1. Until a few days ago I was unsure of who William-Adolphe Bouguereau was and actually, I find it difficult to pronounce his name correctly.
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3. My first encounter with Bourgereau started with a sense of skepticism when I read some information on the internet. Based on the soaring name and the dating of his works, I immediately thought of a boring painter, some servile French academic among those who painted expensive portraits of nobles and hunting events. Somewhere else in the past century, in short, old and dated.
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5. However, judging too fast, I fell into error.
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7. It was a quick lesson and it took me no time to be captivated by the works of Bouguereau found through Open Art Images.
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9. Before I talk about these beautiful things, I will reveal the fateful lesson learned, that is what drives the desire for me to blog about art, without being an art scholar the art must be observed and felt through the emotions it creates upon our body. william adolphe bouguereau and the instincts are the best guides to determine if an artist has able to get into our souls. I had no idea of the name Bouguereau, and if I hadn't then it would be exactly the same. His work captivated me as they touched the most ancient archetypes in my life and changed all I believed I knew about academic art.
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11. It is the way art works, it sends us information that is not conscious that transports us to past and parallel worlds, it lets us enter for a moment into the mind of a stranger who has managed to enter our world, and without knowing us. We and him, two people who are separated in space and time, are in the same room for a brief moment. Our worlds meet and merge in the territory made by a piece of art.
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14. Bouguereau is the one who was abused by modernists
15. My error, however, was made by many other people before me and by those who, at the gates of modernism and following a long and acknowledged career, decided that Bouguereau was not adequate, that he was not modern enough or ready for the future and was not "cool" enough and, immediately, degraded his status to that of a basic academic artist, one of the Art Pompier (an expression that indicates the mastery of a technique, however it is often false and empty until it is bad taste), devoid of any talent.
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17. Bouguereau, the one of the Pieta.
18. No error was greater. It's enough to look through the painting of Pieta to grasp it, to feel the sensation that goes into the insides. In Bouguereau's Pieta is a universal symbol which is that Christ represents the pain of the world . The Madonna is a dark and mysterious woman, is the bearer of reality and of Justice and conscience simultaneously; she throws in our faces the truths, painful and obscure, about the ugly that is ours. The dark and black Mary is in a crowded and nearly imprisoned by guilt, represented by those good-natured characters, with a somewhat dramatic look which have surrounded the dead corpse of Christ. The woman, smug and angry, truly desperate, appears to be a gypsy, a refugee who holds her son's body in her arms under the rubble of the bombings. It's an image of the war photographer, however, we see that image on the walls of an academic of the 19th century who, without much aplomb and smacks us in the face.
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20. The Pieta is only the second chapter (the one that is fun and the final) of a story about a woman named Mary, but it could also be another one. The story starts with the painting of the Madonna of the Roses and where Mary remains a girl and a young mother. She is white and round-faced. She doesn't look us in the eye, but instead looks up, toward the sky, like someone asking for support from God or the universe, conscious of the arduous job she's just started. That task is gathered within her arms. a tiny Jesus who, through his eyes (he will, because he looks us in the eye) we see the importance of future. She encircles him in a maternity pose one that is practical, functional, rather than emotional. The two, sitting in front of us, ask for understanding. When they are in the Pieta this embrace, it becomes an embrace that of the mother who can't carry the burden of her son's death and life slips away. The feeling was familiar to Bouguereau, who lost three children and his wife. In the painting he expresses all his sadness, Mary declares her defeat or, more accurately her defeat to the world. Prayers to heaven and her doubts prompted by the awareness of her task, shatters into an absolute certainty. Her dark eyes, her hollowed out skin, look at the perpetrators with a glare, while the hope of humanity is dissolved into the conviction that evil is present and we are accountable for it.
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22. Bouguereau The intense one of the Academy
23. As I mentioned, the serious mistake that modernists made was to undervalue the expressive potential of the paintings of Bouguereau. Certain the style is academic, From the precise technicalities which he paints naked body, to the mythological and religious themes drawn from neoclassicism, and from the naturalistic backgrounds , to romantic and bucolic subjects. But Bouguereau is not just that, and it's enough to linger on the faces of the characters in his artworks and the full human emotion he's in a position to perceive and convey on the canvas is manifested. His contemporaries recognized this, and made him one of the most famous artists in the 1800s. However, at the dawn of the century of 1900, the Damnatio Memoriae banned him. They accused him of being too bold, but maybe they didn't realize that, beneath the technical structure of his paintings, Bouguereau hid chaos, malice, pain and seduction.
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25. His paintings are the perfect example of the bourgeoisie: stunning forms that conceal disturbing dark secrets, dark and desires the artist is no longer able to keep from being repressed. The naked is among his methods to bring us back to our instinctual nature that the bodies are trying to seduce us and their brightness can make us believe in a fantasy, but also in the set of a movie, where the actors are well illuminated and entice us with their. Simple gestures can be enthralling (like taking off a sock, for example) and bodies pile up and stack together, and they play with 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 at and is looked) at and the desire to communicate human desires in a physical way. Both worlds are there and it's the person who is watching that decides to look at one over the other.
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27. It was another great artist who was as expressive, sensual, with a dreamlike quality as Bouguereau who, during the 1950s and 1960s, saved him from the ashes and wrote his praisesfor him: Salvador Dali. He too, so attached to the bourgeois model was aware of the hidden secrets in the human unconscious and also that you don't need to choose between content and form but you can fool the viewers with surrealist magic tricks.
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31. Bouguereau, the one who knows the right dosages
32. Bouguereau's secret is in the right dosage between holy and vulgar, pure and sensuality, malice as well as innocence. Even if you think you're seeing the typical shepherds, Venus, and angels, Bouguereau transcends all stereotypes or commonplace in art. A girl defends herself from Eros, that annoying putto represents the cravings of her heart, desires she doesn't really want to approach; a shepherdess has the expression of an old woman, bearer of popular and rural wisdom that has been cultivated by those who have lived life through practice and even a little suffering. The Nymph who does not conceal, but rather makes absolutely visible, with just one glance, the attraction she feels towards Satyr. Satyr. The gay passion is carefully placed in Dante's slums. There are so many young mothers who are overwhelmed by the need to take charge of their children in a world that does not recognize them, and in which they are to be only functional characters. The power of the expressions that his characters give us back and those that they exchange with each other is awe-inspiring. They look like photographs or film footage and gracefully share real-life stories. This is realist art, stuffed into mythical and dreamlike scenes Here can be the universe in its complexity.
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34. Bouguereau the artist who paints with human archetypes
35. I believe that Bouguereau is extremely knowledgeable about archetypes of humans social patterns, as well as multiple identities of the being. I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that he was a member of some esoteric school. Some of his images catapulted me to the surrealist universe of Jodorosky in which the naked is a human trait, where vices and virtues are exclaimed with a loud voice, in which the unconscious sprang forth and finds representation.
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37. There are many things that I can see in his 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 deep awareness of the facts of existence, intellectual accountability and a desire to break down social taboos. All of this is done in the most basic and "formal" ways, with the language of his day, without pretension or snobbishness with no pretension or judgement and most importantly, without violence, that at this point in the text as well as in human history, it's the modernists who seem antiquated to me.
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41. Homepage: https://blog.openartimages.com/2021/10/11/william-adolphe-bouguereau-who/