Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was so earnest that it landed him in jail. When a former student asked him to use forged identity papers to open a bank account, Rousseau, who was then in his sixties, was happy to help out his old acquaintance. He seemed unaware that he was doing anything more than a favor, let alone committing fraud. To prove the painter’s innocence, his lawyer brought one of his canvases before the jury and declared: “You do not have the right to condemn a primitive.”
The works that result from such legendary naivety are on view at the Barnes Foundation in Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets. There’s always been a mystique surrounding the French artist: though he schmoozed with the Parisian avant-garde around the turn of the century, his work is distinct, even uncategorizable. Compared to many of the artists he spent time with, he began painting late in life and with little formal training. Instead, his work was characterized by sincere, childlike whimsy. For this, he was often ridiculed during his lifetime. His lawyer shrewdly realized that bringing out this painting would amuse and strike pity in the hearts of the jurors.
Rousseau builds each object from its details… this, incidentally, is how children draw
Rousseau worked as a tax collector in Paris for most of his adult life. (His avant-garde compatriots nicknamed him the “douanier.”) At the exhibition’s outset, “The Toll Gate” (c. 1890) depicts the artist’s presumable workplace: a gate manned by uniform-clad officials before a serene, landscaped path. Rousseau never advanced in his public service career, but while at work he began to sketch, and at the age of 49, he retired to focus on his painting.
Though it’s hard to tell, Rousseau painted from life. In fact, he recorded surface appearance to a fault: his paintings rarely betray any understanding of the underlying structure of what he depicted. In “The Past and the Present, or Philosophical Thought” (1889, see p.41) – an enchanting depiction of Rousseau and his second wife with the faces of their past spouses floating in the clouds above – the figures’ hands are bizarrely small. It looks like Rousseau had no clue how the skeleton, musculature and flesh were constructed under those white wedding gloves. In “The Football Players” (1908), limbs bend awkwardly and at junctures that should be impossible. When one player’s knee bends behind his other leg, his calf appears on the other side at a different height.
You can see this in his plants, too. Instead of developing the overall effect of a tree – the way branches split from the trunk, then the way the leaves spring from the branches – Rousseau is meticulously recording leaf by leaf. He’s not pulling from his imagination: even for the exotic tropical plants such as those in “Jungle Landscape with Setting Sun” (c. 1910), Rousseau visited hothouses and botanical gardens. He builds each object from its details, piecing together the ruddiness of cheeks and a mustache to make a face, rather than placing those features on top of a skull, or painting a petal and a petal and a petal to make a flower. This, incidentally, is how children draw.
As the exhibition demonstrates, the effect can be charming and even bewitching. A couple of military portraits from around 1893, “Portrait of Frumence Biche” and “Artillerymen,” have the pleasantly untutored look of paintings from the colonial Americas. In the jungle compositions, his style of depicting plants meets its match: the symmetrical ferns; smooth, waxy leaves and grasses; and splaying bird-of-paradise petals really are that primordial looking. Animals often have a human aspect, recalling children’s tales: in “Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo” (1908), the tiger’s front-facing, almond-shaped eyes are framed by neatly parted hair flowing down around its face.
Strangely, for all the teasing in the show’s title about the “painter’s secrets,” at every turn the curators chalk up Rousseau’s work to financial pressures and praise-chasing. A room of small paintings completed for commission seems to have been collected simply to emphasize their shoddy execution. Because the jungle paintings were his most popular works, the gallery that holds them is titled “Playing to the Crowd.”
But the exhibition’s final room, which features three of Rousseau’s most ambitious and enigmatic works, shows how unsatisfying these materialistic readings are. In “The Sleeping Gypsy” (1897), a lion muzzles around behind a slumbering woman who seems to be made up of all stripes – pink in her hair and red, blue, green and yellow in her dress. In “Unpleasant Surprise” (1899-1901), the colors of a woman’s nude body are echoed in the sunset behind her; a bear about to attack rears in shock from a gallant man’s gunfire. “The Snake Charmer” (1907) depicts a female figure of almost otherworldly darkness, serpents silhouetted all around. Everything in these pictures seems laden with meaning that’s just out of reach.
Rousseau was dead serious about his pursuit of childlike innocence, formally and in his subject matter. These pictures could only have come from an outlook of wonder, and at their best they incite wonder too. Perhaps the show gives us such bereft explanations because, in our day, Rousseau’s disposition is incomprehensible. The spirit of our age is the opposite: wonder is stupid. All the hidden meanings have already been discovered. Rousseau reveals just how untrue that is.
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