For https://blog.openartimages.com/2021/10/11/william-adolphe-bouguereau-who/ , up until a few days ago I was unsure of the name of William-Adolphe-Bouguereau and, in fact, I still find it difficult to pronounce his name accurately.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust, reading some information online. With the name's high-pitched sound and the date of his work I instantly imagined a boring artist or a servile French academic, one of those who painted expensive portraits of nobles as well as hunting events. Something from the other century, which is, in a nutshell the old and outdated.

But judging too quickly I made a mistake.


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

Before I share with you the details of these beautiful things, I will reveal the fateful lesson learned, which is also what motivates me to write about art, without being an art scholar: art should be viewed and experienced through the impact of emotions it creates in our bodies. The body's senses and the instincts are the best guide to understand If an artist can penetrate us. I barely knew Bouguereau's name If I had then it would be the same, because his paintings captivated me and touched the oldest archetypes of my soul and changed the things I thought I knew about art in academia.

This is what art does, it sends us information that is not conscious, it takes us back to worlds that were once parallel, it lets us enter for a moment into the mind of a stranger and is able to enter our world without even knowing who we are. We and he, people separated by time and space together in the same space for a moment. Our worlds collide and blend into the world created by a work of art.

Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My error was committed by many others before me, by those who, as they stepped into the modern age and following a long and recognized career, decided that Bouguereau was not good enough, that he was not contemporary enough and prepared for the future, not "cool" enough and, in a matter of minutes, relegated him to a simple academic artist, one of the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies the mastery of a technique, however it is often false and empty to the point of bad taste) without any talent.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
There was no greater error. It is enough to look to Bouguereau's Pieta to grasp it, and feel a feeling that goes straight to the insides. The Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message which is that Christ symbolizes the suffering of the world . The Madonna is a dark and mysterious woman is the symbol of the truth, of Justice and conscience at the same time; she throws in our faces the truths, uncomfortable and hidden, about the ugliness that belongs to us. This dark, black Mary is in a crowded and nearly trapped by guilt, depicted by the jolly characters with a dramatic look, who have surrounded the dead Christ's body. Christ. The lady, who is regal and angry, really desperate, appears to be someone who is a refugee, a gypsy who holds her dead son in her arms amid the debris of bombings. It's an image of an official war photographer but we find that image on the walls of an academic from the 19th century, who without too many pleasantries, slaps us in the face.

The Pieta is only the second chapter (the last and most funereal) of a tale about a woman named Mary, but it could also be a different one. This tale begins with the illustration The Madonna of the Roses and where Mary remains a girl and a mother of a child, round and white. She does not look us in the eye, but instead looks up, toward the sky, like someone asking for support in the direction of God or destiny, aware of the difficult job she's just started. This task is carried within her arms. a little Jesus, from whose gaze (he does, he looks at us with his eyes) we sense the important future. She surrounds him in a maternity pose one that is practical, functional rather than emotional. The two, facing us, demand compassion. When they are in the Pieta, that embrace becomes a handhold for a mom who is unable to bear the weight of her son's death as her life is slipping away. This was a familiar feeling to Bouguereau, who lost three children and his wife. In the painting, while Bouguereau screams in sadness, Mary declares her defeat and, in a way her defeat to the world. Her prayers to heaven as well as her doubts, prompted by the awareness of her task, shatters into the certainty. Her black eyes, her hollowed-out skin, look at the perpetrators with a glare and the faith of humanity slips into the certainty that evil exists and that we are accountable for it.

Bouguereau The intense one of the Academy
As I said, the serious mistake that modernists made was to overlook the expressive capacity of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certain the style is academic: from the perfect technicalities with which he draws the naked body, to the mythological and religious themes drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds , to the romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau isn't just this, and it is enough to keep looking at the looks of the characters in his artworks in which all the human emotion he's in a position to perceive and convey on canvas is evident. His contemporaries recognized this and made him one of the most well-known artists of the 1800s. But then, with the advent of the new century, it was the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of being too daring, but 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 illustration of the bourgeoisie: gorgeous forms that conceal alarming secrets, darkness and desires that the artist is no longer able to suppress. The nude is one of his methods to reconnect us to our natural instinct that the bodies are trying to entice us and their brightness can make us enter a dream, as well as in the setting of a film, in which the actors are well lit and are able to entice us. Simple gestures can be enthralling (like removing a sock for example); bodies stack up and pile together, and they play with each other, it's all an act of foreplay and Bouguereau is an artist who walks a tightrope between an education of bourgeois that is looked (and is observed) at, and the need to speak to the human need for material. Both are present and it's the observer who decides to look at one over the other.

It was another great artist, equally emotional, sensual like Bouguereau, who, around the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. He too, so attached to the bourgeois formula knew the secrets in the unconscious of humans and the fact that you don't need to choose between form and content, but you could fool your viewers with surrealist magic tricks.

Bouguereau, the person who can determine the appropriate doses
Bouguereau's trick is in the proper balance of sacred and profane, purity and sensuality. He also demonstrates malice and innocence. Even if you believe you're seeing the typical shepherds, the typical Venus and angels Bouguereau transcends all stereotypes and every commonplace in art. A woman defends herself against Eros and that irritable putto symbolizes the desires and desires that she isn't willing to pursue; a shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman who is a symbol of the wisdom of the common and rural that has been cultivated by those who have lived life through practice and even some suffering. The Nymph who doesn't hide, but rather makes absolutely evident, with a single intense gaze, the attraction she feels for Satyr. Satyr. The gay passion is carefully placed in Dante's slums. There are so many young mothers overwhelmed by having to take care of their children in a world that does not accept them, in which they are only functional personalities. The power of the expressions that his characters send us back and the looks they exchange with one another is enormous. They look like photographs or film footage and gracefully share real-life tales. Realism is packed into dreamlike and mythical scenes This is the world in its complex simplicity.



Bouguereau is the artist who paints with human archetypes
My impression is that Bouguereau is quite knowledgeable about archetypes of humans, social patterns, and multiple identities of the being. I wouldn't be too surprised should it turn out that he belongs to some mysterious school. Some of his images catapulted me to the surrealist world of Jodorosky where nakedness is an intrinsic human trait as well as where virtues and vices are exclaimed with a loud voice, where the unconscious pops forth and finds representation.

These are the many things I observe in the painting of Bouguereau, and if you don't believe me take a look at his eyes, the mirror of the many souls of the world. In my vision of 2021 I see in him a profound awareness of the realities of life, intellectual responsibility, a desire to unmask social taboos. He does this in the most simple and "formal" ways, with the language of the day, without pretension or snobbishness and without presumption or judgment, and above all with no violence, so that, at this moment in both the text and human history, it is the modernists who seem antiquated to me.