The Insider Secret on William Adolphe Bouguereau Uncovered
Until a few days ago I didn't know who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was and in fact, I still have trouble articulating his name properly.
My encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust after reading some of the information available on the internet. With the name's high-pitched sound and the date of his works I instantly thought of a boring painter, some unprofessional French academic or one of the artists who painted expensive portraits of nobles as well as hunting parties. A painting from another century, or, more simply older and out of date.
However, judging too fast I made a mistake.
I quickly learned my lesson and it didn't take me long to fall in love with the art of Bouguereau found on Open Art Images.
Before I share with you the details of the beauty of this I will share the fateful lesson learned, which is also what 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 in our bodies. The senses and instincts are the best guides to determine if an artist is able to connect with us. I barely knew Bouguereau's name If I had I would have felt the same, because his paintings captivated me, touched the most ancestral archetypes in my life and changed everything I thought I knew about art in academia.
It is the way art works by sending us information that is unconscious that transports us to parallel and past worlds as well as allowing us to enter for a brief moment in the mind of a stranger who has entered our world without even knowing who we are. We and he, people who are separated in space and time, are in the same room for a moment. Our worlds intersect and merge within the space that is created by a work art.
Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My error was made by a lot of others before me in the same way, by those who as they stepped into the modern age and following a long, recognized career, decided that Bouguereau wasn't good enough and that he wasn't modern enough and modern enough and was not "cool" enough and, in a matter of minutes, relegated him to an academic artist, one among those who were Art Pompier (an expression that suggests an impressive technique, but often empty and false to the point of having bad taste), devoid of any creativity.
Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
There was no greater error. It's enough to glance to his Pieta to understand it, to feel a feeling that goes straight to the bowels. The Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message which is that Christ is the symbol of the suffering of the world . The Madonna, a black and esoteric woman, is the bearer of the truth, of Justice and conscience at the same time; she throws in our faces all the truths, painful and hidden, about the ugliness that belongs to us. This dark, black Mary is surrounded and almost imprisoned by guilt, represented by these lovable characters with a slightly too melodramatic look that are surrounded by the Christ's body. Christ. The woman, smug and angry, really desperate, looks like someone who is a refugee, a gypsy who holds her dead son in her arms beneath the debris of bombings. It is an image of an official war photographer but we find this on the wall of an academic of the 19th century, who with no pleasantries is smacking us on the face.
Pieta Pieta is just The second part (the last and most funereal) of a tale about a woman named Mary, but it could also be another one. This tale begins with the paintingThe Madonna of the Roses in which Mary appears as a girl and a young mother. She is round and white. She does not look us in our eye, instead she looks upwards, to the sky, like someone seeking help by God or destiny, aware of the difficult task she has just begun. That task is gathered in her arms, and she holds a small Jesus and from his gaze (he does, he gazes at us with his eyes) we see the importance of destiny. She encircles him in a maternal pose, one that is functional, rather than emotional. The two men, sitting in front of us, seek acceptance. In the Pieta the embrace transforms into the hand that of the mother who cannot bear the weight of her son's death and life slips away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau who had lost three of his children as well as his spouse. In the painting Bouguereau screams in despair, Mary declares her defeat, or rather, the defeat of the world. Prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by the awareness of her mission, shatter into the certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed-out skin, look at the perpetrators directly in the face, while the hope of humanity sank into the knowledge that evil is present and we are the ones responsible.
Bouguereau, the intense one of the Academy
As I said the major error made by modernists was to overlook the expressive potential of the painting by Bouguereau. Certain, everything in his style is academic, from the flawless technicalities which he paints naked bodies to the religious and mythological themes drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds to the romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau is not only that, and it's enough to be able to focus on the eyes of certain characters in his artworks, where all the human ferocity that he is able to see and transport onto the canvas is reflected. His contemporaries recognized this, and made him one of the most well-known artists in the 1800s. However, at the advent of the new century his work was banned by the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being bold, but maybe they were unaware that beneath the orderly technicality of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, pain, malice, and seduction.
