Notes

The Untold Secret To Mastering William Adolphe Bouguereau In Simply 6 Days
For a while, up until a few days ago I had no idea the name of William-Adolphe-Bouguereau and, in fact, I still have trouble articulating his name properly.

My first encounter with Bourgereau began with suspicion, reading some information online. From the high-sounding name and the date of his work I instantly thought of a boring painter or a servile French academic, one of those who paint lavish portraits of nobles and hunting events. A painting from another century, or, more simply the old and outdated.

But I was too quick to judge I slipped up.

It was a quick lesson and it didn't take me long to fall in love with the works of Bouguereau discovered through Open Art Images.

Before I share with you the details of the beauty of this I will also share the crucial lesson I have learned, which is the reason that inspires the desire for me to blog about art without being an academic in the field of art the art must be looked at and felt by the emotions it produces on our bodies. The body's senses and the instincts are the best guides to determine if an artist is able to connect with our souls. I didn't even know the name of Bouguereau and, if I didn't, it would have been exactly the same. His works bewitched me, touched the most ancestral archetypes of my soul and displaced 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, it takes us back to parallel and past worlds and allows us to step for a brief moment in the mind of someone else who has entered ours, without knowing us. We and he, individuals separated by time and space together in the same room for a brief moment. Our worlds meet and merge within the space created by a work of art.

Bouguereau The one who is snubbed by modernists
My mistake, however, was committed by many other people before me in the same way, by those who in the midst of modernism and after a long and acknowledged career, decided that Bouguereau wasn't good enough to be considered contemporary enough and ready for the future, not "cool" enough and, in a matter of minutes, relegated him to an academic artist, a member of the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies the mastery of a technique, however it is often empty and false until it is bad taste) without any creativity.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
There was no greater error. It's enough to glance at Bouguereau's Pieta to grasp it, to feel a feeling that goes straight to the insides. In Bouguereau's Pieta is a universal symbol which is that Christ symbolizes the suffering of this world. Madonna, a black and mysterious woman who is the bearer of truth, of Justice and conscience, all at once and throws into our faces all the facts, both uncomfortable and obscure, about the ugly that is ours. The dark and black Mary is enveloped and trapped by guilt, depicted by these lovable characters with a slightly too dramatic look, who have surrounded the dead body of Christ. She, dignified and angry, really desperate, looks like an escaped gypsy who holds her son's body in her arms under the debris of bombings. william adolphe bouguereau 's an image from a war photo reporter, however, we see it on the canvas of an academic from the 19th century who without much aplomb, slaps us with a slap in the face.



The Pieta is just the second chapter (the final and funereal one), of a story about a woman, Mary however, it could also be a different one. This story begins with the drawing "The Madonna of the Roses and where Mary is still a girl and a mother of a child, with a round face and white hair. She does not look us in the eye, but instead looks up, toward the sky, as if looking for help by God or the universe, mindful of the arduous task she has just begun. The task is held by her arms and she holds a small Jesus and from his gaze (he will, because he stares at us with his eyes) we see the importance of destiny. She encircles him in a maternity pose one that is practical, functional rather than emotional. The two of them, sitting in front of us, seek understanding. When they are in the Pieta the embrace transforms into an embrace of a mother who can't carry the burden of her son's murder and life slips away. This was a familiar feeling to Bouguereau who had lost three of his children along with his beloved wife. In the painting Bouguereau expresses his complete dismay, Mary declares her defeat and, in a way, the defeat of the world. The prayers she makes to God, her doubts dictated by her awareness of her task, shatters into a certainty. Her dark eyes, her hollowed-out skin, look the culprits in the face, while the hope of humanity slips into the certainty that evil exists and that we are accountable for it.

Bouguereau is the most intense of the Academy
As I mentioned the biggest mistake made by the modernists was to overlook the expressive capacity of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certainly the style is academic: From the precise technicalities which he creates naked body, to the themes of mythology and religion taken from neoclassicism, from naturalistic backgrounds to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. However, Bouguereau is not just this, and it is enough to linger on the looks of certain characters in his paintings and the full human intensity that he is able to see and transport onto the canvas is reflected. His contemporaries understood this and made him one of the most famous artists in the 1800s. Then, with the dawn of the new century, it was the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of being too doing enough, and maybe they didn't realize that behind the technical order of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain, and even seduction.

His work is the ideal illustration of the bourgeoisie: gorgeous forms that conceal alarming hidden secrets, darkness and desires that the artist is no longer able to suppress. The nude is one of the methods he employs to return us to our natural instinct that the bodies are trying to seduce us, and their brightness makes us enter a dream, as well as in the setting of a film, where the actors are well lit and bewitch us. Simple gestures are transformed into something extraordinary (like the removal of a sock as an example); bodies pile up and stack up, touch and seek the other, it's an elaborate game of foreplay and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker poised between the bourgeois education system that is looked (and is observed) at and the need to speak to the human need for material. Both are present and it's the person who is watching that decides to see one rather than the other.

It was another great artist, as expressive, sensual, like Bouguereau who, during the 1950s and 1960s, saved him from the ashes and wrote his praisesfor him: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois model, knew the secrets contained within the human subconscious and also that you don't need to choose between content and form but you can fool the spectators with surrealist illusions.

Bouguereau, the person who can determine the appropriate doses
Bouguereau's secret is in the right dosage between sacred and profane, purity and sensuality. He also demonstrates malice and innocence. Even if you believe you're looking at the standard shepherds, Venus, and angels, Bouguereau surpasses all stereotypes or commonplace in art. A woman defends herself against Eros the gruesome putto symbolizes the desires, the desires that she doesn't really want to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman, a bearer of the wisdom of the common and rural that has been cultivated by those who have lived life through practice and even a little suffering. The Nymph who doesn't hide her feelings, but instead makes visible, with just one intense gaze, the attraction she feels towards the Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned in Dante's slums. There are many young mothers overwhelmed by having to take charge of their children in a world that does not recognize them, and where they are considered only functional personalities. The power of the looks that his characters give us back, and the glances they exchange with one another is awe-inspiring. They appear like photos films, or movie scenes, and politely reveal real-life tales. Here is realism, packed into mythical and dreamlike images, here is the world in its complexity.

Bouguereau, the one who paints using human archetypes
My impression is that Bouguereau is extremely knowledgeable about archetypes of humans, social patterns, and various identities of the human being. I wouldn't be shocked to discover that he was a member of some obscure school. Certain of his pictures swept me to the surrealist realm of Jodorosky where nakedness is a human characteristic as well as where virtues and vices are exclaimed with a loud voice, in which the unconscious sprang forth and finds a representation.

These are just a few of the things that I can see in his painting. And if you don't believe me look into his eyes. They are the mirror of the multitude of souls in the world. Through my eyes of 2021 I can see in him a deep awareness of the facts of life, a sense of intellectual responsibility as well as a desire to dispel social taboos. All of this is done in the most basic and "formal" ways, with the language of the day, without pretension or snobbishness and without presumption or judgment, and above all without violence, so much that, at this moment in the text as well as in human history, it's the modernists who appear outdated to me.


Here's my website: https://blog.openartimages.com/2021/10/11/william-adolphe-bouguereau-who/