Homer and His Guide (Homère et son guide), 1874, Oil on canvas. By William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)
The 19th century French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau has a major image problem that began over a century ago and has persisted through the maturing of modernism and into our current postmodern age, where anything goes, but as we all know, not everything does.
The exhibition “Bouguereau & America” at the Milwaukee Art Museum (through May 12) looks at the artist’s stateside patronage and gets at the roots of those poor public relations by examining the public that admired him. It’s a show with many stories to tell. The wall text alone is a bildungsroman about America’s industrial growth and self-image, suggesting that anyone who was anyone in Gilded Age America, from the “Merchant Prince” Alexander Turney Stewart to Jay Gould’s daughter, Anna, marked their arrival on the scene with a Bouguereau. As avant-garde history surged past his collectors’ tastes into the 20th century, his paintings remained brass rings of social elevation, but they were antiquated relics in the eyes of most artists.
Bouguereau’s work is undeniably astounding. He’s arguably the most masterful painter of the human figure who has ever lived. Well, the female figure at least. His males are slightly clumsier, which makes sense because didn’t paint nearly as many of them. This is most evident in the painting Faun and Bacchante. Bouguereau isn’t virtuosic in the way Velazquez or Sargent were—the surfaces of his paintings are layered and rigorously composed. They leave little to the imagination. But, in terms of sheer theatricality, rendering and finish, Dream of Spring, to choose a single painting, is unparalleled. Its cluster of powder-skinned, winged putti flutter around a doe-eyed, Roman-nosed, virginal personification whose flesh is so supple and translucent you’d swear you can see her pulse. The same could be said for almost any painting in the show. Variation comes mainly from scale and configuration of subject matter, not from spontaneity. Whether the work is of Aphrodite or a personification of Virtue is ultimately immaterial, they’re all just academically sanctioned alibis providing Bouguereau an opportunity to masterfully paint (mostly) ruddy young ladies in quaint idyllic settings.
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The nature of that PR problem might be evident at this point. There are some very creepy moments in this show that don’t hold up to the scrutiny of an awoken age. The Little Beggar and The Broken Pitcher are good examples. Not simply because of their subjects’ gender or age, but because their excessive sentimentality feels manipulative and exploitative. As icky as the content is, it showcases some endgame academic painting chops.
It’s not so strange that a country like the United States, lacking in its own traditional institutions and aristocracy, would mark its cultural coming of age with artifacts drawn from others’ establishments—especially France’s. The Gilded Age love of Bouguereau or Beaux-Arts architecture is as easy to understand as an NFL draftee’s purchase of a shiny red Ferrari in 2019. What is less clear, and only implied by this exhibition, is why it took so long for the U.S. to move beyond Bouguereau and classicism. America’s taste for art was notoriously conservative well into the 20th century. The public was famously disturbed by the 1913 Armory Show that introduced America to the European avant-garde. And the U.S. continued to favor the narrative realist styles of Andrew Wyeth, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell long after continental Europe’s artists had gone inward and abstract.
America’s own historical painter and pundit Kenyon Cox said of the modernist impulse that its “lack of discipline and the exaltation of the individual have very nearly made an end of art. It can only be restored by the love of beauty, the reverence for tradition, the submission to discipline and the rigor of self-control.”
A desire for discipline and a suppression of the individual will, while saving just a little moral room to exalt the painter and his subjects, are contradictory in the most Puritanical (read: American) way. As is Bouguereau’s own fine line between titillating prurience and innocent storytelling. The true nature of the American Spirit resides somewhere deep inside this show. Art has come a long way in the past 100 years; America’s consciousness has come even further. While other once-marginalized anti-modernist impulses such as the pre-Raphaelites and the Vienna Secession have been reevaluated and even resurrected in recent years, Bouguereau, alas, still looks as 19th century as a beaver pelt top hat. But man, could that guy paint.
