For a while, up until a few days ago I had no idea the name of William-Adolphe-Bouguereau and, actually, I find it difficult to pronounce his name properly.

My first encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust when I read some information online. Based on the soaring name and the dating of his work I instantly imagined a boring artist or a servile French academic, one of those who paint lavish portraits of nobles and hunting parties. A painting from another century, or, more simply the old and outdated.

But judging too quickly I slipped up.

The lesson I learned quickly, 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 the beauty of this I will share the fateful lesson learned, which is also what drives the desire for me to blog about art without being an art scholar: art should be viewed and experienced through the emotions it creates on our bodies. The senses and instincts are the best guides to know if an artist has able to penetrate our souls. I didn't even know the name of Bouguereau, and if I hadn't then it would be similar, as his work captivated me, touched the most ancestral archetypes that shaped my soul, and changed everything I thought I knew about academic art.

This is what art does and it is able to send us information that is unconscious, it takes us back to past and parallel worlds, it lets us enter for a brief moment in the mind of a stranger, who in turn has entered our world without even knowing who we are. We and he, individuals separated by time and space and space, share the same space for a brief moment. Our worlds intersect and merge in the territory made by a piece of art.


Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernists
My error, however, was made by many others before me and by those who, at the gates of modernism and after a long and acknowledged career, decided that Bouguereau was not good enough to be considered modern enough or prepared for the future or "cool" enough and, overnight, downgraded him to a simple academic artist, one from the Art Pompier (an expression that suggests the mastery of a technique, however it is often false and empty until it is bad taste), devoid of any talent.

Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
The error is not more significant. It's enough to glance at Bouguereau's Pieta to grasp the meaning, and to experience the sensation that goes into the internal organs. Bouguereau's Pieta conveys a universal message which is that Christ is the symbol of the suffering of the world and the Madonna is a dark and mysterious woman who is the bearer of truth as well as Justice and conscience simultaneously; she throws in our faces the truths, painful and concealed, about the ugly that we all share. That black dark Mary is enveloped and in prison by guilt, as shown by the jolly characters with a slightly too dramatic look that surround the dead Christ's body. Christ. The lady, who is regal and angry, really desperate, looks like a gypsy, a refugee who holds her dead son in her arms under the debris of 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 in the face.

The Pieta is only an additional chapter (the last and most funereal), of a story about a woman called Mary, but it could be a different one. This story begins with the drawing "The Madonna of the Roses and where Mary remains a girl, a young mother, round and white. She doesn't look us in the eye, but looks upwards, to the sky, like someone seeking help from God or destiny, conscious of the arduous job she's just started. william adolphe bouguereau is held within her arms. a tiny Jesus, from whose gaze (he does, he stares at us) we see the importance of future. She wraps him around in a maternity pose one that is functional, rather than emotional. The two of them, sitting in front of us, seek understanding. In the Pieta this embrace, it becomes an embrace for a mom who can't carry the burden of her son's death and life slips away. This was a familiar feeling to Bouguereau who had lost three of his children along with his beloved wife. In the painting, while he expresses all his dismay, Mary declares her defeat or, more accurately, the defeat of the world. Her prayers to heaven as well as her doubts, prompted by the awareness of her mission, break into a certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed-out skin, stare the culprits in the face and the faith of humanity sank into the knowledge that evil is real and we are accountable for it.

Bouguereau is the most intense of the Academy
As I said the major error made by modernists was to undervalue the expressive power of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certain all of his work is academic: From the precise technicalities which he paints naked body as well as the themes of mythology and religion that are derived from Neoclassicism, from naturalistic backgrounds to romantic and bucolic subjects. However, Bouguereau isn't just this, and it's enough to keep looking at the faces of some of the characters in his paintings in which all the human ferocity that he is capable of capturing and transferring on the canvas is manifested. His peers understood this and made him an one of the more famous artists of the 1800s. Then, with the beginning of the century of 1900, it was the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not bold, but maybe they didn't realize that, beneath the technical structure 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 he no longer wants to suppress. The nude is one of his methods to reconnect us to our instinctual nature: the bodies want to lure us in and their brightness can make us believe in a fantasy, however, they also create a setting of a movie, where the actors are brightly illuminated and entice us with their. Simple gestures can be enthralling (like removing a sock for instance) and bodies pile up and stack together, and they play with the other, it's an elaborate game of foreplay and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker who is balancing bourgeois education that looks (and is observed) at as well as the need to express the human need for material. Both exist and it's the viewer who decides whether to look at one over the other.

It was another artist, as emotional, sensual with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau who, during the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote his praises: Salvador Dali. Dali, like many artists who were adamantly attached to the bourgeois ideal was aware of the hidden secrets in the unconscious of humans and also that you don't have to make a choice between content and form, but you could fool your viewers with surrealist magic tricks.

Bouguereau The person who can determine the appropriate dosages
The secret of Bouguereau's art is to find the right dosage between sacred and profane, pure as well as sensuality. It is also about malice as well as innocence. Even if you think you are seeing the usual shepherds, Venus and angels, Bouguereau overcomes every stereotype, every commonplace of art. A woman defends herself from Eros the gruesome putto is a symbol of the desire, the desires that she isn't willing to approach; a shepherdess has the expression of an old woman who is a symbol of the wisdom of the common and rural and of those who have learned how to live their lives through practice and suffering. The Nymph who doesn't hide and instead makes evident, with a single eye, the desire she feels for a Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned in Dante's slums. There are many young mothers, overwhelmed by having to take charge of their children in an environment that doesn't accept them, in which they are to be only functional characters. The impact of the glances that his characters show us back, and the glances they exchange with one another is immense. They look like photographs films, or movie scenes, and politely reveal real-life stories. Here is realism, packed into mythical and dreamlike images This can be the universe in all its complexity.


Bouguereau is the artist who paints using human archetypes
My impression is that Bouguereau is quite 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 is a member of an obscure school. A few of his photographs swept me to the surrealist realm of Jodorosky, where the nude is a fundamental human trait, where vices and virtues are declaimed loudly, where the unconscious pops out and is portrayed.

These are the many things I see in his painting. And in case you doubt my assertions, observe his eyes, the mirror of the souls of the world. With my eyes of the year 2021, I see in him deep awareness of the facts of life, a sense of intellectual responsibility, a desire to unmask social taboos. All of this is done in the simplest and most "formal" ways, with the language of the day and without pretense or snobbery with no pretension or judgement and, most importantly, with no violence, so that, at this moment in the text as well as in the history of humanity, it's the modernists who appear outdated to me.