Notes

The Secret For William Adolphe Bouguereau Revealed in Six Simple Steps
Until a few days ago I was unsure of the name of William-Adolphe-Bouguereau and, in actual fact, I have trouble articulating his name correctly.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust after reading some of the information available on the internet. From the high-sounding name and the date of his work, I immediately thought of some boring painter and a servile French academic, one of those who paint lavish portraits of nobles and hunting events. Something from the other century, which is, in a nutshell the old and outdated.

However, judging too fast, I fell into error.

I quickly learned my lesson, and it didn't take me long to fall in love with the works of Bouguereau that I found through Open Art Images.

Before I share with you the details of such beauty, however I will share the crucial lesson I have learned, that is what inspires my desire to talk about art, without being an academic in the field of art: art should be looked at and felt through the impact of its emotions on our bodies. The senses and 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 didn't then it would be similar, as his works bewitched me, touched the most ancestral archetypes of my soul and challenged all I believed I knew about art in academia.

It is the way art works by sending us information that is unconscious, it takes us back to parallel and past worlds as well as allowing us to enter for a short time into the mind of someone else and is able to enter our world without even knowing who we are. We and he, people distant in time and space together in the same space for a short time. Our worlds intersect and merge into the world made by a piece of art.

Bouguereau The one who is snubbed by modernists
My error, however, was committed by many other people before me in the same way, by those who at the gates of modernism and following a long and recognized career, decided that Bouguereau was not good enough and that he wasn't modern enough and modern enough or "cool" enough and, immediately, degraded his status to that of a basic academic artist, a member of those who were Art Pompier (an expression that indicates the mastery of a technique, however it is often empty and false to the point of bad taste), devoid of any creativity.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.

There was no greater error. It is enough to look through Bouguereau's Pieta to comprehend the meaning, and to experience a feeling that goes straight to the internal organs. Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message that is universal in the sense that Christ symbolizes the suffering of the world . The Madonna, a black and esoteric woman is the symbol of truth and of Justice and conscience simultaneously and throws into our faces the facts, both uncomfortable and obscure, about the ugly that belongs to us. This dark, black Mary is in a crowded and nearly in prison by guilt, as shown by these lovable characters with a slightly too dramatic appearance, who surround the dead corpse of Christ. She, dignified and angry, truly desperate, looks like an escaped gypsy who holds her deceased son in her arms beneath the debris of bombings. It's an image of 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.

The Pieta is nothing more than an additional chapter (the last and most funereal), of a story about a woman, Mary however, it could also be a different one. This tale begins with the illustration The Madonna of the Roses and where Mary is still a young girl and a young mother. She is white and round-faced. She doesn't look us in the eye, but looks upwards, towards the sky, as if seeking help by God or fate, mindful of the difficult task she is about to begin. The task is held in her arms, a little Jesus and from his gaze (he is, and he looks at us with his eyes) we can sense the significance of future. She encircles him in a maternity pose one that is functional rather than emotional. The two men, standing in front of us, ask for understanding. When they are in the Pieta this embrace, it becomes the hand for a mom who is unable to take the burden of her murdered son and life slips away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau, who had lost three children along with his beloved wife. In the painting he expresses all his sadness, Mary declares her defeat and, in a way, the defeat of the world. Prayers to heaven, her doubts dictated by her awareness of her mission, break into a certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed out skin, look at the perpetrators with a glare and the faith of humanity slips into the certainty that evil is present and we are the ones responsible.

Bouguereau, the intense one of the Academy
As I mentioned, the serious mistake made by the modernists was to undervalue the expressive potential of the paintings of Bouguereau. Sure all of his work is academic: from the perfect technicalities with which he draws the naked bodies as well as the mythological and religious themes that are derived from Neoclassicism, from naturalistic backgrounds to romantic and bucolic subjects. However, Bouguereau is not only that, and it's enough to keep looking at the eyes of some of the characters in his paintings and the full human emotion he's capable of capturing and transferring on the canvas is manifested. His peers understood this, and made him an one of the more famous artists in the 1800s. However, at the beginning of the new century his work was banned by the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being bold, but perhaps they had not realized that, beneath the technical structure of his artworks, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain, and even seduction.

His artworks are the perfect example of the bourgeoisie: gorgeous forms that conceal alarming secrets, darkness and desires he no longer wants to repress. william adolphe bouguereau is one of the methods he employs to return us to our instinctual nature and desire to entice us and their brightness can make us enter a dream, however, they also create a setting of a film, where the actors are well illuminated and entice us with their. The simplest gestures become sublime (like taking off a sock, for instance); bodies pile up and stack up, they touch and search one another, it's all a game of foreplay, and Bouguereau is an artist who walks a tightrope between an education of bourgeois that is looked (and is looked) at as well as the need to express material human needs. Both exist but it's the person who is watching that decides to focus on one or the other.

It was another artist who was as expressive, sensual, and dreamlike as Bouguereau who, in the 1950s and 1960s, saved him from the ashes and wrote about his achievements: Salvador Dali. He , too, so enslaved to the bourgeois ideal was aware of the hidden secrets within the human subconscious and the fact that you don't have to make a choice between content and form but you can fool the viewers with surrealist magic tricks.

Bouguereau, the one who knows the right dosages
Bouguereau's trick is in the right balance between sacred and profane, pure and sensuality, malice as well as innocence. Even if you think you're looking at the standard shepherds, the typical Venus and angels Bouguereau overcomes every stereotype or commonplace in art. A girl defends herself from Eros, that annoying putto represents the cravings, the desires that she doesn't really want to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess has the expression of an old woman who is a symbol of rural and popular wisdom, of those who know how to live their lives through practice and some suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal and instead makes evident, with a single intense gaze, the attraction she feels towards a Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned in Dante's underworld. There are a lot of young mothers, overwhelmed by having to take care of their children in an unfriendly world recognize them, and in which they are just functional individuals. The power of the expressions that his characters show us back and the looks they exchange with each other is enormous. They appear like photos, film scenes and gracefully share real-life tales. This is realist art, stuffed into dreamlike and mythical scenes Here are the real world, in its complex simplicity.



Bouguereau the artist who paints using human archetypes
I believe that Bouguereau is quite clear about human archetypes as well as social patterns and various identities of the human being. I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out that he is a member of an esoteric school. Certain of his pictures swept me to the surrealist realm of Jodorosky in which the naked is a fundamental characteristic of the human 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 the painting of Bouguereau, and If you aren't convinced, look into the eyes of his characters, the mirror of the multitude of souls in the world. In my vision of the year 2021, I can see in him a profound awareness of the realities of life, a sense of intellectual responsibility as well as a desire to dispel social taboos. He does all this in the most basic and "formal" ways, with the language of his time without pretense or snobbery with no pretension or judgement, and above all without violence, so that, at this moment in the text and in the history of humanity, it's the modernists who appear outdated to me.



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