Notes

The secret of Profitable William Adolphe Bouguereau
For a while, up until a few days ago I had no idea who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was , and actually, I have trouble articulating his name accurately.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust, reading some information on the internet. From the high-sounding name and the date of his work, I immediately thought of a boring painter and a unprofessional French academic or one of the artists who painted expensive portraits of nobles and hunter gatherings. A painting from another century, in short the old and outdated.

But I was too quick to judge I made a mistake.

The lesson I learned quickly, and it took me no time to become enchanted by the works of Bouguereau found through Open Art Images.

Before I talk about these beautiful things I will share the lesson I learned which is the reason that inspires my desire to talk about art without being an art scholar: art should be observed and felt through the impact of the emotions it produces on our bodies. The senses and instincts are the best guides to know if an artist can penetrate us. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau, and if I hadn't then it would be the same, because his works bewitched me as they touched the most ancient archetypes in my life and displaced all I believed I knew about academic art.


This is what art does by sending us information that is unconscious that brings us back to parallel and past worlds as well as allowing us to enter for a brief moment in the head of a stranger who has entered our world, and without knowing us. We and he, individuals distant in time and space and space, share the same space for a brief moment. Our worlds intersect and merge in the territory that is created by a work art.

Bouguereau is the one who was abused by modernists

My error was made by many other people before me and by those who, in the midst of modernism and following a long and acknowledged career, decided that Bouguereau wasn't sufficient and that he wasn't modern enough or prepared for the future, not "cool" enough and, immediately, degraded his status to that of a basic academic artist, a member from the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies an impressive technique, but often false and empty to the point of having bad taste), devoid of any genius.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
There was no greater error. It's enough to look to the painting of Pieta to comprehend the meaning, and to experience a feeling that goes straight into the bowels. Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message that is universal in the sense that Christ symbolizes the suffering of this world. Madonna as a black and esoteric woman, is the bearer of truth, of Justice and conscience, all at once and throws into our faces all the truths, painful and concealed, about the ugly that belongs to us. The dark and black Mary is surrounded and almost imprisoned by guilt, represented by those good-natured characters, with a somewhat dramatic appearance that have surrounded the dead Christ's body. Christ. The woman, smug and angry, really desperate, looks like a gypsy, a refugee who holds her dead son in her arms amid the rubble of the bombings; it is an image from the war photographer, but we find this on the wall of an academic from the 19th century, who without much aplomb and smacks us in the face.

Pieta Pieta is only the second chapter (the last and most funereal) of a tale about a woman called Mary, but it could also be another one. The story starts with the drawing The Madonna of the Roses, where Mary is still a young girl, a young mother, round and white. She doesn't look us in the eye, but instead looks up, toward the sky, as if looking for help from God or the universe, aware of the difficult task she has just begun. This task is carried within her arms. a tiny Jesus and from his gaze (he will, because he stares at us with his eyes) we sense the important destiny. She wraps him around in a motherly pose, one that is functional rather than emotional. The two, facing us, seek acceptance. Then, in Pieta, that embrace becomes a handhold that of the mother who cannot carry the burden of her murdered son as her life is slipping away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau, who had lost three children as well as his spouse. In the painting, while Bouguereau expresses his complete despair, Mary declares her defeat, or rather she declares the end of the world. Her prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by her awareness of her task, shatters into an absolute certainty. Her black eyes, her hollowed out skin, look at the perpetrators directly in the face, while the hope of humanity slips into the certainty that evil is real and we are accountable for it.

Bouguereau is the most intense of the Academy
Like I said, the serious mistake made by the modernists was to overlook the expressive potential of Bouguereau's painting. Sure the style is academic, from the perfect technicalities with which he creates naked bodies as well as the themes of mythology and religion drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds to the romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau is not only this, and it is enough to linger on the faces of the people in his paintings, where all the human intensity that he is able to see and transport on the canvas is manifested. His contemporaries understood this, and made him an one of the more well-known artists in the 1800s. However, at the dawn of the new century, the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of being too bold, but maybe they were unaware that, beneath the technical structure of his work, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain and seduction.

His artworks are the perfect example of the bourgeoisie: stunning forms that conceal disturbing hidden secrets, darkness, and desires that are no longer his desire to keep from being repressed. The naked is one of the means he uses to return us to our natural instinct and desire to seduce us and their brightness can make us believe in a fantasy, as well as in the setting of a film, where actors are lit and bewitch us. Simple gestures can be enthralling (like removing a sock for example) as bodies pile up and stack together, and they play with each other, it's all a game of foreplay, and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker who is balancing the bourgeois education system that is looked (and is looked) at and the need to express material human needs. Both worlds are there but it's the viewer who decides whether to focus on one or the other.

It was another great artist, equally emotional, sensual with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau, who, around the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote his praisesfor him: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois formula, knew the secrets contained in the unconscious of humans and the fact that you don't need to choose between content and form however, you could fool the audience with magical surrealist tricks.

Bouguereau, the one who knows the right doses
The secret of Bouguereau's art is to find the right balance between the sacred and profane. pure and sensuality. william adolphe bouguereau dawn demonstrates malice as well as innocence. If you think that you're looking at the standard shepherds, the usual Venus and angels Bouguereau overcomes every stereotype, every commonplace of art. A girl defends herself from Eros the gruesome putto symbolizes the desires of her heart, desires she doesn't really want to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman who is a symbol of the wisdom of the common and rural and of those who have learned the way of life through experience and suffering. The Nymph who doesn't hide her feelings, but instead makes clear, with one intense gaze, the attraction she feels for the Satyr. The gay passion is carefully placed in Dante's slums. There are many young mothers overwhelmed by having to take the care of their children within an unfriendly world recognize them, and in which they are viewed as only functional personalities. The power of the expressions that his characters send us back, and the glances they exchange with one another is immense. They appear like photos or film footage, and politely reveal the real life stories. Here is realism, packed into dreamlike and mythical scenes Here is the world in all its complex simplicity.

Bouguereau is the artist who paints using human archetypes
I believe that Bouguereau is quite clear about human archetypes as well as social patterns and multiple identities of the being. I wouldn't be shocked should it turn out that he was a member of some obscure school. Some of his images catapulted me into the surrealist universe of Jodorosky, where the nude is a human characteristic in a world where virtues and vices are exclaimed with a loud voice, in which the unconscious sprang forth and finds a representation.

There are many things I observe in his painting. And If you aren't convinced, look into the gaze of these characters. They are the mirror of the souls of the world. Through my eyes in 2021 I see in him profound awareness of the realities of existence, intellectual accountability and a desire to break down social taboos. He does all this in the most simple and "formal" ways, with the language of his time without pretense or snobbery and without presumption or judgment and, most importantly, with no violence, that, at this point in the text as well as in human history, it's the modernists who seem antiquated to me.




Website: https://blog.openartimages.com/2021/10/11/william-adolphe-bouguereau-who/