Notes

Apply Any Of those 9 Secret Methods To enhance William Adolphe Bouguereau
Until a few days ago I had no idea the name of William-Adolphe-Bouguereau and, actually, I find it difficult to pronounce his name properly.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with suspicion, reading some information from the web. With the name's high-pitched sound and the dating of his works I instantly thought of a boring painter or a unprofessional French academic, one of those who painted expensive portraits of nobles as well as hunting parties. william adolphe bouguereau from another century, or, more simply older and out of date.

But judging too quickly I slipped up.

The lesson I learned quickly, and I didn't need long to fall in love with the art of Bouguereau discovered in Open Art Images.

Before I tell you about these beautiful things I will share the crucial lesson I have learned, which is also what motivates the desire for me to blog about art without being an academic in the field of art: art should be viewed and experienced through the its emotions on our bodies. The body's senses and the instincts are the best guides to understand If an artist can get into us. I didn't even know the name of Bouguereau If I had then it would be similar, as his paintings captivated me, touched the most ancestral archetypes of my soul and changed the things I thought I knew about academic art.

That's what art does and it is able to send us information that is unconscious that transports us to parallel and past worlds and allows us to step for a brief moment in the mind of a stranger, who in turn has managed to enter our world, and without knowing us. We and him, two people who are separated in space and time together in the same room for a moment. Our worlds intersect and merge in the territory created by a work of art.

Bouguereau The one who is snubbed by modernists

My error, however, was made by many others before me in the same way, by those who at the gates of modernism and after a long and recognized career, decided that Bouguereau wasn't sufficient, that he was not modern enough or ready for the future, not "cool" enough and, overnight, downgraded him to a simple academic artist, a member from the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies an impressive technique, but often empty and false to the point of bad taste), devoid of any creativity.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
The error is not more significant. It's enough to glance through Bouguereau's Pieta to comprehend the meaning, and to experience the sensation that goes into the bowels. Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message, where Christ symbolizes the suffering of the world . The Madonna as a black and mysterious woman is the symbol of the truth as well as Justice and conscience simultaneously She hurls in our faces all the facts, both uncomfortable and concealed, about the ugly that is ours. That black dark Mary is surrounded and almost imprisoned by guilt, represented by these lovable characters with a melodramatic look that surround 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 debris of bombings. It is an image taken by an official war photographer but we find it on the canvas of an academic of the 19th century who with no pleasantries is smacking us on the face.

Pieta Pieta is only the second chapter (the final and funereal one) of a tale about a woman called Mary, but it could also be a different one. This story begins with the illustration "The Madonna of the Roses in which Mary appears as a girl, a young mother, white and round-faced. She does not look us in our eye, but instead looks up, toward the sky, as if asking for support by God or the universe, aware of the daunting task she is about to begin. That task is gathered within her arms. a little Jesus and from his gaze (he does, he gazes at us with his eyes) we sense the important fate. She surrounds him in a maternity pose one that is functional rather than emotional. The two, facing us, ask for acceptance. Then, in Pieta the embrace transforms into an embrace of a mother who cannot carry the burden of her son's murder, while life slips away. This was a familiar feeling to Bouguereau who had lost three children along with his beloved wife. In the painting Bouguereau screams in sadness, Mary declares her defeat and, in a way she declares the end of the world. Prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by the awareness of her task, shatters into an absolute certainty. Her black eyes, her hollowed out skin, look at the perpetrators directly in the face and the faith of humanity slips into the certainty that evil exists and that we are accountable for it.


Bouguereau, the intense one of the Academy
Like I said the major mistake that modernists made was to underestimate the expressive capacity of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certain all of his work is academic, from the flawless technicalities which he creates naked body as well as the religious and mythological themes taken from neoclassicism, from naturalistic backgrounds to the romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau isn't just this, and it's enough to be able to focus on the looks of certain characters in his artworks, where all the human ferocity that he is in a position to perceive and convey onto the canvas is reflected. His contemporaries recognized this, and made Bouguereau an one of the more well-known artists of the 1800s. But then, with the advent of the new century, the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being bold, but perhaps they had not realized that, beneath the technical structure of his artworks, Bouguereau hid chaos, pain, malice, and even seduction.

His work is the ideal model of the bourgeoisie. gorgeous forms that conceal alarming dark secrets, dark, and desires that he no longer wants to repress. The nude is one of his methods to return us to our primal instincts and desire to seduce us and their brightness lets us believe in a fantasy, as well as in the setting of a film, in which the actors are well lit and are able to entice us. The simplest gestures become sublime (like taking off a sock, for example) and bodies pile up and stack up, touch and seek the other, it's an act of foreplay and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker who is balancing an education of bourgeois that is looked (and is observed) at and the need to express material human needs. Both exist and it's the observer who decides to focus on one or the other.

It was another artist who was as beautiful, sensual, like Bouguereau who, during the 1950s was able to save him from his obscurity and wrote about his achievements: Salvador Dali. He , too, so enslaved to the bourgeois ideal was aware of the hidden secrets in the unconscious of humans and the fact that you don't need to choose between form and content, but you could fool your spectators with surrealist illusions.

Bouguereau is the one who is aware of the proper dosages
The secret of Bouguereau's art is to find the right balance between the sacred and profane. purity as well as sensuality. It is also about malice and innocence. Even if you think you're seeing the typical shepherds, the usual Venus, and angels, Bouguereau transcends all stereotypes, every commonplace of art. A girl defends herself from Eros, that annoying putto is a symbol of the desire and desires that aren't hers to pursue; a shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman, bearer of rural and popular wisdom and of those who have learned life through practice and even suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal her feelings, but instead makes evident, with a single glance, the attraction she feels towards the Satyr. The sexual passion that is carefully placed in Dante's underworld. There are so many young mothers who are who are overwhelmed by the need to take care of their children in a world that does not accept them, where they are considered only functional personalities. The power of the looks that his characters give us back and the looks they exchange with one another is awe-inspiring. They look like photographs films, or movie scenes, and politely reveal real-life tales. Realism is packed into dreamlike and mythical scenes, here is the world in all its complexity.

Bouguereau is the artist who paints using human archetypes
It seems to me that Bouguereau is very clear about human archetypes social patterns, as well as many identities of the person. I wouldn't be surprised should it turn out that he belongs to some mysterious school. A few of his photographs swept me right into the surrealist universe of Jodorosky where nakedness is a human characteristic, where vices and virtues are proclaimed loudly, and where all the unconscious springs forth and finds representation.

These are just a few of the things I see in his painting. And in case you doubt my assertions, observe his eyes. They are the mirror of the multitude of souls in the world. Through my eyes in 2021 I can see in him a deep awareness of the facts of life, a sense of intellectual responsibility, a desire to unmask social taboos. He does all this in the simplest and most "formal" ways, with the language of his time, without pretension or snobbishness, without judgment or presumption and, most importantly, with no violence, so that, at this moment in the text and in the history of humanity, it's the modernists that seem outdated to me.


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