Notes

Apply Any Of these 5 Secret Strategies To enhance William Adolphe Bouguereau
Until a few days ago I was unsure of who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was , and in actual fact, I have trouble articulating his name properly.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust, reading some information online. With the name's high-pitched sound and the date of his works, I immediately thought of some boring painter, some serviceable French academic among those who paint lavish portraits of nobles and hunter parties. Somewhere else in the past century, which is, in a nutshell older and out of date.

However, judging too fast I slipped up.


It was a quick lesson, and it took me no time to be captivated by the art of Bouguereau discovered on Open Art Images.

Before I talk about the beauty of this I will also share the fateful lesson learned, that is what motivates my desire to talk about art, without being an art scholar the art must be viewed and experienced by the emotions it produces on our bodies. The senses and instincts are the best guide to understand If an artist has able to connect with us. I barely knew Bouguereau's name, and if I hadn't then it would be similar, as his paintings captivated me and touched the oldest archetypes in my life and challenged the things I thought I knew about academic art.

That's what art does by sending us information that is unconscious and transports us to worlds that were once parallel as well as allowing us to enter for a moment into the head of a stranger and is able to enter our world, and without knowing us. We and him, two people who are separated in space and time together in the same room for a brief moment. Our worlds meet and merge into the world that is created by a work art.

Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My error, however, was made by many other people before me, by those who, in the midst of modernism and following a long and recognized career, decided that Bouguereau wasn't good enough, that he was not modern enough or prepared for the future and was not "cool" enough and, in a matter of minutes, relegated him to a simple 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) and devoid of any creativity.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
There was no greater error. It's enough to look through Bouguereau's Pieta to grasp the meaning, and to experience the sensation that goes into the internal organs. The Bouguereau's Pieta is a universal symbol that is universal in the sense that Christ is the symbol of the suffering of the world and the Madonna is a dark and esoteric woman who is the bearer of reality and of Justice and conscience at the same time and throws into our faces the facts, both uncomfortable and obscure, about the ugly that is ours. The dark and black Mary is surrounded and almost in prison by guilt, as shown by the jolly characters with a dramatic look that have surrounded the dead Christ's body. 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 amid the debris of bombings. It's an image from the war photographer, however, we see it on the canvas of an academic of the 19th century, who without too many pleasantries and smacks us in the face.

The Pieta is just The second part (the one that is fun and the final) of a tale about a woman, Mary however, it could be a different one. This story begins with the drawing The Madonna of the Roses, where Mary remains a little girl, a young mother, round and white. https://blog.openartimages.com/2021/10/11/william-adolphe-bouguereau-who/ does not look us in our eye, but instead looks up, toward the sky, as if looking for help in the direction of God or fate, aware of the difficult task she has just begun. That task is gathered by her arms a little Jesus, from whose gaze (he does, he looks at us with his eyes) we sense the important destiny. She surrounds him in a maternity pose one that is functional rather than emotional. The two men, standing in front of us, seek understanding. In the Pieta this embrace, it becomes a handhold for a mom who cannot take the burden of her son's murder and life slips away. This feeling was very familiar to Bouguereau, who had lost three of his children along with his beloved wife. In the painting, as Bouguereau screams in dismay, Mary declares her defeat or, more accurately, the defeat of the world. Her prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by her awareness of her mission, break into an absolute certainty. Her dark eyes, her hollowed-out skin, stare at the perpetrators with a glare and the faith of humanity is dissolved into the conviction that evil exists and that we are responsible for it.

Bouguereau, the intense one of the Academy
As I said the biggest mistake made by the modernists was to undervalue the expressive potential of the painting by Bouguereau. Certain all of his work is academic: from the flawless technicalities which he creates naked body to the themes of mythology and religion that are derived from Neoclassicism, from the 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 certain people in his paintings and the full human emotion he's capable of capturing and transferring on canvas is evident. His contemporaries understood this and made Bouguereau one of the most famous artists of the 1800s. But then, with the beginning of the century of 1900, it was the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being doing enough, and maybe they were unaware that, beneath the technical structure of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain and even seduction.

His work is the ideal model of the bourgeoisie. stunning forms that conceal disturbing hidden secrets, darkness and desires the artist is no longer able to suppress. The naked is one of the methods he employs to reconnect us to our natural instinct that the bodies are trying to seduce us, and their brightness makes us believe in a fantasy, as well as in the setting of a movie, where the actors are brightly illuminated and entice us with their. Simple gestures are transformed into something extraordinary (like taking off a sock, for instance) as bodies stack up and pile up, they touch and search each other, it's all an act of foreplay and Bouguereau is an artist who walks a tightrope between the bourgeois education system that is looked (and is at and is looked) at, and the desire to communicate human desires in a physical way. Both are present, and it is perhaps the viewer who decides whether to see one rather than the other.

It was another artist, equally beautiful, sensual, like Bouguereau who, in the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois formula was aware of the hidden secrets in the human unconscious and also that you don't need to choose between form and content, but you can fool the spectators with surrealist illusions.

Bouguereau The one who knows the right dosages
Bouguereau's secret is in the proper balance of holy and vulgar, purity and sensuality, malice as well as innocence. Even if you believe you're looking at the standard shepherds, Venus and angels, Bouguereau overcomes every stereotype and every commonplace in art. A girl defends herself from Eros the gruesome putto represents the cravings, the desires that she isn't willing to approach; a shepherdess has the expression of an old woman, a bearer of popular and rural wisdom, of those who know the way of life through experience and suffering. The Nymph who doesn't hide, but rather makes absolutely evident, with a single glance, the attraction she feels towards a Satyr. The gay passion is carefully placed in Dante's underworld. There are many young mothers feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility of taking care of their children in an unfriendly world accept them, where they are considered just functional individuals. The power of the looks that his characters give us back and those that they exchange with one another is enormous. They resemble photographs, film scenes, and politely reveal real-life stories. Realism is packed into mythical and dreamlike images This are the real world, in all its complexity.

Bouguereau is the artist who paints with human archetypes
My impression is that Bouguereau is very knowledgeable about archetypes of humans, social patterns, and multiple identities of the being. I wouldn't be too surprised should it turn out that he is a member of an obscure school. A few of his photographs swept me to the surrealist universe of Jodorosky in which the naked is an intrinsic human characteristic as well as where virtues and vices are proclaimed loudly, and where all the unconscious springs out and is portrayed.

These are just a few of the things I see in his painting. And If you aren't convinced, observe the gaze of these characters, the reflection of the multitude of souls in the world. With my eyes in 2021 I see in him great awareness of the truths of life, a sense of intellectual responsibility, a desire to unmask social taboos. He does this in the simplest and most "formal" ways, with the language of his day, without pretension or snobbishness and without presumption or judgment and, most importantly, with no violence, that at this point in the text and in human history, it is the modernists that seem outdated to me.



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