Aziz Art October 2016
@aziz_anzabi#Art#History of art(west and Iranian)-contemporary art#William Bouguereau
@aziz_anzabi#Art#History of art(west and Iranian)-contemporary art#William Bouguereau
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ating him a round zero in<br />
Racontars de Rapin and later<br />
describing in Avant et après<br />
(Intimate Journals) the single<br />
occasion when Bouguereau made<br />
him smile on coming across a<br />
couple of his paintings in an Arles'<br />
brothel, "where they belonged".<br />
Bouguereau’s works were eagerly<br />
bought by American millionaires<br />
who considered him the most<br />
important French artist of that<br />
time. But even during his lifetime<br />
there was critical dissent in<br />
assessing his work; the art historian<br />
Richard Muther wrote in 1894 that<br />
Bouguereau was a man "destitute<br />
of artistic feeling but possessing a<br />
cultured taste reveals... in his<br />
feeble mawkishness, the fatal<br />
decline of the old schools of<br />
convention." In 1926, American art<br />
historian Frank Jewett Mather<br />
criticized the commercial intent of<br />
Bouguereau’s work, writing that the<br />
artist "multiplied vague, pink<br />
effigies of nymphs, occasionally<br />
draped them, when they became<br />
saints and madonnas, painted on<br />
the great scale that dominates an<br />
exhibition, and has had his reward.<br />
I am convinced that the nude of<br />
Bouguereau was prearranged to<br />
meet the ideals of a New York<br />
stockbroker of the black walnut<br />
generation." Bouguereau confessed<br />
in 1891 that the direction of his<br />
mature work was largely a response<br />
to the marketplace: "What do you<br />
expect, you have to follow public<br />
taste, and the public only buys<br />
what it likes. That's why, with time,<br />
I changed my way of painting."<br />
After 1920, Bouguereau fell into<br />
disrepute, due in part to changing<br />
tastes.Comparing his work to that<br />
of his Realist and Impressionist<br />
contemporaries, Kenneth Clark<br />
faulted Bouguereau’s painting for<br />
"lubricity", and characterized such<br />
Salon art as superficial, employing<br />
the "convention of smoothed-out<br />
form and waxen surface."<br />
In 1974, the New York Cultural<br />
Center staged a show of<br />
Bouguereau's work partly as a<br />
curiosity, although curator Robert<br />
Isaacson had his eye on the longterm<br />
rehabilitation of Bouguereau's<br />
legacy and reputation.In 1984, the<br />
Borghi Gallery hosted a commercial<br />
show of 23 oil paintings and one<br />
drawing. In the same year a major<br />
exhibition was organized by the<br />
Montreal Museum of Fine <strong>Art</strong>s in<br />
Canada.
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