His work is the ideal model of the bourgeoisie. beautiful forms that hide disturbing dark secrets, dark and desires that he no longer wants to keep from being repressed. The naked is among the methods he employs to reconnect us to our primal instincts: the bodies want to entice us and their brightness lets us believe in a fantasy, however, they also create a setting of a film, in which the actors are brightly 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 act of foreplay and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker poised between an education of bourgeois that is looked (and is looked) at as well as the need to speak to material human needs. Both are present, and it is perhaps the viewer who decides whether to see one rather than the other.
https://blog.openartimages.com/2021/10/11/william-adolphe-bouguereau-who/was another great artist, as expressive, sensual, with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau who, in the 1950s was able to save him from his obscurity and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. He , too, so enslaved to the bourgeois formula knew the secrets in the human unconscious and also that you don't have to decide between content and form, but you could fool your viewers with surrealist magic tricks.
Bouguereau The person who can determine the appropriate doses
Bouguereau's secret is in the proper balance of holy and vulgar, purity and sensuality, malice and innocence. Even if you believe you're seeing the typical shepherds, the usual Venus and angels, Bouguereau surpasses all stereotypes or commonplace in art. A woman defends herself from Eros, that annoying putto symbolizes the desires of her heart, desires aren't hers to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman, a bearer of the wisdom of the common and rural and of those who have learned the way of life through experience and a little suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal and instead makes visible, with just one eye, the desire she feels for a Satyr. The sexual passion that is carefully placed within Dante's underworld. There are a lot of young mothers who are who are overwhelmed by the need to take charge of their children in a world that does not recognize them, and in which they are to be only functional characters. The power of the expressions that his characters give us back and those that they exchange with each other is immense. They appear like photos, film scenes and gracefully tell real-life stories. Realism is packed into mythical and dreamlike images Here can be the universe in all its complexity.
Bouguereau the artist who paints with human archetypes
I believe that Bouguereau is very clear about human archetypes, social patterns, and various identities of the human being. I wouldn't be too surprised should it turn out that he belongs to some obscure school. A few of his photographs 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 proclaimed loudly, and in which the unconscious sprang out and is portrayed.
These are the many things that I can see in Bouguereau's painting, and If you aren't convinced, look into the eyes of his characters, the mirror of the souls of the world. In my vision of the year 2021, I can see in him a deep awareness of the facts of existence, intellectual accountability, a desire to unmask social taboos. He does all this in the most basic and "formal" ways, with the language of the day without pretense or snobbery and without presumption or judgment and most importantly, without violence, so that, at this point in both the text and human history, it's the modernists who appear outdated to me.
My encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust after reading some of the information available on the internet. With the name's high-pitched sound and the date of his works I instantly thought of a boring painter, some unprofessional French academic or one of the artists who painted expensive portraits of nobles as well as hunting parties. A painting from another century, or, more simply older and out of date.
However, judging too fast I made a mistake.
I quickly learned my lesson and it didn't take me long to fall in love with the art of Bouguereau found on Open Art Images.
Before I share with you the details of the beauty of this I will share the fateful lesson learned, which is also what 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 in our bodies. The senses and instincts are the best guides to determine if an artist is able to connect with us. I barely knew Bouguereau's name If I had I would have felt the same, because his paintings captivated me, touched the most ancestral archetypes in my life and changed everything I thought I knew about art in academia.
It is the way art works by sending us information that is unconscious that transports us to parallel and past worlds as well as allowing us to enter for a brief moment in the mind of a stranger who has entered our world without even knowing who we are. We and he, people who are separated in space and time, are in the same room for a moment. Our worlds intersect and merge within the space that is created by a work art.
Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My error was made by a lot of others before me in the same way, by those who as they stepped into the modern age and following a long, recognized career, decided that Bouguereau wasn't good enough and that he wasn't modern enough and modern enough and was not "cool" enough and, in a matter of minutes, relegated him to an academic artist, one among those who were Art Pompier (an expression that suggests an impressive technique, but often empty and false to the point of having bad taste), devoid of any creativity.
Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
There was no greater error. It's enough to glance to his Pieta to understand it, to feel a feeling that goes straight to the bowels. The Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message which is that Christ is the symbol of the suffering of the world . The Madonna, a black and esoteric woman, is the bearer of the truth, of Justice and conscience at the same time; she throws in our faces all the truths, painful and hidden, about the ugliness that belongs to us. This dark, black Mary is surrounded and almost imprisoned by guilt, represented by these lovable characters with a slightly too melodramatic look that are surrounded by the Christ's body. Christ. The woman, smug and angry, really desperate, looks like someone who is a refugee, a gypsy who holds her dead son in her arms beneath the debris of bombings. It is an image of an official war photographer but we find this on the wall of an academic of the 19th century, who with no pleasantries is smacking us on the face.
