Until a few days ago I didn't know who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was and in fact, I still find it difficult to pronounce his name correctly.

My encounter with Bourgereau started with a sense of skepticism, reading some information online. From the high-sounding name and the date of his works I instantly thought of a boring painter and a serviceable French academic or one of the artists who paint lavish portraits of nobles and hunter gatherings. Somewhere else in the past century, which is, in a nutshell, old and dated.


But judging too quickly I slipped up.

It was a quick lesson, and it took me no time to become enchanted by the works of Bouguereau found on Open Art Images.

Before I talk about such beauty, however, I will reveal the lesson I learned which is also what drives the desire for me to blog about art, without being an art scholar the art must be viewed and experienced through the impact of its emotions in our bodies. The senses and instincts are the best guides to know if an artist has able to connect with our souls. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau and, if I didn't, it would have been exactly the same. His paintings captivated me as they touched the most ancient archetypes in my life and changed the things I thought I knew about art in academia.

It is the way art works and it is able to send us information that is unconscious that transports us to parallel and past worlds, it lets us enter for a short time into the mind of a stranger and has entered our world, and without knowing us. We and he, individuals who are separated in space and time together in the same room for a moment. Our worlds intersect and merge into the world that is created by a work art.

Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My error was made by many other people before me in the same way, by those who at the gates of modernism and after a long and well-known career, concluded that Bouguereau wasn't sufficient, that he was not contemporary enough and prepared for the future or "cool" enough and, immediately, degraded his status to that of a basic academic artist, a member among the Art Pompier (an expression that suggests an impressive technique, but often empty and false to the point of having bad taste) without any genius.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
The error is not more significant. It is enough to look to his Pieta to comprehend the meaning, and to experience the sensation that goes into the insides. The Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message that is universal in the sense that Christ symbolizes the suffering of the world and the Madonna is a dark and esoteric woman who is the bearer of the truth as well as Justice and conscience, all at once and throws into our faces all the truths, painful and concealed, about the ugly that is ours. This dark, black Mary is in a crowded and nearly in prison by guilt, as shown by the jolly characters with a slightly too melodramatic look that are surrounded by the corpse of Christ. She, dignified and angry, really desperate, appears to be an escaped gypsy who holds her son's body in her arms beneath the rubble of the bombings. It's an image from a war photo reporter, but we find that image on the walls of an academic of the 19th century who, without much aplomb, slaps us on the face.

The Pieta is only The second part (the last and most funereal) of a tale about a woman called Mary however, it could also be another one. This tale begins with the drawing The Madonna of the Roses and where Mary is still a young girl and a young mother. She is white and round-faced. She does not look us in our eye, but instead looks upwards, towards the sky, like someone asking for support from God or the universe, mindful of the daunting task she is about to begin. The task is held in her arms, a little Jesus and from his gaze (he is, and he stares at us) we can sense the significance of destiny. She surrounds him in a maternal pose, one that is practical, functional, rather than emotional. The two men, standing in front of us, demand understanding. In william adolphe bouguereau artist transforms into an embrace that of the mother who can't carry the burden of her murdered son as her life is slipping away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau, who had lost three of his children as well as his spouse. In the painting, as he expresses all his sadness, Mary declares her defeat and, in a way her defeat to the world. The prayers she makes to God and her doubts prompted by her realization of her mission, break into a certainty. Her dark eyes, her hollowed out skin, look the culprits in the face, while the hope of humanity is dissolved into the conviction that evil exists and that we are the ones responsible.

Bouguereau, the intense one of the Academy
As I mentioned the major mistake that modernists made was to underestimate the expressive potential of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certain the style is academic, from the perfect technicalities with which he paints naked body as well as the themes of mythology and religion drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. However, Bouguereau isn't just this, and it's enough to be able to focus on the looks of some of the people in his paintings and the full human emotion he's in a position to perceive and convey onto the canvas is reflected. His contemporaries recognized this and made him among the top famous artists in the 1800s. However, at the beginning of the new century, it was the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of being too doing enough, and maybe they didn't realize that, beneath the technical structure of his artworks, Bouguereau hid chaos, pain, malice, and seduction.

His work is the ideal illustration of the bourgeoisie: beautiful forms that hide disturbing secrets, darkness, and desires that the artist is no longer able to suppress. The nude is one of the methods he employs to return us to our primal instincts that the bodies are trying to entice us and their brightness can make us believe in a fantasy, but also in the set of a film, in which the actors are well illuminated and entice us with their. Simple gestures are transformed into something extraordinary (like removing a sock for instance) and bodies stack up and pile up, they touch and search one another, it's all a game 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 desire to communicate human desires in a physical way. Both are present, and it is perhaps the viewer who decides whether to focus on one or the other.

It was another artist, equally expressive, sensual, with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau who, in the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote about his achievements: Salvador Dali. He , too, so enslaved to the bourgeois formula knew the secrets within the human subconscious and the fact that you don't need to choose between form and content, but you can fool the audience with magical surrealist tricks.


Bouguereau is the person who can determine the appropriate doses
Bouguereau's trick is in the proper balance of the sacred and profane. purity as well as sensuality. It is also about malice and innocence. Even if you believe you're seeing the typical shepherds, the usual Venus, and angels, Bouguereau overcomes every stereotype or commonplace in art. A woman defends herself against Eros and that irritable putto symbolizes the desires and desires that she doesn't really want to pursue; a shepherdess is an old woman, bearer of popular and rural wisdom, of those who know the way of life through experience and a little suffering. The Nymph who doesn't conceal her feelings, but instead makes clear, with one glance, the attraction she feels towards the Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned in Dante's underworld. There are many young mothers, overwhelmed by having to take charge of their children in an unfriendly world recognize them, and in which they are to be only functional characters. The impact of the glances that his characters give us back and the looks they exchange with each other is enormous. They resemble photographs, film scenes and gracefully share the real life stories. Realism is packed into mythical and dreamlike scenes Here can be the universe in all its complexity.

Bouguereau is the artist who paints using human archetypes
I believe that Bouguereau is quite clear about human archetypes social patterns, as well as various identities of the human being. I wouldn't be shocked to discover that he belongs to some mysterious school. Some of his images catapulted me right into the surrealist realm of Jodorosky in which the naked is a fundamental characteristic of the human, where vices and virtues are declaimed loudly, where all the unconscious springs out and is portrayed.

These are the many things I observe in Bouguereau's painting, and in case you doubt my assertions, observe his eyes. They are the mirror of the many souls of the world. In my vision in 2021 I see in him a profound awareness of the realities of existence, intellectual accountability, a desire to unmask social taboos. He does all this in the most simple and "formal" ways, with the language of his time, without pretension or snobbishness with no pretension or judgement and, most importantly, without violence, so much that, at this moment in both the text and human history, it's the modernists who seem antiquated to me.