Until a few days ago I was unsure of the name of William-Adolphe-Bouguereau and, actually, I find it difficult to pronounce his name correctly.

My encounter with Bourgereau began with suspicion, reading some information online. Based on the soaring name and the date of his work I instantly thought of a boring painter and a serviceable French academic among those who paint expensive portraits of nobles and hunting gatherings. Somewhere else in the past century, or, more simply, old and dated.

However, judging too fast I slipped up.

I quickly learned my lesson, and it didn't take me long to be captivated by the art of Bouguereau found through Open Art Images.

Before I tell you about these beautiful things, I will reveal the fateful lesson learned, which is the reason that drives me to write about art without being an academic in the field of art Art should be looked at and felt through the impact of emotions it creates in our bodies. The senses and instincts are the best guides to understand If an artist has able to connect with us. I barely knew Bouguereau's name If I had then it would be exactly the same. His work captivated me as they touched the most ancient archetypes in my life and displaced the things I thought I knew about academic art.

This is what art does by sending us information that is unconscious, it takes us back to worlds that were once parallel, it lets us enter for a brief moment in the mind of someone else, who in turn has managed to enter our world, and without knowing us. We and he, individuals distant in time and space, are in the same space for a moment. Our worlds collide and blend into the world made by a piece of art.


Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My error was committed by many others before me and by those who, as they stepped into the modern age and following a long and recognized career, decided that Bouguereau was not adequate and that he wasn't modern enough and prepared for the future, not "cool" enough and, immediately, degraded him to an academic artist, one among the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies an impressive technique, but often empty and false to the point of bad taste), devoid of any creativity.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
No error was greater. It's enough to glance at Bouguereau's Pieta to understand the meaning, and to experience the sensation that goes into the insides. In Bouguereau's Pieta carries a universal message which is that Christ represents the pain of this world. Madonna, a black and esoteric woman who is the bearer of truth, of Justice and conscience, all at once; she throws in our faces all the truths, uncomfortable and obscure, about the ugly that belongs to us. This dark, black Mary is enveloped and trapped by guilt, depicted by the jolly characters with a slightly too melodramatic look, who surround the dead Christ's body. Christ. The woman, smug and angry, really desperate, looks like a gypsy, a refugee who holds her dead son in her arms amid the rubble of the bombings; it is an image of the war photographer, but we find that image on the walls of an academic from the 19th century who, with no pleasantries is smacking us with a slap in the face.

Pieta Pieta is nothing more than The second part (the final and funereal one) of a tale about a woman, Mary however, it could also be a different one. This tale begins with the drawing The Madonna of the Roses and where Mary remains a little girl, a young mother, round and white. She does not look us in our eye, but looks upwards, towards the sky, like someone seeking help from God or the universe, conscious of the daunting job she's just started. That task is gathered within her arms. a tiny Jesus, from whose gaze (he is, and he looks us in the eye) we sense the important destiny. She wraps him around in a maternal pose, one of those practical, functional rather than emotional. The two, sitting in front of us, ask for understanding. In the Pieta the embrace transforms into a handhold that of the mother who can't take the burden of her son's death, while life slips away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau who lost three children and his wife. In the painting, as Bouguereau expresses his complete despair, Mary declares her defeat, or rather, the defeat of the world. Prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by her realization of her mission, break into an absolute certainty. Her dark eyes, her hollowed out skin, look the culprits in the face and hope for humanity sank into the knowledge that evil is real and we are the ones responsible.

Bouguereau The intense one of the Academy
As I mentioned the biggest mistake that modernists made was to overlook the expressive power of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certain the style is academic: from the flawless technicalities which he paints naked body to the mythological and religious themes taken from neoclassicism, from the naturalistic backgrounds to the romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau is not only that, and it's enough to keep looking at the faces of certain people in his paintings in which all the human emotion he's capable of capturing and transferring on the canvas is manifested. His peers understood this and made him among the top well-known artists in the 1800s. However, at the dawn of the new century, his work was banned by the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not bold, but perhaps they had not realized that beneath the orderly technicality of his work, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain, and seduction.

His artworks are the perfect model of the bourgeoisie. stunning forms that conceal disturbing hidden secrets, darkness and desires that he no longer wants to keep from being repressed. The nude is one of his methods to return us to our natural instinct: the bodies want to lure us in and their brightness can make us enter a dream, as well as in the setting of a film, where the actors are brightly lit and are able to entice us. The simplest gestures become sublime (like removing a sock for example); bodies stack up and pile together, and they play with the other, it's a game of foreplay, and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker poised between an education of bourgeois that is looked (and is at and is looked) at, and the desire to communicate material human needs. Both worlds are there and it's the observer who decides to see one rather than the other.



It was another artist, as expressive, sensual, and dreamlike as Bouguereau, who, around the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. william adolphe bouguereau , too, so enslaved to the bourgeois ideal knew the secrets within the human subconscious and that you don't necessarily have to decide between form and content, but you can fool the spectators with surrealist illusions.

Bouguereau is the person who can determine the appropriate dosages
Bouguereau's secret is in the right dosage between the sacred and profane. pure as well as sensuality. It is also about malice as well as innocence. Even if you believe you are seeing the usual shepherds, the typical Venus and angels, Bouguereau transcends all stereotypes or commonplace in art. A woman defends herself against Eros, that annoying putto symbolizes the desires and desires that aren't hers to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess is an old woman who is a symbol of rural and popular wisdom and of those who have learned life through practice and even a little suffering. The Nymph who doesn't hide, but rather makes absolutely visible, with just one glance, the attraction she feels for the Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned in Dante's underworld. There are so many young mothers, feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility of taking the care of their children within an unfriendly world recognize them, and in which they are viewed as just functional individuals. The impact of the glances that his characters send us back and the looks they exchange with one another is enormous. They resemble photographs films, or movie scenes, and politely reveal real-life stories. This is realist art, stuffed into mythical and dreamlike scenes This can be the universe in its complexity.

Bouguereau, the one who paints with human archetypes
My impression is that Bouguereau is quite clear about human archetypes as well as social patterns and many identities of the person. I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out that he is a member of an obscure school. Certain of his pictures swept me to the surrealist realm of Jodorosky, where the nude is an intrinsic characteristic of the human as well as where virtues and vices are declaimed loudly, in which the unconscious sprang forth and finds a representation.

These are the many things that I can see in his painting. And if you don't believe me take a look at the gaze of these characters, the reflection of the souls of the world. In my vision of 2021 I see in him a great awareness of the truths of life, intellectual responsibility, a desire to unmask social taboos. All of this is done in the simplest and most "formal" ways, with the language of his day, without pretension or snobbishness and without presumption or judgment, and above all without violence, that, at this moment in the text as well as in human history, it's the modernists that seem outdated to me.