Pieta Pieta is just The second part (the last and most funereal) of a tale about a woman named Mary, but it could also be another one. This tale begins with the paintingThe Madonna of the Roses in which Mary appears as a girl and a young mother. She is round and white. She does not look us in our eye, instead she looks upwards, to the sky, like someone seeking help by God or destiny, aware of the difficult task she has just begun. That task is gathered in her arms, and she holds a small Jesus and from his gaze (he does, he gazes at us with his eyes) we see the importance of destiny. She encircles him in a maternal pose, one that is functional, rather than emotional. The two men, sitting in front of us, seek acceptance. In the Pieta the embrace transforms into the hand that of the mother who cannot bear the weight of her son's death and life slips away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau who had lost three of his children as well as his spouse. In the painting Bouguereau screams in despair, Mary declares her defeat, or rather, the defeat of the world. Prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by the awareness of her mission, shatter into the certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed-out skin, look at the perpetrators directly in the face, while the hope of humanity sank into the knowledge that evil is present and we are the ones responsible.
Bouguereau, the intense one of the Academy
As I said the major error made by modernists was to overlook the expressive potential of the painting by Bouguereau. Certain, everything in his style is academic, from the flawless technicalities which he paints naked bodies to the religious and mythological themes drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds to the romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau is not only that, and it's enough to be able to focus on the eyes of certain characters in his artworks, where all the human ferocity that he is able to see and transport onto the canvas is reflected. His contemporaries recognized this, and made him one of the most well-known artists in the 1800s. However, at the advent of the new century his work was banned by the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being bold, but maybe they were unaware that beneath the orderly technicality of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, pain, malice, and seduction.
His work is the ideal model of the bourgeoisie. beautiful forms that hide disturbing dark secrets, dark and desires that he no longer wants to keep from being repressed. The naked is among the methods he employs to reconnect us to our primal instincts: the bodies want to entice us and their brightness lets us believe in a fantasy, however, they also create a setting of a film, in which the actors are brightly 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 act of foreplay and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker poised between an education of bourgeois that is looked (and is looked) at as well as the need to speak to material human needs. Both are present, and it is perhaps the viewer who decides whether to see one rather than the other.
https://blog.openartimages.com/2021/10/11/william-adolphe-bouguereau-who/was another great artist, as expressive, sensual, with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau who, in the 1950s was able to save him from his obscurity and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. He , too, so enslaved to the bourgeois formula knew the secrets in the human unconscious and also that you don't have to decide between content and form, but you could fool your viewers with surrealist magic tricks.
Bouguereau The person who can determine the appropriate doses
Bouguereau's secret is in the proper balance of holy and vulgar, purity and sensuality, malice and innocence. Even if you believe you're seeing the typical shepherds, the usual Venus and angels, Bouguereau surpasses all stereotypes or commonplace in art. A woman defends herself from Eros, that annoying putto symbolizes the desires of her heart, desires aren't hers to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman, a bearer of the wisdom of the common and rural and of those who have learned the way of life through experience and a little suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal and instead makes visible, with just one eye, the desire she feels for a Satyr. The sexual passion that is carefully placed within Dante's underworld. There are a lot of young mothers who are who are overwhelmed by the need to take charge of their children in a world that does not recognize them, and in which they are to be only functional characters. The power of the expressions that his characters give us back and those that they exchange with each other is immense. They appear like photos, film scenes and gracefully tell real-life stories. Realism is packed into mythical and dreamlike images Here can be the universe in all its complexity.
Bouguereau the artist who paints with human archetypes
I believe that Bouguereau is very clear about human archetypes, social patterns, and various identities of the human being. I wouldn't be too surprised should it turn out that he belongs to some obscure school. A few of his photographs 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 proclaimed loudly, and in which the unconscious sprang out and is portrayed.
These are the many things that I can see in Bouguereau's painting, and If you aren't convinced, look into the eyes of his characters, the mirror of the souls of the world. In my vision of the year 2021, I can see in him a deep awareness of the facts of existence, intellectual accountability, a desire to unmask social taboos. He does all this in the most basic and "formal" ways, with the language of the day without pretense or snobbery and without presumption or judgment and most importantly, without violence, so that, at this point in both the text and human history, it's the modernists who appear outdated to me.
