Notes

The Untold Secret To Mastering William Adolphe Bouguereau In Just 6 Days
Up until a few days ago, I was unsure of who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was , and in fact, I still find it difficult to pronounce his name correctly.


My first encounter with Bourgereau began with suspicion when I read some information on the internet. With the name's high-pitched sound and the date of his works I instantly thought of some boring painter or a servile French academic among those who paint expensive portraits of nobles as well as hunting events. Something from the other century, in short the old and outdated.

However, judging too fast I slipped up.

I quickly learned my lesson, and I didn't need long to become enchanted by the work of Bouguereau discovered through Open Art Images.

Before I talk about these beautiful things, I will reveal the lesson I learned which is also what drives 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 impact of emotions it creates in our bodies. The body's senses and the intuition are the best way to know if an artist can penetrate us. I barely knew Bouguereau's name, and if I hadn't, it would have been similar, as his works bewitched me and touched the oldest archetypes in my life and challenged all I believed I knew about academic art.

It is the way art works by sending us unconscious information, it transports us to parallel and past worlds, it lets us enter for a brief moment in the mind of someone else, who in turn has entered ours, without knowing us. We and him, two people distant in time and space and space, share the same space for a short time. Our worlds intersect and merge within the space that is created by a work art.


Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My mistake, however, was made by many others before me, by those who, in the midst of modernism and after a long and recognized career, decided that Bouguereau was no longer good enough and that he wasn't modern enough or modern enough, not "cool" enough and, overnight, downgraded his status to that of a basic academic artist, a member from those who were Art Pompier (an expression that suggests 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.
The error is not more significant. It is enough to look through the painting of Pieta to comprehend the meaning, and to experience an emotion that reaches to the internal organs. In Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message, where Christ represents the pain of the world . The Madonna is a dark and mysterious woman is the symbol of reality, of Justice and conscience simultaneously She hurls in our faces all the truths, uncomfortable and hidden, about the ugliness that we all share. The dark and black Mary is surrounded and almost trapped by guilt, depicted by these lovable characters with a dramatic appearance that have surrounded the dead corpse of Christ. The lady, who is regal and angry, truly desperate, looks like someone who is a refugee, a gypsy who holds her son's body in her arms under the wreckage of the bombings; it is an image from the war photographer, however, we see it on the canvas of an academic of the 19th century, who without much aplomb and smacks us on the face.

Pieta Pieta is just the second chapter (the final and funereal one) of a story about a woman, Mary however, it could be a different one. This tale begins with the drawing "The Madonna of the Roses in which Mary is still a girl and a mother of a child, with a round face and white hair. She doesn't look us in the eye, but instead looks upwards, towards the sky, like someone looking for help in the direction of God or fate, mindful of the arduous task she is about to begin. The task is held within her arms. a little Jesus who, through his eyes (he is, and he gazes at us) we can sense the significance of fate. william adolphe bouguereau wraps him around in a motherly pose, one that is practical, functional poses, not emotional. The two, sitting in front of us, seek acceptance. Then, in Pieta, that embrace becomes an embrace of a mother who is unable to bear the weight of her son's death as her life is slipping away. This feeling was very familiar to Bouguereau who had lost three children as well as his spouse. In the painting, as he expresses all his sadness, Mary declares her defeat, or rather she declares the end of the world. Prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by her awareness of her mission, break into an absolute certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed-out skin, stare at the perpetrators with a glare, while the hope of humanity sank into the knowledge that evil is real and we are accountable for it.

Bouguereau is the most intense of the Academy
As I said the biggest mistake made by the modernists was to undervalue the expressive power of Bouguereau's painting. Sure the style is academic, from the flawless technicalities which he draws the naked bodies, to the mythological and religious themes taken from neoclassicism, from the naturalistic backgrounds , to the romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau is not only this, and it's enough to keep looking at the faces of some of the people in his paintings in which all the human emotion he's in a position to perceive and convey onto the canvas is reflected. His contemporaries recognized this, and made him among the top well-known artists in the 1800s. But then, with the dawn of the new century the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being daring, but maybe they didn't realize that behind the technical order of his work, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain and even seduction.

His artworks are the perfect model of the bourgeoisie. beautiful forms that hide disturbing dark secrets, dark, and desires that the artist is no longer able to repress. The naked is among his methods to bring us back to our natural instinct: the bodies want to entice us and their brightness can make us enter a dream, but also in the set of a film, in which actors are lit and bewitch us. Simple gestures are transformed into something extraordinary (like the removal of a sock as an example) as bodies stack up and pile up, touch and seek the other, it's an elaborate game of foreplay and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker who is balancing bourgeois education that looks (and is looked) at, and the desire to communicate human desires in a physical way. Both exist and it's the observer who decides to look at one over the other.

It was another artist who was as expressive, sensual, with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau who, in the 1950s was able to save him from his obscurity and wrote about his achievements: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois ideal, knew the secrets contained in the unconscious of humans and the fact that you don't have to decide between content and form but you can fool the audience with magical surrealist tricks.

Bouguereau is 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 and innocence. If you think that you are seeing the usual shepherds, the typical Venus and angels Bouguereau overcomes every stereotype or commonplace in art. A girl defends herself from Eros and that irritable putto is a symbol of the desire and desires that she isn't willing to pursue; a shepherdess has the expression of an old woman, bearer of the wisdom of the common and rural and of those who have learned the way of life through experience and a little suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal, but rather makes absolutely clear, with one eye, the desire she feels for the Satyr. The sexual passion that is carefully placed in Dante's slums. There are many young mothers, overwhelmed by having to take care of their children in an unfriendly world accept them, where they are considered to be only functional characters. The power of the looks that his characters show us back and those that they exchange with one another is awe-inspiring. They resemble photographs or film footage and gracefully share real-life tales. Realism is packed into mythical and dreamlike images, here is the world in all its complex simplicity.

Bouguereau, the one who paints with human archetypes
It seems to me that Bouguereau is quite knowledgeable about archetypes of humans, social patterns, and many identities of the person. I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that he belongs to some esoteric school. Certain of his pictures swept me right into the surrealist realm of Jodorosky in which the naked is a human trait, where vices and virtues are proclaimed loudly, and where the unconscious pops forth and finds representation.

There are many things I see in Bouguereau's painting, and if you don't believe me take a look at the gaze of these characters. They are the mirror of the souls of the world. In my vision of the year 2021, I see in him a great awareness of the truths of existence, intellectual accountability and a desire to break down social taboos. He does this in the most basic and "formal" ways, with the language of the day without pretense or snobbery with no pretension or judgement and most importantly, with no violence, that at this point in both the text and the history of humanity, it's the modernists who seem antiquated to me.


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