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From The Banquet Years: The Arts in France,
1885-1918 Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire.
Contributors: Roger Shattuck - author. Publisher: Harcourt Brace. Place of
Publication: FOUR
· The Paintings They [the
primitive painters of 1300-1500] had in common a compact clear technique, and
a still awkward command of form, movement, and light, although often more
personal and moving than that of their successors. -- Charles Sterling, Les
peintres primitifs The initial
question in dealing with Rousseau's work is immediately thrust upon us: Is he
a modern "primitive"? The terms "primitive" and
"naïf" were used very early to describe his work and found ready
acceptance; recent estimates of his work have tended to treat him as a
painter who cannot be separated from the evolution of modern art by such glib
and arbitrary classifications. Almost fifty years after his death we may well
challenge the stock adjectives. Yet if its meaning is carefully restricted,
the term "primitive" can be applied to Rousseau without
misrepresentation. It is no
slur to call Giotto and Cimabue "primitive"; it is a means of
locating them within two centuries which prepare the formulation of the
strict optical conventions of Renaissance art. Rousseau reveals a comparable
primitivism, for he strove in his conscious thinking about art to achieve a
naturalistic, academic style. He admired Bouguereau and Gérôme and Courtois.
Twentieth-century Western art, however, the disgruntled offspring of a great
naturalistic tradition culminating in impressionism, was seeking out the
methods of primitives from But it is
important to realize that the style which he achieved was but a stopping
place upon a road along which he would have travelled further if he could,
and that the effect which be attains, seen from the point of view of the
mechanics and psychology of its creation, is because of this
intention, even if it is in spite of it from the point of view of the
sophisticated observer. ( Primitivism in Modern Art) In other words, Rousseau was
primitive in performance but not in intention. The distinction is accurate
yet dangerous. * What is usually described as his intention was
really his ambition--the desire to show in official Salons. It was the
only reward he could imagine after a life of obscurity and hardship. The
ponderous machine-like titles for his paintings express this ambition
without indicating the limited extent to which it influenced his actual
painting. The patent disparity between his so-called aims and his
accomplishments has bothered many critics, but never Rousseau. He learned
what he needed from successful academic painters, their smooth brushwork and
skillful color; then he went his own way. In considering his work we can
distinguish artistic intentions from worldly ambitions only by looking at
what he was willing to sign as the product of his hand. Confused and irritated by these
distinctions, many a critic reaches the point of speculating on how much of a
simpleton Rousseau was--as if the greater his doltishness, the better his
painting, because the more miraculous. Following this line of reason,
artistic fashion has tended to inflate Rousseau's reputation by calling him a
talented ass. No comment should be necessary on this collapse of critical
thinking. Rousseau's intelligence as a painter must be measured in his
painting and not in his sentimentality or his ignorance of banking finance. More than the complaint that
Rousseau is a product of fashion, a related accusation goes to the heart of
the cas Rousseau. He has been called --though not in these terms--the
"sandwich man" of modern art, the downand-out bum to whom a miserly
wage of recognition was paid to perform the humiliating task of publicizing
modern painting. In this interpretation his living or remembered figure
becomes the pitiable dupe of cubism and surrealism and every other ism, the
victim who earned only laughter for his efforts. The surface meaning of the
accusation is, of course, wrong; Rousseau painted independently, carried
advertising posters for no one, and was not ridiculed by other painters. But
there is a latent content in this accusation, the implication that Rousseau
represents a special case of modernism. It will require an entire chapter to
reveal the truth beneath the falsehood. There remains one last
preliminary: the technical problems of dealing with Rousseau's work. First of
all, forgeries. Soon after his death, a profusion of counterfeit Rousseaus
appeared in ____________________
appeared in The other technical problem is
