Notes

You, Me And William Adolphe Bouguereau: The Truth
Up until a few days ago, I was unsure of who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was , and in actual fact, I have trouble articulating his name accurately.

My encounter with Bourgereau started with a sense of skepticism when I read some information on the internet. From the high-sounding name and the dating of his work, I immediately imagined a boring artist, some unprofessional French academic, one of those who paint expensive portraits of nobles and hunting parties. Somewhere else in william adolphe bouguereau sisters , or, more simply older and out of date.

However, judging too fast, I fell into error.


The lesson I learned quickly, and it didn't take me long to become enchanted by the work of Bouguereau found 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 drives the desire for me to blog about art, without being an art scholar the art must be looked at and felt by the emotions it produces on our bodies. Our senses and our intuition are the best way to know if an artist can penetrate us. I didn't even know the name of Bouguereau If I had, it would have been the same, because his work captivated me and touched the oldest archetypes of my soul and displaced everything I thought I knew about art in academia.

It is the way art works by sending us information that is not conscious that takes us back to parallel and past worlds and allows us to step for a moment into the mind of someone else, who in turn has entered our world, and without knowing us. We and he, individuals distant in time and space, are in the same room for a brief moment. Our worlds intersect and merge into the world created by a work of art.

Bouguereau is the one who was abused by modernists
My mistake, however, was made by a lot of others before me, by those who, at the gates of modernism and following a long, acknowledged career, decided that Bouguereau was no longer good enough and that he wasn't contemporary enough and ready for the future or "cool" enough and, overnight, downgraded him to an academic artist, a member from the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies a masterful technique but often empty and false to the point of having bad taste) without any genius.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
There was no greater error. It is enough to look to his Pieta to understand it, to feel a feeling that goes straight into the insides. Bouguereau's Pieta is a universal symbol which is that Christ represents the pain of the world and the Madonna as a black and mysterious woman who is the bearer of truth and of Justice and conscience simultaneously She hurls in our faces all the truths, painful and hidden, about the ugliness that we all share. The dark and black Mary is in a crowded and nearly trapped by guilt, depicted by those good-natured characters, with a somewhat dramatic appearance, who are surrounded by the Christ's body. Christ. The woman, smug and angry, truly desperate, looks like someone who is a refugee, a gypsy who holds her dead son in her arms amid the wreckage of the bombings. It is an image of a war photo reporter, however we can see that image on the walls of an academic from the 19th century, who without too many pleasantries and smacks us in the face.

Pieta Pieta is nothing more than an additional chapter (the final and funereal one) of a tale about a woman, Mary, but it could be a different one. The story starts with the drawing of the Madonna of the Roses in which Mary is still a little girl and a young mother. She is with a round face and white hair. She does not look us in our eye, but looks up, toward the sky, as if seeking help from God or destiny, mindful of the arduous task she is about to begin. That task is gathered in her arms, a tiny Jesus and from his gaze (he will, because he looks at us with his eyes) we see the importance of destiny. She surrounds him in a motherly pose, one of those practical, functional poses, not emotional. The two, facing us, demand acceptance. Then, in Pieta the embrace transforms into the hand that of the mother who cannot bear the weight of her murdered son, while life slips away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau, who lost three children along with his beloved wife. In the painting, as he expresses all his despair, Mary declares her defeat, or rather her defeat to the world. The prayers she makes to God as well as her doubts, prompted by her realization of her task, shatters into a certainty. Her dark 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 the ones responsible.

Bouguereau is the most intense of the Academy
As I said the major mistake that modernists made was to undervalue the expressive potential of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certain the style is academic: from the perfect technicalities with which he draws the naked body to the mythological and religious themes taken from neoclassicism, from naturalistic backgrounds to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. But Bouguereau isn't just this, and it is enough to be able to focus on the looks of the characters in his artworks and the full human emotion he's capable of capturing and transferring on canvas is evident. His contemporaries recognized this, and made him among the top well-known artists of the 1800s. But then, with the advent of the century of 1900, it was the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of being too daring, but perhaps they had not realized that behind the technical order of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain and even seduction.



His paintings are the perfect illustration of the bourgeoisie: gorgeous forms that conceal alarming dark secrets, dark, and desires that he no longer wants to keep from being repressed. The naked is one of the methods he employs to return us to our primal instincts that the bodies are trying to seduce us and their brightness lets us feel like we're in a dream however, they also create a setting of a film, in which the actors are brightly illuminated and entice us with their. Simple gestures are transformed into something extraordinary (like removing a sock for instance) as bodies stack up and pile up, touch and seek each other, it's all an elaborate game of foreplay and Bouguereau is an artist who walks a tightrope between an education of bourgeois that is looked (and is looked) at and the need to express human desires in a physical way. Both exist but it's the observer who decides to focus on one or the other.

It was another artist who was as expressive, sensual, with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau who, in the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote about his achievements: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois model knew the secrets in the unconscious of humans and that you don't necessarily have to decide between form and content, but you can fool the spectators with surrealist illusions.

Bouguereau, the person who can determine the appropriate dosages
The secret of Bouguereau's art is to find the right dosage between sacred and profane, purity and sensuality, malice and innocence. Even if you think you're looking at the standard shepherds, the usual Venus and angels Bouguereau overcomes every stereotype and every commonplace in art. A woman defends herself against Eros the gruesome putto is a symbol of the desire of her heart, desires she doesn't really want to approach; a shepherdess has the expression of an old woman who is a symbol of rural and popular wisdom and of those who have learned life through practice and even some suffering. The Nymph who doesn't conceal her feelings, but instead makes visible, with just one glance, the attraction she feels towards a Satyr. The sexual passion that is carefully placed in Dante's slums. There are a lot of young mothers who are overwhelmed by having to take the care of their children within an environment that doesn't recognize them, and in which they are viewed as only functional personalities. The power of the expressions that his characters give us back and the looks they exchange with each other is immense. They look like photographs, film scenes and gracefully tell real-life tales. Here is realism, packed into mythical and dreamlike images Here can be the universe in its complexity.

Bouguereau the artist who paints with human archetypes
It seems to me that Bouguereau is quite aware of human archetypes, social patterns, and many identities of the person. I wouldn't be surprised should it turn out that he is a member of an obscure school. Certain of his pictures swept me right into the surrealist world of Jodorosky where nakedness is a human characteristic as well as where virtues and vices are exclaimed with a loud voice, where the unconscious pops forth and finds representation.

These are just a few of the things that I can see in the painting of Bouguereau, and if you don't believe me take a look at the gaze of these characters. They are the mirror of the multitude of souls in the world. Through my eyes of the year 2021, I can see in him a deep awareness of the facts of existence, intellectual accountability as well as a desire to dispel social taboos. All of this is done in the simplest and most "formal" ways, with the language of his day, without pretension or snobbishness with no pretension or judgement 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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