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Up until a few days ago, I didn't know who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was , and in fact, I still have trouble articulating his name accurately.My first encounter with Bourgereau began with distrust, reading some information on the internet. From the high-sounding name and the date of his work, I immediately thought of some boring painter and a unprofessional French academic or one of the artists who painted expensive portraits of nobles and hunting events. Somewhere else in the past century, which is, in a nutshell, old and dated.But judging too quickly I slipped up.I quickly learned my lesson and it took me no time to be captivated by the work of Bouguereau that I found in Open Art Images.Before I tell you about the beauty of this I will share the crucial lesson I have learned, which is the reason that inspires me to write about art, without being an art scholar Art should be viewed and experienced by emotions it creates on our bodies. Our senses and our instincts are the best guides to know if an artist is able to get into our souls. I didn't even know the name of Bouguereau and, if I didn't I would have felt exactly the same. His works bewitched me, touched the most ancestral archetypes in my life and challenged everything I thought I knew about academic art.It is the way art works and it is able to send us information that is unconscious and transports us to past and parallel worlds as well as allowing us to enter for a short time into the head of a stranger who is able to enter our world without even knowing who we are. We and he, individuals distant in time and space, are in the same room for a moment. Our worlds collide and blend in the territory that is created by a work art.<img width="445" src="">Bouguereau, the one mistreated by modernistsMy error, however, was made by a lot of others before me in the same way, by those who as they stepped into the modern age and following a long, recognized career, decided that Bouguereau was not adequate and that he wasn't modern enough and ready for the future, not "cool" enough and, immediately, degraded him to a simple academic artist, a member among the Art Pompier (an expression that signifies an impressive technique, but often false and empty to the point of bad taste), devoid of any creativity.Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.The error is not more significant. It's enough to glance at the painting of Pieta to understand the meaning, and to experience a feeling that goes straight to the internal organs. Bouguereau's Pieta carries a universal message that is universal in the sense that Christ is the symbol of the suffering of this world. Madonna is a dark and esoteric woman, is the bearer of the truth and of Justice and conscience simultaneously; she throws in our faces the truths, uncomfortable and concealed, about the ugly that is ours. That black dark Mary is enveloped and in prison by guilt, as shown by these lovable characters with a somewhat dramatic look that are surrounded by the Christ's body. Christ. The lady, who is regal and angry, truly desperate, appears to be a gypsy, a refugee who holds her dead son in her arms under the rubble of the bombings; it is an image taken by an official war photographer however we can see that image on the walls of an academic from the 19th century who with no pleasantries and smacks us in the face.Pieta Pieta is nothing more than an additional chapter (the final and funereal one) of a story about a woman called Mary, but it could also be another one. The story starts with the illustration of the Madonna of the Roses, where Mary is still a young girl and a young mother. She is with a round face and white hair. She doesn't look us in the eye, but looks upwards, towards the sky, like someone looking for help by God or the universe, conscious of the difficult task she has just begun. The task is held in her arms, and she holds a small Jesus who, through his eyes (he does, he looks at us) we sense the important fate. She encircles him in a maternity pose one of those practical, functional, rather than emotional. The two, sitting in front of us, demand understanding. When they are in the Pieta the embrace transforms into a handhold for a mom who cannot take the burden of her murdered son and life slips away. This was a familiar feeling to Bouguereau who lost three children along with his beloved wife. In the painting, as Bouguereau expresses his complete sadness, Mary declares her defeat or, more accurately her defeat to the world. Her prayers to heaven, her doubts dictated by the awareness of her task, shatters into a certainty. The dark eyes of her, the hollowed-out skin, look the culprits in the face and hope for humanity sank into the knowledge that evil exists and that we are the ones responsible.<img width="408" src="">Bouguereau The intense one of the AcademyAs? I said the biggest mistake that modernists made was to underestimate the expressive power of Bouguereau's painting. Sure, everything in his style is academic: from the flawless technicalities which he creates naked body, to the religious and mythological themes taken from neoclassicism, from naturalistic backgrounds to the bucolic and somewhat romantic subjects. However, Bouguereau is not only that, and it's enough to linger on the faces of the people in his paintings and the full human emotion he's capable of capturing and transferring on the canvas is manifested. His contemporaries understood this and made Bouguereau one of the most famous artists of the 1800s. Then, with the advent 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, beneath the technical structure of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, pain, malice, and seduction.His work is the ideal model of the bourgeoisie. beautiful forms that hide disturbing secrets, darkness and desires that the artist is no longer able to suppress. The naked is one of his methods to reconnect us to our natural instinct that the bodies are trying to seduce us, and their brightness makes us enter a dream, however, they also create a setting of a movie, where actors are lit and are able to entice us. Simple gestures are transformed into something extraordinary (like removing a sock for example); bodies pile up and stack up, touch and seek one another, it's all a game of foreplay, and Bouguereau is a tightrope walker poised between the bourgeois education system that is looked (and is at and is looked) at, and the need to express human desires in a physical way. Both exist but it's the viewer who decides whether to see one rather than the other.It was another great artist who was as emotional, sensual like Bouguereau who, in the 1950s was able to save him from his obscurity and wrote his praisesfor him: Salvador Dali. He too, so attached to the bourgeois model was aware of the hidden secrets in the unconscious of humans and that you don't necessarily have to make a choice between content and form but you could fool your spectators with surrealist illusions.<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oFYHLpd_cII" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Bouguereau The one who is aware of the proper dosagesThe secret of Bouguereau's art is to find the right balance between holy and vulgar, purity as well as sensuality. It is also about malice as well as innocence. Even if you believe you are seeing the usual shepherds, the usual Venus and angels, Bouguereau surpasses all stereotypes, every commonplace of art. A girl defends herself from Eros the gruesome putto is a symbol of the desire of her heart, desires she doesn't really want to approach; a shepherdess has the expression of an old woman, bearer of the wisdom of the common and rural and of those who have learned life through practice and even some suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal, but rather makes absolutely visible, with just one glance, the attraction she feels towards the Satyr. The homosexual passion carefully positioned within Dante's underworld. There are many young mothers overwhelmed by having to take the care of their children within an unfriendly world recognize them, and in which they are only functional personalities. The power of the looks that his characters send us back and the looks they exchange with each other is enormous. They appear like photos, film scenes and gracefully tell real-life tales. This is realist art, stuffed into dreamlike and mythical scenes, here are the real world, in its complexity.Bouguereau is the artist who paints with human archetypesMy impression is that Bouguereau is extremely knowledgeable about archetypes of humans social patterns, as well as many identities of the person.https://judojaw07.doodlekit.com/blog/entry/18431789/the-untold-secret-to-william-adolphe-bouguereau-in-less-than-9-minuteswouldn't be too surprised if it turned out that he is a member of an obscure school. Some of his images catapulted me into the surrealist realm of Jodorosky, where the nude is an intrinsic characteristic of the human, where vices and virtues are declaimed loudly, in which the unconscious sprang forth and finds a representation.These are just a few of the things I see in his painting. And If you aren't convinced, look into the eyes of his characters. They are the mirror of the many souls of the world. In my vision of the year 2021, I see in him a deep awareness of the facts of existence, intellectual accountability, a desire to unmask social taboos. He does all this in the most basic and "formal" ways, with the language of his day, without pretension or snobbishness and without presumption or judgment, and above all with no violence, so that, at this moment in the text and in human history, it is the modernists that seem outdated to me.