liumelendez333179

For a while, up until a few days ago I had no idea who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was , and actually, I have trouble articulating his name accurately.My first encounter with Bourgereau began with suspicion after reading some of the information available online. With the name's high-pitched sound and the dating of his works I instantly thought of a boring painter or a serviceable French academic among those who painted expensive portraits of nobles and hunting gatherings.https://pbase.com/topics/woolenskate24/the_secret_of_william_adolphfrom the other century, in short, old and dated.But judging too quickly I slipped up.It was a quick lesson, and it took me no time to be captivated by the works of Bouguereau found through Open Art Images.Before I talk about such beauty, however, I will reveal the crucial lesson I have learned, that is what drives me to write about art, without being an art academic the art must be viewed and experienced by its emotions upon our body. The body's senses and the instincts are the best guide to know if an artist is able to get into us. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau If I had then it would be exactly the same. His paintings captivated me as they touched the most ancient archetypes that shaped my soul, 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 unconscious information that takes us back to past and parallel worlds, it lets us enter for a moment into the mind of a stranger and has managed to enter our world without even knowing who we are. We and he, individuals separated by time and space, are in the same room for a brief moment. Our worlds intersect and merge in the territory created by a work of art.Bouguereau is the one who was abused by modernistsMy error was committed by many other people before me and by those who, at the gates of modernism and after a long and well-known career, concluded that Bouguereau was not sufficient and that he wasn't modern enough or ready for the future, not "cool" enough and, overnight, downgraded him to an academic artist, one of those who were Art Pompier (an expression that signifies a masterful technique but often false and empty to the point of bad taste) without any genius.Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.There was no greater error. It's enough to glance to the painting of Pieta to understand it, and feel the sensation that goes into the bowels. Bouguereau's Pieta carries a universal message, where Christ symbolizes the suffering of the world and the Madonna, a black and mysterious woman who is the bearer of reality and of Justice and conscience, all at once and throws into our faces all the facts, both uncomfortable and hidden, about the ugliness that belongs to us. That black dark Mary is in a crowded and nearly imprisoned by guilt, represented by the jolly characters with a dramatic look that are surrounded by the body of Christ. She, dignified and angry, truly desperate, appears to be a gypsy, a refugee who holds her deceased son in her arms under the wreckage of the 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, slaps us with a slap in the face.The Pieta is just the second chapter (the final and funereal one), of a story about a woman named Mary, but it could also be another one. This story begins with the drawing "The Madonna of the Roses, where Mary is still a little girl and a mother of a child, with a round face and white hair. She does not look us in the eye, but instead looks up, toward the sky, like someone seeking help from God or the universe, conscious of the daunting task she is about to begin. The task is held by her arms and she holds a small Jesus, from whose gaze (he will, because he stares us in the eye) we sense the important future. She encircles him in a maternity pose one that is practical, functional, rather than emotional. The two of them, standing in front of us, ask for acceptance. Then, in Pieta, that embrace becomes an embrace that of the mother who is unable to bear the weight of her son's death as her life is slipping away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau who lost three children as well as his spouse. In the painting, as Bouguereau screams in dismay, Mary declares her defeat or, more accurately she declares the end of the world. Her prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by her awareness of her mission, break into the certainty. Her dark eyes, her hollowed-out skin, stare at the perpetrators with a glare and hope for humanity slips into the certainty that evil is present and we are accountable for it.<img width="312" src=""><img width="343" src="">Bouguereau, the intense one of the AcademyAs? I said the biggest error made by modernists was to underestimate the expressive potential of the painting by Bouguereau. Certain, everything in his style is academic: From the precise technicalities which he creates naked body, to the religious and mythological themes drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds , to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. But Bouguereau isn't just this, and it's enough to keep looking at the looks of certain characters in his paintings in which all the human emotion he's in a position to perceive and convey onto the canvas is reflected. His peers understood this, and made Bouguereau an one of the more famous artists of the 1800s. Then, with the beginning of the new century, his work was banned by the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of not being doing enough, and perhaps they had not realized that behind the technical order of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain, and even seduction.<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oFYHLpd_cII" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>His work is the ideal illustration of the bourgeoisie: gorgeous forms that conceal alarming hidden secrets, darkness and desires he no longer wants to keep from being repressed. The nude is one of the methods he employs to bring us back to our instinctual nature that the bodies are trying to entice us, and their brightness makes us believe in a fantasy, but also in the set of a film, where actors are lit and bewitch us. The simplest gestures become sublime (like taking off a sock, for example) and bodies stack up and pile up, touch and seek one another, it's all an elaborate 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 as well as the need to express material human needs. Both exist, and it is perhaps the observer who decides to look at one over the other.It was another great artist who was as emotional, sensual and dreamlike as Bouguereau who, in the 1950s, saved him from oblivion and wrote about his achievements: Salvador Dali. He , too, so enslaved to the bourgeois ideal knew the secrets in the unconscious of humans and that you don't necessarily have to make a choice between content and form but you can fool the viewers with surrealist magic tricks.Bouguereau, the one who is aware of the proper dosagesBouguereau's trick is in the right dosage between the sacred and profane. pure and sensuality. He also demonstrates malice as well as innocence. Even if you think you are seeing the usual shepherds, the typical Venus and angels, Bouguereau transcends all stereotypes, every commonplace of art. A girl defends herself from Eros the gruesome putto is a symbol of the desire, the desires that she isn't willing to be able to satisfy. A shepherdess possesses the look of an old woman, a bearer of popular and rural wisdom and of those who have learned how to live their lives through practice and suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal and instead makes clear, with one glance, the attraction she feels for a Satyr. The sexual passion that is carefully placed within Dante's underworld. There are so many young mothers, feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility of taking the care of their children within a world that does not recognize them, and in which they are just functional individuals. The power of the looks that his characters show us back, and the glances they exchange with each other is immense. They look like photographs or film footage, and politely reveal real-life tales. Realism is packed into dreamlike and mythical scenes Here can be the universe in all its complexity.Bouguereau is the artist who paints using human archetypesMy impression is that Bouguereau is quite aware of human archetypes social patterns, as well as various identities of the human being. I wouldn't be too surprised should it turn out that he belongs to some esoteric school. A few of his photographs swept me to the surrealist universe of Jodorosky, where the nude is a human trait, where vices and virtues are exclaimed with a loud voice, where all the unconscious springs out and is portrayed.These are the many things I see in his painting. And if you don't believe me observe the gaze of these characters, the reflection of the many 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 as well as a desire to dispel social taboos. All of this is done in the most basic and "formal" ways, with the language of his time and without pretense or snobbery and without presumption or judgment, and above all with no violence, that, at this point in both the text and the history of humanity, it's the modernists who seem antiquated to me.