dating. In general, all Rousseau's works should be dated earlier than the
years accepted today, even many works he dated himself. Rousseau could not
possibly have painted so many works in his four last years as are now
assigned to the period 1907-1910. The date of a painting's exhibition at the
Salon des Indépendants does not necessarily correspond to the date of its
completion. Attaining a certain notoriety at the close of his life, Rousseau
naturally drew upon a stock of earlier works and ideas, and dated them--as
did Bonnard and Chagall-with the year of their public appearance. The
peculiar qualities of his style have produced a situation in which many of
his paintings must be dated loosely within a period of ten years. As an artist, Rousseau followed
no steady evolution of style, nor even a series of outwardly melodramatic
reversals like Picasso's. At his first Salon des Indépendants in 1886, the
year following his retirement at fortyone, Rousseau hung Un soir de
carnaval, 7 one of his masterpieces. Painted large (almost four by
three feet) and in limpid color, this canvas shows him already in command of
his mature style. The brushwork and detail are immaculate, and he combines in
an astonishingly simple composition areas of pure color with areas of an
intricate fretwork in silhouette. Twelve years later Rousseau painted an equally
successful picture, La bohémienne endormie. 28 It restricts treatment of detail to the lion's mane and
the robe of the gypsy and allows areas of subtle color to glow in the same
mysterious moonlight that filled Un soir de carnaval. A gradual
simplification of manner appears to have taken place. After a similar
interval came the final masterpiece, Le rêve, 53 almost his largest picture. † Rousseau returned to the exploitation of detail and
unrolled a veritable tapestry of exotic foliage with a few spaces of solid
color; again, moonlight and mystery. In none of these compositions did he
explore linear perspective; we feel space as accumulation. In Le rêve
he accumulated detail to create the physical presence of the jungle; in La
bohémienne endormie he accumulated plain (and plane) color to imply
depth; in Un soir de carnaval, the best of the three and the earliest,
he employed both methods. What can one tell of his "evolution" from
these ____________________
high points in his career? Only that
he reached the fullness of his style very early and sustained it to the last.
Three portraits spaced at equal
intervals across his years as a painter point to the same conclusion. Despite
their miniature size and style, the pair of portraits of Monsieur and Madame
Stevenc, 5, 6 dated 1884 (not exhibited until 1906), have already
developed the conventions and simplifications of the human face which
Rousseau used in his Autoportrait à lampe 8 ( 1890) and in the last of his portraits, Joseph Brummer 50 ( 1909). The treatment of nose, eyes, and hair--the
fundamentals of Rousseau's portrait style --changed very little. The
paintings imply no clear development in stages. One must accept the craftsman
in Rousseau which made him approach every subject in a paradoxical manner:
every painting was a totally fresh endeavor, a problem removed from previous
experience and demanding no logical place in a regular progression of styles;
and at the same time every painting called forth a number of conventional
techniques and characteristic emblems which solved for him some of the more
troublesome problems and marked it as his work. The pure craftsman thinks not
so much of improvement and progress as of maintaining a high level of skill.
If
there is a traceable progression in Rousseau's work, it has been described by
the critics Daniel Catton Rich and Douglas Cooper. However, the chronological
approach to his work is a misleading convenience. One stage does not grow
logically out of the last, as we usually expect from an artist. Along with
their similarities, the paintings have a discontinuous quality which suggests
that the order of their execution is not a profoundly relevant factor. In
addition, the uncertain dating of the bulk of Rousseau's canvases makes
chronological classification difficult. The extreme irresponsibility is to
date them in such a way as to demonstrate a preconceived scheme of
progression. A few points must be granted. Rousseau's earliest paintings--the few
still extant--tend to be very small. The first sizable painting we know is Un
soir de carnaval, a hint that he swiftly developed a kind of miniature style
into very large compositions. Yet the smallness of the early work is
explained in great part by his lack of time for painting until he retired.
