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| The Broken Pitcher by William-Adolphe Bouguereau's (1891) |
I went to the Legion of Honor Museum of Art in San Francisco on Saturday with my art history instructor and a few classmates. I was amazed to learn from her and another student that William-Adolphe Bouguereau's The Broken Pitcher was considered by many as porn/erotica at the time it was painted and exhibited.
Broken Pitcher shows so many elements of the theme of "lost innocence". This painting was scandalous and way too suggestive for some at the time. I am not going to argue that the young woman in the painting, her expression, body language, and the items around her communicate lost innocence, but I doubt many contemporary viewers would catch the message and classify it as bold, if at all.
I think most modern viewers that haven't taken an art history course would catch all the subtle and not-so-subtle suggestive elements in this piece. If you compare this painting to an American Apparel photo advertisement, the subtle concepts are lost to the modern sexualization of everything.
I am working on a similar image for my diptych series. My image is much more direct than Bouguereau's, but is still more subtle than current fashion/glamor advertising. (Below is a working version. I will use a different tombstone image since this one is for a boy.) I wonder how my diptych will be received. To be honest, I am not holding my breath on it.
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| Courtney and Lamb - 041811 |
An interesting art history lesson, Karl. In the past week, I seem to be discovering past censorship that I didn't know about before. One thing I will say. I pay a lot more attention to a visual or verbal work when it is censored. Perhaps censorship actually achieves the opposite of its intended purpose - to keep material from us.
ReplyDeleteSheeesh. Call me a modern insensitive, but lost innocence? Good greif, Mr. Rogers. Can we say "PROJECTION" boys and girls? Projection is when we take what we feel and say someone else is feeling it. Those folks back then had to be some of the horniest, kinkiest, most pitifully debauched beneath a forged iron repression to ever stomp dirt if what they saw in that picture was lost innocence. The pitcher is broken, yes it is... but a vessel for water is symbolic of the womb, fertility, the broken pitcher far, far more a symbol of being barren than some shame at being deflowered under less than prescribed conditions. Those folks are our ancestors, both physical and cultural, and we wonder why our world is the tangled up mess it is? Oh well. EVerything flows downhill, and payday is Friday.
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