Richard,
Thanks for your reply. Both you and David put forward reasonable points but are they accurate with regards to B and to the 20th century?
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Disconnection with the themes and aesthetics of Bouguereau's time has more to do with cataclysmic changes wrought by World War I (which still resonate throughout today's culture) than native dislikes of certain subject matter or subjective handlings of imagery.
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Certainly WW1 did represent a fracture, for example 1918 saw the deaths of several of the Vienna giants including Klimt but I don't agree that the view of the aesthetics of B are seen through that prism since Degas and Monet not to mention Courbet before them had already rejected the superficiality as they saw it of the academic painters.
The 20th century was a vibrant century that gave us Matisse, Picasso, Ernst, Rivera, Giacometti, Hopper, Hockney, Moore, Freud and Coldstream just to mention a random few. I agree that the latter decades of the century were tough if you were interested in rigourous figurative training but the century was rich, expressive and diverse.
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