Then the dimensions enlarge suddenly. Around the turn of the century,
Rousseau appears to have experimented a little with atmospheric perspective
in a tentative approach to impressionist technique. Many drawings, like the
one belonging to Max Weber of the Vue de Malakoff, 56 and a few paintings like Vue d'un coin du chateau de
Bellevue 31 (c. 1900), suggest the foliage of the background rather
than depicting it in detail. The most remarkable shift in Rousseau's work,
his turning to tropical and exotic scenes during the last five years of his
life, grew as much out of the circumstances of his unorthodox career as out
of any aesthetic conviction. The jungle scenes became popular when they were
exhibited and sold better than his other works. His own need and a ready market
impelled him to repeat tropical subjects to the verge of mechanical
production. Rousseau collected and read
attentively everything that was written about him, and it is remotely
possible that the early articles on his "primitive" manner helped
produce the singular arrest at that stage. Despite conflicting intentions, he
always painted in a highly personal style, and it is doing him no injustice
to propose that he may have unconsciously understood that there were
qualities in his work quite different from the traditional execution he
admired. Whatever its origin, the singleness of Rousseau's style--the
combination of stiffness and freshness in every painting--is the essence of
his greatness; through thirty years and more than three hundred paintings he
worked with the same fundamental insights. Aside from still lifes, Rousseau
painted only two subjects: landscape and the human figure. In itself the
choice is neither original nor startling. Rousseau's work owes its distinct
qualities not so much to his treatment of these separate subjects as to the
manner in which he combined them. Through a widely shifting balance of
components, his painting portrays man occupying landscape. Rousseau's
genius, the secret of his art, can be best perceived in the naturalness and
mystery of this relationship. Thus, his production can be
classified less satisfactorily by chronological periods than according to the
way it yields to particular stresses and according to the completeness of the
integration he makes between two basic ingredients. There are three obvious
categories: straight landscapes, straight portraits, and a combination of the
two for which, significantly, Rousseau had his own term,
"portrait-landscapes." Out of them grows a fourth category of
paintings in which the balance is so subtly yet powerfully struck that they
transcend both landscape and portrait to achieve a superior realityhis most
haunting and inscrutable works. These categories serve to divide Rousseau's
work for purposes of analysis and to suggest the meaning he found in the
visible world. The pure
portraits, lacking any hint of landscape, are very few and early. The twin
portraits of Monsieur and Madame Stevenca 5, 6 are followed six years later by another pair, Autoportrait
à la lampe 8 and Portrait de la femme de l'artiste à la lampe 9 ( 1890). The first pair (probably copied from
photographs) immediately suggest miniatures by their size and by the oval
space which Rousseau lay out to contain the figures. Using areas of even
color in the background and clothes, he concentrates our attention on the
faces, which are masklike in their rigidity. But they are still human--intensifications
of the human face in the manner that Jarry insisted upon in advocating masks
for stage use. The rigidity is caused by the absence of modeling and shadow
and by the use of a kind of facial convention to portray features. It is the
formula he used all his life: a prominent nose with flaring nostrils and a
bridge which divides in two unbroken lines to form thick eye- brows; large
eyes printed in heavy outline; and a straight expressionless mouth. The eyes
stead out strongly because of the black contour which he invariably applied;
they seem to stare out through a mask. The eyes of Madame Stevenc, by their
shape and placement, resemble the cryptic pair of eyes that appear on one
side of ancient Egyptian sarcophagi. The two later portraits, of
Rousseau and his wife, reaching the dimensions of a sheet of typewriter
paper, present a considerable contrast. Without giving up his basic
simplifications, Rousseau appears to have been concerned with both the idea
of a good likeness and the inclusion of realistic detail. The faces are a
complex structure of planes, not a single flat shape. He worked carefully
this time with a rhythmic pattern of lines in the background and introduced
the decorative-symbolic presence of the brass lamp. The wrinkles that he
painted into the faces serve both as severe realism and as lines of stress
and tension in the composition. Rousseau's later depictions of human features
varied his original formula without elaborating it. * The only other straight portrait
is the little ink sketch that Rousseau drew of himself in 1895. 55 Fortunately, we can compare it with the excellent
photograph of him as a young man from which it was copied. Rousseau observed
the general pose and silhouette of the photograph and paid almost loving
attention to the flowing lines of hair and beard. Then he boldly blackened
the contours of nose and eyebrows and turned the shoulders, the coat, and
even the face into direct frontality. What the figure loses in handsomeness
it gains back in strength of line. The little drawing shows a characteristic
blend of crudeness and skill. In 1890, the year of the two
portraits with lamp, Rousseau exhibited Moi-même, portrait-paysage. 10 From that
year on with the exception of the sketch, all his portraits took the form of
the human figure in a carefully arranged setting--usually full-length.
