Eventually, The key To William Adolphe Bouguereau Is Revealed
Until a few days ago I had no idea who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was and in fact, I still find it difficult to pronounce his name accurately.
My first encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust after reading some of the information available from the web. Based on the soaring name and the dating of his works, I immediately thought of some boring painter or a unprofessional French academic, one of those who paint expensive portraits of nobles and hunting gatherings. Somewhere else in the past century, or, more simply the old and outdated.
But judging too quickly, I fell into error.
I quickly learned my lesson and I didn't need long to become enchanted by the work of Bouguereau discovered through Open Art Images.
Before I talk about these beautiful things I will also share the fateful lesson learned, that is what drives my desire to talk about art, without being an art academic Art should be viewed and experienced through the impact of the emotions it produces upon our body. The body's senses and the intuition are the best way to know if an artist is able to penetrate our souls. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau If I had, it would have been the same, because his work captivated me and touched the oldest archetypes that shaped my soul, and challenged the things I thought I knew about art in academia.
This is what art does by sending us information that is not conscious that takes us back to worlds that were once parallel as well as allowing us to enter for a short time into the head of a stranger, who in turn has entered our world, and without knowing us. We and he, people separated by time and space, are in the same room for a moment. Our worlds intersect and merge in the territory that is created by a work art.
Bouguereau is the one who was abused by modernists
My error was made 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 and that he wasn't contemporary enough and ready for the future, not "cool" enough and, overnight, downgraded his status to that of a basic academic artist, one from the Art Pompier (an expression that suggests a masterful technique but often false and empty to the point of bad taste) without any creativity.
Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
The error is not more significant. It is enough to look at his Pieta to comprehend it, to feel an emotion that reaches to the bowels. The Bouguereau's Pieta is a universal symbol which is that Christ symbolizes the suffering of this world. Madonna as a black and mysterious woman, is the bearer of truth, of Justice and conscience simultaneously She hurls in our faces the truths, uncomfortable and hidden, about the ugliness that we all share. This dark, black Mary is in a crowded and nearly imprisoned by guilt, represented by the jolly characters with a somewhat melodramatic look that have surrounded the dead corpse of Christ. She, dignified and angry, truly desperate, appears to be an escaped gypsy who holds her deceased son in her arms under the wreckage of the bombings. It's an image taken by a war photo reporter, however we can see that image on the walls of an academic of the 19th century who without too many pleasantries and smacks us on the face.
Pieta Pieta is just the second chapter (the last and most funereal) of a tale about a woman named Mary, but it could be a different one. This tale begins with the painting "The Madonna of the Roses in which Mary appears as a young girl, a young mother, round and white. She does not look us in the eye, but looks upwards, towards the sky, as if looking for help from God or destiny, conscious of the difficult task she has just begun. The task is held by her arms a little Jesus and from his gaze (he is, and he stares at us with his eyes) we sense the important destiny. She surrounds him in a maternal pose, one that is functional rather than emotional. The two men, facing us, seek understanding. When they are in the Pieta, that embrace becomes an embrace of a mother who can't bear the weight of her son's murder and life slips away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau, who had lost three children and his wife. In https://blog.openartimages.com/2021/10/11/william-adolphe-bouguereau-who/ , as Bouguereau screams in despair, Mary declares her defeat, or rather she declares the end of the world. Prayers to heaven, her doubts dictated by the awareness of her mission, break into a certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed-out skin, stare at the perpetrators directly in the face and the faith of humanity slips into the certainty that evil is real and we are responsible for it.
Bouguereau, the intense one of the Academy
As I said, the serious mistake made by the modernists was to overlook the expressive potential of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certainly, everything in his style is academic: from the flawless technicalities which he creates naked body, to the mythological and religious themes taken from neoclassicism, from the naturalistic backgrounds to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. But Bouguereau is not just this, and it is enough to be able to focus on the eyes of the people in his paintings, where all the human ferocity that he is in a position to perceive and convey onto the canvas is reflected. His contemporaries understood this and made Bouguereau an one of the more well-known artists in the 1800s. But then, with the advent of the new century, the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not bold, but perhaps they had not realized that beneath the orderly technicality of his artworks, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain, and even seduction.
His artworks are the perfect model of the bourgeoisie. stunning forms that conceal disturbing secrets, darkness and desires the artist is no longer able to repress. The naked is one of the methods he employs to return us to our instinctual nature that the bodies are trying to seduce us and their brightness lets us believe in a fantasy, as well as in the setting of a film, in which the actors are well illuminated and entice us with their. Simple gestures can be enthralling (like removing a sock for instance); bodies pile up and stack together, and they play with the other, it's 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 the human need for material. Both worlds are there but it's the observer who decides to focus on one or the other.
It was another great artist, equally beautiful, sensual, like Bouguereau who, during the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. He too, so attached to the bourgeois ideal knew the 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 is the one who knows the right doses
Bouguereau's trick is in the right dosage between holy and vulgar, purity and sensuality, malice and innocence. If you think that you're seeing the typical shepherds, the usual Venus, and angels, Bouguereau overcomes every stereotype, every commonplace of art. A girl defends herself from Eros, that annoying putto is a symbol of the desire, the desires that she isn't willing to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess has the expression of an old woman, a bearer of the wisdom of the common and rural that has been cultivated by those who have lived how to live their lives through practice and some suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal her feelings, but instead makes clear, with one eye, the desire she feels towards Satyr. Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned in Dante's slums. There are many young mothers, who are overwhelmed by the need to take charge of their children in an unfriendly world accept them, in which they are only functional personalities. The power of the looks that his characters show us back, and the glances they exchange with each other is immense. They appear like photos or film footage and gracefully share real-life stories. Here is realism, packed into mythical and dreamlike images Here are the real world, in all its complexity.
Bouguereau is the artist who paints using human archetypes
It seems to me that Bouguereau is extremely clear about human archetypes as well as social patterns and many identities of the person. I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that he was a member of some esoteric school. A few of his photographs swept me to the surrealist world of Jodorosky where nakedness is an intrinsic human characteristic as well as where virtues and vices are declaimed loudly, where the unconscious pops forth and finds representation.
These are just a few of the things that I can see in Bouguereau's painting, and if you don't believe me look into the gaze of these characters. They are the mirror of the multitude of souls in the world. With my eyes of 2021 I can see in him a great awareness of the truths of life, intellectual responsibility and a desire to break down social taboos. He does all this in the simplest and most "formal" ways, with the language of the day, without pretension or snobbishness and without presumption or judgment, and above all with no violence, that at this point in the text and in human history, it's the modernists who appear outdated to me.