Notes

William Adolphe Bouguereau Secrets Revealed
For a while, up until a few days ago I had no idea who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was and actually, I find it difficult to pronounce his name properly.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with suspicion when I read some information online. From the high-sounding name and the date of his work I instantly imagined a boring artist, some unprofessional French academic or one of the artists who paint lavish portraits of nobles as well as hunting events. Somewhere else in the past century, or, more simply older and out of date.

But I was too quick to judge I slipped up.

I quickly learned my lesson and it didn't take me long to become enchanted by the art of Bouguereau found on Open Art Images.

Before I tell you about these beautiful things I will also share the fateful lesson learned, which is the reason that inspires the desire for me to blog about art, without being an art academic: art should be looked at and felt through the its emotions upon our body. The senses and instincts are the best guide to determine if an artist can get into us. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau, and if I hadn't, it would have been exactly the same. His work captivated me and touched the oldest archetypes in my life and challenged all I believed I knew about art in academia.

That's what art does, it sends us information that is unconscious, it transports us to past and parallel worlds and allows us to step for a short time into the head of a stranger and has managed to enter ours, without knowing us. We and he, individuals distant in time and space together in the same space for a brief moment. Our worlds meet and merge into the world made by a piece of art.

Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My error, however, was made by many others before me in the same way, by those who in the midst of modernism and after a long and well-known career, concluded that Bouguereau was not good enough, that he was not contemporary enough and prepared for the future and was not "cool" enough and, overnight, downgraded him to an academic artist, one from those who were Art Pompier (an expression that suggests an impressive technique, but often false and empty until it is bad taste) and devoid of any talent.


Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
No error was greater. It is enough to look through his Pieta to comprehend it, to feel a feeling that goes straight into the bowels. The Bouguereau's Pieta is a universal symbol that is universal in the sense that Christ represents the pain of the world and the Madonna, a black and mysterious woman who is the bearer of truth and of Justice and conscience, all at once and throws into our faces all the facts, both uncomfortable and hidden, about the ugliness that is ours. This dark, black Mary is in a crowded and nearly trapped by guilt, depicted by those good-natured characters, with a dramatic look which have surrounded the dead corpse of Christ. The lady, who is regal and angry, truly desperate, appears to be an escaped gypsy who holds her son's body in her arms under the debris of bombings. It is an image of an official war photographer however, we see this on the wall of an academic of the 19th century who with no pleasantries and smacks us in the face.


The Pieta is nothing more than an additional chapter (the one that is fun and the final) of a story about a woman, Mary but it could be a different one. This story begins with the illustration "The Madonna of the Roses in which Mary remains a girl and a mother of a child, with a round face and white hair. She does not look us in our eye, instead she looks up, toward the sky, as if seeking help from God or destiny, aware of the difficult task she has just begun. This task is carried within her arms. and she holds a small Jesus and from his gaze (he does, he stares us in the eye) we see the importance of fate. She encircles him in a maternal pose, one of those practical, functional rather than emotional. The two, sitting in front of us, seek acceptance. In the Pieta the embrace transforms into the hand that of the mother who is unable to carry the burden of her murdered son as her life is slipping away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau who had lost three children along with his beloved wife. In the painting he expresses all his dismay, Mary declares her defeat, or rather her defeat to the world. Her prayers to heaven, her doubts dictated by her realization of her mission, shatter into an absolute certainty. Her black eyes, her hollowed-out skin, stare at the perpetrators directly in the face and the faith of humanity is dissolved into the conviction that evil is present and we are accountable for it.

Bouguereau The intense one of the Academy

As I said the biggest error made by modernists was to overlook the expressive potential of the painting by Bouguereau. Sure, everything in his style is academic, from the perfect technicalities with which he draws the naked bodies, to the religious and mythological themes drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. However, Bouguereau is not only this, and it is enough to linger on the eyes of certain characters in his artworks in which all the human intensity that he is in a position to perceive and convey on the canvas is manifested. His contemporaries understood this, and made him one of the most famous artists of the 1800s. But then, with the dawn of the new century, his work was banned by the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being daring, but perhaps they had not realized that, beneath the technical structure of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain and even seduction.

His artworks are the perfect illustration of the bourgeoisie: stunning forms that conceal disturbing dark secrets, dark and desires that he no longer wants to keep from being repressed. The naked is one of his methods to return us to our primal instincts and desire to entice us and their brightness can make us feel like we're in a dream as well as in the setting of a film, where the actors are brightly lit and bewitch us. Simple gestures are transformed into something extraordinary (like taking off a sock, for instance) and bodies pile up and stack up, they touch and search the other, it's an elaborate game of foreplay and Bouguereau is an artist who walks a tightrope between bourgeois education that looks (and is observed) at, and the need to express material human needs. Both worlds are there but it's the viewer who decides whether to focus on one or the other.

It was another great artist, as expressive, sensual, like Bouguereau, who, around the 1950s and 1960s, saved him from the ashes and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. william adolphe bouguereau , like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois model, knew the secrets contained in the human unconscious and that you don't necessarily need to choose between content and form, but you can fool the spectators with surrealist illusions.

Bouguereau is the one who is aware of the proper dosages
Bouguereau's trick is in the right balance between sacred and profane, purity and sensuality, malice as well as innocence. If you think that you're seeing the typical shepherds, Venus and angels Bouguereau surpasses all stereotypes or commonplace in art. A woman defends herself from Eros the gruesome putto symbolizes the desires, the desires that she doesn't really want to pursue; a shepherdess is an old woman who is a symbol of rural and popular wisdom and of those who have learned life through practice and even suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal and instead makes evident, with a single intense gaze, the attraction she feels for a Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned in Dante's slums. There are a lot of young mothers who are overwhelmed by having to take care of their children in an unfriendly world accept them, in which they are viewed as to be only functional characters. The impact of the glances that his characters give us back and the looks they exchange with one another is awe-inspiring. They appear like photos or film footage, and politely reveal real-life tales. Realism is packed into mythical and dreamlike images Here are the real world, in all its complex simplicity.

Bouguereau is 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 multiple identities of the being. I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that he was a member of some esoteric school. Certain of his pictures swept me right into the surrealist realm of Jodorosky in which the naked is a characteristic of the human, where vices and virtues are proclaimed loudly, and where the unconscious pops forth and finds representation.

These are the many things I observe in Bouguereau's painting, and in case you doubt my assertions, look into his eyes. They are the mirror of the souls of the world. Through my eyes of 2021 I can see in him a deep awareness of the facts of existence, intellectual accountability 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 day, without pretension or snobbishness with no pretension or judgement and most importantly, without violence, so much so that, at this moment in the text and in human history, it's the modernists who seem antiquated to me.



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