Notes

William Adolphe Bouguereau Secrets
For a while, up until a few days ago I was unsure of the name of William-Adolphe-Bouguereau and, actually, I struggle to pronounce 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 dating of his work, I immediately imagined a boring artist and a unprofessional French academic or one of the artists who paint lavish portraits of nobles and hunting events. A painting from another century, or, more simply, old and dated.

But I was too quick to judge I slipped up.

The lesson I learned quickly and it took me no time to fall in love with the work of Bouguereau discovered on Open Art Images.

Before I tell you about the beauty of this I will share the lesson I learned which is also what inspires the desire for me to blog about art, without being an art scholar Art should be viewed and experienced through the its emotions on our bodies. The body's senses and the intuition are the best way to determine if an artist has able to connect with our souls. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau and, if I didn't, it would have been similar, as his paintings captivated me, touched the most ancestral archetypes in my life and changed everything I thought I knew about academic art.

It is the way art works by sending us unconscious information that takes us back to worlds that were once parallel as well as allowing us to enter for a short time into the mind of a stranger who has entered our world, and without knowing us. We and he, people distant in time and space together in the same room for a moment. Our worlds meet and merge in the territory made by a piece of art.

Bouguereau is the one who was abused by modernists
My error, however, was committed by many other people before me, by those who, as they stepped into the modern age and after a long and recognized career, decided that Bouguereau was not adequate, that he was not modern enough and ready for the future or "cool" enough and, overnight, downgraded him to an academic artist, a member of the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies a masterful technique but often empty and false until it is bad taste) without any genius.


Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
No error was greater. It is enough to look to the painting of Pieta to grasp the meaning, and to experience an emotion that reaches to the bowels. Bouguereau's Pieta carries a universal message that is universal in the sense that Christ represents the pain of this world. Madonna is a dark and mysterious woman who is the bearer of truth, of Justice and conscience simultaneously She hurls in our faces all the truths, uncomfortable and concealed, about the ugly that we all share. The dark and black Mary is enveloped and in prison by guilt, as shown by those good-natured characters, with a dramatic appearance, who surround the dead corpse of Christ. She, dignified and angry, truly desperate, appears to be an escaped gypsy who holds her son's body in her arms under the rubble of the bombings; it is an image of the war photographer, however we can see it on the canvas of an academic of the 19th century, who without much aplomb is smacking us on the face.

Pieta Pieta is nothing more than The second part (the last and most funereal), of a story about a woman, Mary but it could be a different one. The story starts with the illustration The Madonna of the Roses and where Mary remains a young girl and a young mother. She is with a round face and white hair. She does not look us in our eye, instead she looks upwards, to the sky, like someone asking for support by God or the universe, aware of the daunting task she is about to begin. This task is carried by her arms a little Jesus who, through his eyes (he will, because he looks us in the eye) we see the importance of fate. She surrounds him in a maternal pose, one of those practical, functional poses, not emotional. The two of them, sitting in front of us, demand understanding. Then, in Pieta this embrace, it becomes an embrace for a mom who can't bear the weight of her son's death as her life is slipping away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau, who lost three children and his wife. In the painting, as Bouguereau screams in sadness, 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 an absolute certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed-out skin, look the culprits in the face and the faith of humanity is dissolved into the conviction that evil exists and that we are responsible for it.

Bouguereau is the most intense of the Academy
As I mentioned the biggest error made by modernists was to underestimate the expressive power of the paintings of Bouguereau. Sure, everything in his style is academic, from the flawless technicalities which he draws the naked body as well as the mythological and religious themes drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. But Bouguereau isn't just that, and it's enough to linger on the faces of certain characters in his paintings in which all the human intensity that he is able to see and transport on canvas is evident. His peers understood this and made Bouguereau one of the most famous artists in the 1800s. However, at the dawn of the century of 1900, his work was banned by the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being doing enough, and maybe they didn't realize that, beneath the technical structure of his artworks, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain, and even seduction.

His work is the ideal example of the bourgeoisie: beautiful forms that hide disturbing secrets, darkness and desires he no longer wants to suppress. The nude is one of the means he uses to return us to our natural instinct and desire to seduce us, and their brightness makes us enter a dream, as well as in the setting of a movie, where the actors are well illuminated and entice us with their. The simplest gestures become sublime (like taking off a sock, for instance) and bodies stack up and pile up, touch and seek one another, it's all a game of foreplay, and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker poised between the bourgeois education system that is looked (and is looked) at and the need to speak to the human need for material. Both exist and it's the person who is watching that decides to see one rather than the other.

It was another artist, equally expressive, sensual, and dreamlike as Bouguereau who, during the 1950s and 1960s, saved him from the ashes and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois formula, knew the secrets contained in the unconscious of humans and the fact that you don't need to choose between content and form but you could fool your spectators with surrealist illusions.

Bouguereau The one who is aware of the proper dosages
Bouguereau's trick is in the right balance between sacred and profane, pure and sensuality, malice and innocence. If you think that you're looking at the standard shepherds, the typical Venus and angels, Bouguereau surpasses all stereotypes and every commonplace in art. A girl defends herself from Eros and that irritable putto represents the cravings and desires that aren't hers to pursue; a shepherdess has the expression of an old woman, a bearer of popular and rural wisdom and of those who have learned the way of life through experience and suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal, but rather makes absolutely visible, with just one eye, the desire she feels towards the Satyr. The gay passion is carefully placed in Dante's underworld. There are william adolphe bouguereau overwhelmed with the responsibility of taking charge of their children in an environment that doesn't recognize them, and where they are considered just functional individuals. The power of the expressions that his characters send us back and those that they exchange with one another is enormous. They look like photographs, film scenes and gracefully share real-life tales. Realism is packed into mythical and dreamlike scenes, here is the world in all its complexity.

Bouguereau the artist who paints with human archetypes
It seems to me that Bouguereau is very knowledgeable about archetypes of humans as well as social patterns and many identities of the person. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that he was a member of some obscure school. Certain of his pictures swept me into the surrealist realm of Jodorosky in which the naked is an intrinsic human characteristic as well as where virtues and vices are exclaimed with a loud voice, in which the unconscious sprang forth and finds a representation.


These are just a few of the things I see in his painting. And in case you doubt my assertions, look into his eyes, the reflection of the multitude of souls in the world. With my eyes of the year 2021, I see in him a deep awareness of the facts of life, a sense of intellectual responsibility as well as a desire to dispel social taboos. He does all this in the simplest and most "formal" ways, with the language of his time, without pretension or snobbishness and without presumption or judgment, and above all without violence, so that, at this point in the text as well as in human history, it's the modernists who seem antiquated to me.


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