Notes

The Ultimate Secret Of William Adolphe Bouguereau
For a while, up until a few days ago I had no idea who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was and actually, I struggle to pronounce his name accurately.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with suspicion when I read some information from the web. From the high-sounding name and the dating of his works, I immediately imagined a boring artist and a serviceable French academic among those who painted expensive portraits of nobles and hunter gatherings. Something from the other century, which is, in a nutshell, old and dated.

But judging too quickly I made a mistake.

It was a quick lesson, and it didn't take me long to fall in love with the art of Bouguereau that I found through Open Art Images.

Before I tell you about these beautiful things I will also share the fateful lesson learned, which is also what motivates me to write about art without being an art scholar: art should be viewed and experienced through the impact of emotions it creates on our bodies. The body's senses and the intuition are the best way to understand If an artist is able to connect with us. I didn't even know the name of Bouguereau, and if I hadn't then it would be similar, as his work captivated me, touched the most ancestral archetypes in my life and changed all I believed I knew about art in academia.

This is what art does by sending us information that is not conscious, it transports us to parallel and past worlds and allows us to step for a moment into the mind of someone else, who in turn has managed to enter our world, and without knowing us. We and he, individuals who are separated in space and time, are in the same space for a short time. Our worlds intersect and merge into the world that is created by a work art.


Bouguereau The one who is snubbed by modernists
My error, however, was made by a lot of others before me, by those who, in the midst of modernism and following a long, acknowledged career, decided that Bouguereau was no longer adequate and that he wasn't modern enough or ready for the future and was not "cool" enough and, immediately, degraded him to an academic artist, one of those who were Art Pompier (an expression that suggests a masterful technique but often false and empty until it is bad taste), devoid of any creativity.


Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
The error is not more significant. It's enough to glance at the painting of Pieta to understand the meaning, and to experience an emotion that reaches to the insides. The Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message, where Christ represents the pain of this world. Madonna, a black and esoteric woman, is the bearer of truth, of Justice and conscience at the same time and throws into our faces all the truths, painful and obscure, about the ugly that is ours. This dark, black Mary is in a crowded and nearly imprisoned by guilt, represented by the jolly characters with a somewhat dramatic look which surround the dead Christ's body. Christ. She, dignified and angry, really desperate, appears to be a gypsy, a refugee who holds her deceased son in her arms beneath the wreckage of the bombings. It's an image of the war photographer, however, we see this on the wall of an academic from the 19th century, who with no pleasantries and smacks us on the face.

The Pieta is just an additional chapter (the one that is fun and the final) of a tale about a woman called Mary but it could also be another one. This story begins with the illustration of the Madonna of the Roses in which Mary is still a little girl, a young mother, round and white. She does not look us in our eye, but looks upwards, to the sky, like someone asking for support by God or fate, mindful of the daunting task she has just begun. That task is gathered in her arms, and she holds a small Jesus, from whose gaze (he does, he stares at us with his eyes) we can sense the significance of destiny. She surrounds him in a maternal pose, one that is practical, functional rather than emotional. The two of them, standing in front of us, demand understanding. In the Pieta this embrace, it becomes the hand that of the mother who cannot bear the weight of her son's murder as her life is slipping away. This was a familiar feeling to Bouguereau, who lost three children and his wife. In the painting, as Bouguereau expresses his complete despair, Mary declares her defeat or, more accurately her defeat to the world. 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 and hope for humanity sank into the knowledge that evil exists and that we are responsible for it.

Bouguereau The intense one of the Academy
Like I said the biggest mistake that modernists made was to undervalue the expressive power of Bouguereau's painting. Certain, everything in his style is academic, from the flawless technicalities which he paints naked body as well as the religious and mythological themes taken from neoclassicism, from the naturalistic backgrounds , to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. But Bouguereau is not only this, and it is enough to linger on the faces of the characters in his paintings in which all the human ferocity that he is in a position to perceive and convey on canvas is evident. His peers understood this and made Bouguereau an one of the more famous artists of the 1800s. However, at the dawn of the century of 1900, the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not bold, but maybe they were unaware that behind the technical order of his work, Bouguereau hid chaos, pain, malice, and even seduction.

His artworks are the perfect example of the bourgeoisie: beautiful forms that hide disturbing secrets, darkness and desires the artist is no longer able to suppress. The naked is among the methods he employs to bring us back to our instinctual nature and desire to lure us in, and their brightness makes us feel like we're in a dream however, they also create a setting of a film, in which actors are illuminated and entice us with their. The simplest gestures become sublime (like the removal of a sock as an example); bodies stack up and pile up, they touch and search each other, it's all an elaborate game of foreplay and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker who is balancing bourgeois education that looks (and is looked) at as well as the need to express human desires in a physical way. Both are present and it's the person who is watching that decides to focus on one or the other.

It was another great artist, equally expressive, sensual, like Bouguereau who, in the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote his praisesfor him: Salvador Dali. He , too, so enslaved to the bourgeois model knew the secrets in the human unconscious and that you don't necessarily have to decide between content and form, however, you could fool the spectators with surrealist illusions.

Bouguereau The one who is aware of the proper doses
Bouguereau's secret is in the right balance between holy and vulgar, 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 from Eros the gruesome putto is a symbol of the desire of her heart, desires aren't hers to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman, a bearer of rural and popular wisdom, of those who know life through practice and even 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 gay passion is carefully placed within Dante's underworld. There are many young mothers who are overwhelmed by the need to take charge of their children in an environment that doesn't recognize them, and in which they are to be only functional characters. william adolphe bouguereau of the glances that his characters show us back, and the glances they exchange with one another is awe-inspiring. They appear like photos or film footage, and politely reveal real-life stories. This is realist art, stuffed into mythical and dreamlike images This can be the universe in its complex simplicity.

Bouguereau the artist who paints with human archetypes
It seems to me that Bouguereau is extremely aware of human archetypes as well as social patterns and various identities of the human being. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that he was a member of some obscure school. Some of his images catapulted me into the surrealist realm of Jodorosky in which the naked is an intrinsic characteristic of the human as well as where virtues and vices are declaimed loudly, in which the unconscious sprang forth and finds representation.

There are many things I observe in Bouguereau's painting, and If you aren't convinced, take a look at the gaze of these characters. They are the mirror of the many souls of the world. With my eyes in 2021 I see in him profound awareness of the realities of life, a sense of intellectual responsibility, a desire to unmask social taboos. He does this in the most simple and "formal" ways, with the language of his day without pretense or snobbery and without presumption or judgment, and above all with no violence, that at this moment in the text and 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/