Exhibition text
In the late nineteenth century, William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) was among the most celebrated painters in France. Within a generation, the modernists had made his name a punchline. His polished academic surfaces were dismissed as l'art pompier, “fireman art,” a joke usually traced to the gleaming classical helmets of academic painting, which critics likened to the brass helmets of the Paris fire brigade.
Collection 001 reclaims the insult. Royaux names it l'art laurier: the art of the laurel, the wreath once given to the worthy. What the avant-garde ridiculed as empty perfection, Royaux reads as discipline, a lifetime given to proportion, finish, and a beauty that does not apologise for itself.
Milwaukee holds part of this story. Bouguereau's Homer and His Guide (1874), in which the blind poet is led by a boy, belongs to the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum. The institution began in the same city.
Each work in the collection carries the institutional mark within Bouguereau's world: the painting carried, not copied.
Collection 001 is open for one season. Each work is made in an edition of 25 and is never restocked in its original form. When the exhibition closes, its works enter the Archive.