The Secret For William Adolphe Bouguereau Revealed in Four Simple Steps
Posted: November 7, 2021
Until a few days ago I didn't know who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was and in actual fact, I have trouble articulating his name accurately.
My first encounter with Bourgereau started with a sense of skepticism when I read some information from the web. Based on the soaring name and the dating of his work, I immediately thought of a boring painter or a servile French academic or one of the artists who paint lavish portraits of nobles and hunter parties. A painting from another century, which is, in a nutshell the old and outdated.
However, judging too fast I made a mistake.
The lesson I learned quickly and it took me no time to fall in love with the art of Bouguereau found in Open Art Images.
Before I tell you about the beauty of this I will share the crucial lesson I have learned, which is the reason that drives the desire for me to blog about art, without being an art academic: art should be observed and felt through the impact of emotions it creates in our bodies. The senses and instincts are the best guides to determine if an artist has able to connect with us. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau, and if I hadn't then it would be similar, as his paintings captivated me and touched the oldest archetypes of my soul and displaced all I believed I knew about art in academia.
This is what art does and it is able to send us information that is unconscious and takes us back to parallel and past worlds and allows us to step for a short time into the head of a stranger and has managed to enter our world, and without knowing us. We and him, two people distant in time and space, are in the same room for a brief moment. Our worlds intersect and merge in the territory that is created by a work art.
Bouguereau The one who is snubbed by modernists My error was made by a lot of other people before me, by those who, in the midst of modernism and following a long, acknowledged career, decided that Bouguereau was not adequate to be considered modern enough and ready for the future, not "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 an impressive technique, but often empty and false to the point of having bad taste) without any genius.
Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta. No error was greater. It's enough to look through his Pieta to comprehend the meaning, and to experience an emotion that reaches into the internal organs. In Bouguereau's Pieta is a universal symbol that is universal in the sense that Christ symbolizes the suffering of the world and the Madonna as a black and mysterious woman who is the bearer of reality as well as Justice and conscience, all at once She hurls in our faces the truths, painful and hidden, about the ugliness that belongs to us. This dark, black Mary is surrounded and almost trapped by guilt, depicted by the jolly characters with a somewhat dramatic appearance which have surrounded the dead Christ's body. Christ. The woman, smug and angry, truly desperate, looks like an escaped gypsy who holds her deceased son in her arms amid the wreckage of the bombings. It's an image taken by an official war photographer however, we see it on the canvas of an academic from the 19th century who, with no pleasantries, slaps us on the face.
Pieta Pieta is nothing more than the second chapter (the one that is fun and the final) of a tale about a woman named Mary however, it could be a different one. This story begins with the illustration The Madonna of the Roses in which Mary remains a young girl and a young mother. She is round and white. She doesn't look us in the eye, instead she looks upwards, to the sky, like someone seeking help in the direction of God or destiny, aware of the arduous task she is about to begin. This task is carried in her arms, a tiny Jesus who, through his eyes (he does, he stares at us with his eyes) we can sense the significance of fate. She surrounds him in a motherly pose, one that is functional poses, not emotional. The two of them, facing us, seek compassion. When they are in the Pieta the embrace transforms into an embrace that of the mother who is unable to carry the burden of her son's death and life slips away. This was a familiar feeling to Bouguereau, who had lost three children as well as his spouse. In the painting, while Bouguereau expresses his complete despair, Mary declares her defeat or, more accurately, the defeat of the world. Prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by her awareness of her mission, break into an absolute certainty. Her black eyes, her hollowed-out skin, stare at the perpetrators directly in the face and hope for humanity is dissolved into the conviction that evil exists and that we are the ones responsible.
Bouguereau, the intense one of the Academy Like I said the major mistake made by the modernists was to overlook the expressive capacity of the painting by Bouguereau. Sure, everything in his style is academic: From the precise technicalities which he paints naked bodies as well as the themes of mythology and religion taken from neoclassicism, from naturalistic backgrounds to romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau is not just that, and it's enough to linger on the eyes of certain characters in his artworks and the full human ferocity that he is in a position to perceive and convey on canvas is evident. His contemporaries recognized this and made him one of the most famous artists in the 1800s. However, at the advent of the new century it was the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not doing enough, and perhaps they had not realized that behind the technical order of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, pain, malice, and even seduction.
His work is the ideal illustration of the bourgeoisie: beautiful forms that hide disturbing dark secrets, dark and desires that are no longer his desire to suppress. The naked is one of the methods he employs to bring us back to our natural instinct: the bodies want to seduce us and their brightness lets us enter a dream, but also in the set of a film, in which the actors are well illuminated and entice us with their. The simplest gestures become sublime (like removing a sock for example) and bodies stack up and pile together, and they play with each other, it's all an elaborate game of foreplay and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker who is balancing bourgeois education that looks (and is looked) at, and the need to speak to the human need for material. Both exist and it's the viewer who decides whether to see one rather than the other.
It was another artist, equally beautiful, sensual, like Bouguereau who, during the 1950s was able to save him from his obscurity and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois model knew the secrets in the unconscious of humans and that you don't necessarily need to choose between form and content, however, you could fool the audience with magical surrealist tricks.
Bouguereau The one who is aware of the proper dosages Bouguereau's trick is in the proper balance of sacred and profane, purity and sensuality, malice as well as innocence. Even if you believe you're seeing the typical shepherds, Venus, and angels, Bouguereau transcends all stereotypes or commonplace in art. A girl defends herself from Eros, that annoying putto symbolizes the desires, the desires that she doesn't really want to approach; a shepherdess is an old woman who is a symbol of popular and rural wisdom that has been cultivated by those who have lived how to live their lives through practice and a little suffering. The Nymph who doesn't hide her feelings, but instead makes visible, with just one glance, the attraction she feels for Satyr. Satyr. The gay passion is carefully placed in Dante's slums. There are so 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 viewed as only functional personalities. The impact of the glances that his characters give us back and the looks they exchange with one another is immense. They look like photographs or film footage and gracefully share the real life stories. This is realist art, stuffed into mythical and dreamlike scenes, here can be the universe in all its complex simplicity.
Bouguereau is the artist who paints using human archetypes I believe that Bouguereau is very clear about human archetypes as well as social patterns and various identities of the human being. I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out that he was a member of some esoteric school. william adolphe bouguereau of his pictures swept me into the surrealist universe of Jodorosky where nakedness is a characteristic of the human as well as where virtues and vices are proclaimed loudly, and where all the unconscious springs forth and finds representation.
There are many things that I can see in the painting of Bouguereau, and if you don't believe me take a look at his eyes. They are the mirror of the souls of the world. In my vision of 2021 I see in him a profound awareness of the realities of life, a sense of 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 pretense or snobbery with no pretension or judgement and most importantly, with no violence, so that, at this point in the text and in human history, it is the modernists who seem antiquated to me.