Autoportrait à la lampe already indicates that Rousseau felt the need of a
rhythmical and decorative background to fill out the composition; his still
lifes contain similar backgrounds. This early self-portrait also includes a
domestic object, the brass lamp, the first of a whole repertory of
accouterments which accompany the subjects of his portraiture. We never find
Rousseau isolating human features as a form of pure beauty or expression.
They appear in association with appropriate landscape or fragments of
ordinary life. There was nothing casual about the name he gave this type of
painting, which he considered his discovery. In 1907, writing the juge
d'instruction before his trial, he stated flatly: "I am ____________________
the inventor of the
portrait-landscape." He gave it as a credential, an accomplishment for
which he would be remembered. In the Moi-même portrait
of 1890, decorative and symbolic details surround and encroach on the
standing figure of Rousseau. Their cumulative significance matches that of
the human form. His palette, brush, and artist's beret establish his
profession. A
few years later, Rousseau painted another portrait-landscape, La première
femme de l'artiste. 19 Like Moi-même, it is a large composition (80
x 45 inches), and the bright background of foliage and flowers crowds the
margins around the tall full-skirted woman. † One hand "rests" on her hip; the other holds a
dainty parasol; a kitten plays with a ball of wool at her feet. The portrait
effortlessly runs the gamut from playfulness in the kitten, through exoticism
in the background, to calm elegance in the formalized yet handsome face. It
was to be another fifteen years before Rousseau matched the magnificence of
these two portraits. Without laboring over physical likeness, he expressed
character in a pose, or repose, of the whole body, in a selection of
significant objects attached to the figure, and in a meticulously painted
background. He portrayed not an appearance but an environment. In
1891 Rousseau exhibited a small portrait of Pierre Loti 11 which should probably be dated somewhat earlier. The
painting assembles a number of parts related as much by composition as by an
anecdotal meaning: an obsessive, masklike face with more than usual attention
to shadow and modeling; a red fez and dark-curled mustache; a staring tiger
cat sitting in the foreground on a little table; a large hand with cigarette
and ring-almost a separate creature--placed over the heart; a red and white
collar arrangement like a cutout in the deep black of the coat; a large tree
on one ____________________
side balanced against a compact
row of four chimneys on the other; and a single cauliflower ear (although the
head is shown almost full face) protruding from the right side of the face
like an artificial hearing device or a deformity. Yet for all the separateness
of the parts, the painting does not fall apart. A slack area immediately
appears if any detail is covered, and a strong, ironic personality is very
much present in the portrait. Rousseau continued the
portrait-landscape approach in a series of children's portraits which span
the years 1893 to 1905. As if a child's world were one of simplified reality,
he reduces the décor in most of them to a flat area of grass and
flowers on which the child neither sits nor stands, but hovers, as in Portrait
d'enfant. 37 (One
unfinished portrait shows a chair being brushed in around the child like a
scaffolding.) The faces, heavily fleshed and sometimes almost bearded,
resemble adult faces on stunted bodies. L'enfant
aux rochers, 24 with its bleak unearthly foreground of jagged rock,
recalls the photographer's painted prop with comic scene and hole for the
head. Despite their deformity, the paintings have a wistful beauty. Each
child holds a flower and stares rigidly out of the frame, bold but lost. In
the most ambitious child's portrait, Pour fêter le bébé; l'enfant au
polichinelle 36 ( 1903), a sturdy blond child clothed in white occupies
most of the large canvas and holds at arm's length a marionette figure of
Punch. The marionette, costumed in brilliant motley, brings a strange
reversal into the painting, for its dark features (aside from an enormous
handlebar mustache) appear more human than those of the child. In fact, the
angular Punch strung on his wires resembles Rousseau's conventional depiction
of himself. We have crossed into the world of fairy stories and magical
dances in which toys came to life and the child moves among them as an equal.
