Dean's World

I love women. I do. I view them as fundamentally the same creatures as men, and yet ineffably and wonderfully different. Having a pregnant wife knocking about the house probably contributes to this view.

If you look at ancient Greek culture, they tended to be quite beauty-obsessed. They also treated their women as less than property. Indeed, if they were property, this would have implied a certain status: if you own something, you value it in some way, whereas women were not quite so valued. So while they revered beauty, it was male beauty they tended to revere. You could see it in their art, quite obviously.

Here is how they tended to view female beauty:

Not bad. But here is how they tended to view male beauty:

Notice how much more well-defined the male form is. How much more dramatic, less draped, more vibrant. The Greeks were obsessed with male beauty--and the status of their women was quite low.

Modern American culture tends to revere female beauty, and women have greater status in this society than they have in almost any culture in human history. And yet, have a look at the type of woman we have come to uphold as beautiful, such as Sarah Jessica Parker:

Now, I do not think that Miss Parker is an ugly woman. But just look at her. She is thin. Ridiculously thin. Stick legs, tiny arms, almost no waist to speak of. How many adult women really look like this? 5% of the female population? 2%? 1%?

I don't mind that our culture worships female beauty. Indeed, I think you could make a good case that the status of women, and the healthiness of society in general, has gone up at the exact same time as worship of female beauty has gone up. Yet somehow, I think we've gone wrong somewhere.

I can point to it just by pointing to this picture of another icon of female beauty, Marilyn Monroe. Just have a look at this photo of Marilyn in her heyday:

Just look at her. What a mess! Big, gigantic feet. Short, stubby legs with big thighs. Chunky upper arms. Could such a beast find a job in today's Hollywood?

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. But just look at Marilyn next to Sarah. Isn't it ridiculous?

But let me ask you a simple question: who looks more like a real, everyday woman? I submit that it is (size 12) Marilyn, and not (size zero) Sarah.

I love women. I love their grace and their beauty and their chattering and their silliness and their strength. Yet somehow, it seems that our culture went wrong somewhere. Somehow we decided that hollow cheeks, tiny little arms, long stick legs, no waist, no hips, tiny little feet, but unnaturally enormous breasts, are the epitome of female beauty. How did we come to this point?

We missed something somewhere, methinks.

Back in the late 1800s, there was an artist who I believe truly captured the beauty of the female form. In my mind, he should be revered as much as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and maybe even Da Vinci. He was a truly great artist. Perhaps he is forgotten because his work came just before the explosion of the expressionists, the cubists, the dadaists, the abstractionists, and so on. Perhaps he was just too old-fashioned, for he was completely overshadowed by the modern artists. But he should be remembered.

Who was he? His name was William Bouguereau.

He drew in the classical style, yet about 2/3rds of his work was based on the feminine form. He was truly great at it. He drew men, he drew children, he drew many things. But most especially he was without peer, before or since, when it came to drawing women.

He seems to me to have captured the essence of feminine grace. Yes, a somewhat romanticized view of the feminine, yet still a realistic depiction of it.

Indeed, here is an odd observation about him: I love the way he drew women's feet. He seemed to capture women's feet better than anyone. I am no foot fetishist by any means, but when you look at how he drew them, they were almost hyper-realistic.

Regardless of all that, just look at the way he drew women. Isn't it breathtaking?

He understood what real women looked like. He truly did.

I see two things when I see William Bouguereau's work. First, I see a man who drew in the classical style at a time when it was out of fashion, archaic, and underapreciated. This is tragic enough. Yet I also see an artist who, more than any other, appreciated the grace, the beauty, and the poetry of the feminine form, the true feminine form.

Women--real women--aren't they beautiful?

You can see more William Bouguereau right here.