressive power of the painting by Bouguereau. Sure the style is academic: From the precise technicalities which he creates naked body to the themes of mythology and religion taken from neoclassicism, from the naturalistic backgrounds to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. However, Bouguereau is not just this, and it's enough to linger on the looks of some of the people in his paintings and the full human emotion he's in a position to perceive and convey onto the canvas is reflected. His contemporaries understood this and made Bouguereau one of the most well-known artists of the 1800s. However, at the advent of the century of 1900, the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not bold, but maybe they were unaware that beneath the orderly technicality of his artworks, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain, and seduction.

His paintings are the perfect model of the bourgeoisie. gorgeous forms that conceal alarming dark secrets, dark and desires that the artist is no longer able to keep from being repressed. The naked is one of the means he uses to reconnect us to our natural instinct and desire to lure us in and their brightness can make us believe in a fantasy, however, they also create a setting of a movie, where actors are lit and bewitch us. The simplest gestures become sublime (like removing a sock for example) as bodies stack up and pile up, they touch and search the other, it's an elaborate game of foreplay and Bouguereau is an artist who walks a tightrope between bourgeois education that looks (and is at and is looked) at as well as the desire to communicate the human need for material. Both exist and it's the observer who decides to look at one over the other.

It was another great artist, as beautiful, sensual, with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau who, during the 1950s and 1960s, saved him from the ashes and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois ideal knew the secrets in the human unconscious and the fact that you don't need to choose between content and form but you can fool the spectators with surrealist illusions.

william adolphe bouguereau , the person who can determine the appropriate dosages
The secret of Bouguereau's art is to find the right dosage between holy and vulgar, pure as well as sensuality. It is also about malice as well as innocence. If you think that you're looking at the standard shepherds, the typical Venus and angels, Bouguereau surpasses all stereotypes and every commonplace in art. A girl defends herself from Eros the gruesome putto is a symbol of the desire, the desires that she doesn't really want to approach; a shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman, bearer of popular and rural wisdom and of those who have learned how to live their lives through practice and a little suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal her feelings, but instead makes visible, with just one intense gaze, the attraction she feels towards a Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned in Dante's slums. There are a lot of young mothers who are feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility of taking charge of their children in an environment that doesn't recognize them, and in which they are viewed as to be only functional characters. The power of the looks that his characters send us back and the looks they exchange with one another is immense. They appear like photos, film scenes, and politely reveal real-life stories. Realism is packed into dreamlike and mythical scenes, here is the world in its complex simplicity.


Bouguereau is the artist who paints using human archetypes
My impression is that Bouguereau is quite knowledgeable about archetypes of humans, social patterns, and multiple identities of the being. I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out that he is a member of an obscure school. A few of his photographs swept me right into the surrealist world of Jodorosky, where the nude is a human trait, where vices and virtues are exclaimed with a loud voice, where all the unconscious springs forth and finds a representation.

These are just a few of the things I see in Bouguereau's painting, and if you don't believe me observe his eyes, the reflection of the multitude of souls in the world. Through my eyes of the year 2021, I see in him a deep awareness of the facts of life, intellectual responsibility and a desire to break down social taboos. All of this is done in the most simple and "formal" ways, with the language of the day without pretense or snobbery, without judgment or presumption and, most importantly, with no violence, so that, at this moment in both the text and human history, it's the modernists who appear outdated to me.



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