Three late paintings observe the balance of
portrait-landscape: Une noce à la campagne 38 ( 1905), Le Poète et sa muse 51, 52 ( 1909), and the Portrait de Joseph Brummer 50 ( 1909). They employ what is almost a
compositional formula: the figure or figures are placed in the middle of the
canvas and surrounded by a pattern of sinuous branches and foliage against a
light sky. The dark or black clothing is set off by one patch of color, and a
small object is introduced at the bottom to keep the foreground alive. Une
noce à la campagne demonstrates the surprising range of facial appearance the
Douanier could express within the limitations of his nose-eyebrow-eye scheme;
he painted eight figures as radically different as characters out of Dickens.
He also discovered a means, repeated in the Brummer portrait, of lightening
the entire composition. He decreased the amount of foliage from left to right
across the canvas, so that one feels free space surrounding the bare tree
trunks on the right side. In the Brummer portrait he achieved the same effect
by lightening the shade of green in the leaves from left to right. Ever since Rembrandt, the intense portrayal of human characterr has tended to eliminate the
natural world as a distraction. The face should tell all. Even the romantics
hesitated to paint a formally commissioned portrait out of doors. Rousseau
set his highly formal compositions against pastoral or semipastoral
backgrounds. His refusal to separate portraiture from landscape and genre
painting characterizes the "primitive" sensibility which sees a
person and the objects that surround him as a single entity. Rousseau treated
his canvas as a surface upon which to combine and relate the material parts
of a person's life, rather than as a means of dramatically isolating a face
from all incidentals. Despite the significance of these
portrait-landscapes, by far the greatest number of Rousseau's paintings are
landscapes--so called by him and frequently entitled View of. . . with
a place name. Probably because they keep to small dimensions, seldom
exceeding twenty inches in length or breadth, he was able to produce several
every year. He found all the scenery he needed in and around Landscape
painting, then, proclaims Rousseau's steadfast sense of beauty and reality in
nature, a sense of the true picturesque. That abused word is a guide
to the second quality of his landscapes. In the process of beginning a
picture, Rousseau used scenery as the material for a carefully thought-out
composition within the imposed limits of the frame. His earliest dated work, Petit
moulin avec attelage 1, 2 ( 1879), exists in two versions (and probably more),
which show Rousseau changing the proportions of his picture area, omitting
trees, narrowing the foreground, adding a woman's figure, and varying his
tints in order to consolidate a composition that was originally too open. Yet
it is indisputably the same scene. A few years later in La falaise 4 (c. 1885) he began to reduce everything to flat areas of
color and sloping diagonals punctuated with small shapes--sails and men. Yet
it remains a recognizable place. Before 1900 he returned to clarity of detail
and settled upon what subsequently becomes the basic unit of design in his
landscapes: the tree. Like Corot, the Douanier discovered the double soul of
the tree: the clearly marked, sinuous line of trunk and branches, and the
massed rhythmic color area of foliage. For the most part he built up a
tracery of trunks and branches in the foreground; behind it he spread thick,
luminous foliage, which is picked out in detail only as it approaches the
foreground. Between these two planes, not separated by any contrived feeling
of depth, are placed a few small objects--usually men and women in highly
stylized costumes and postures. Three or four landscapes fit this
scheme almost perfectly, for instance Paysage 32a and Bois de Vincennes 33 ( 1901). In both the arabesques of bare tree trunks in
the foreground move across a nearly impressionist background of autumn color.
The long tranquil horizontal of wall in the former divides the painting
vertically and not in depth; in the latter the silhouette of one prominent evergreen
adds both horizontal and vertical emphasis. The tiny human beings, who move
in terrible isolation across the scene, inhabit another universe from that of
the bold figures in the portraitlandscapes. These little creatures wander,
lost and anonymous, in the powerful presence of Nature. In the last tropical
paintings, most of them of much greater size than the earlier landscapes,
natural growth encroaches overwhelmingly on any human presence. The only
surviving creatures are semilegendary dream figures, animals, and
aboriginals. For Rousseau, landscape is not houses or mountains or virgin
forest; it is man walking in wonder among the trees. At intervals during his steady
production of works that record the mutual attunement of landscape and the
human figure, Rousseau painted canvases that surpass both landscape and
portraiture. All are large compositions in which a distinct feeling of awe
and catastrophe has intensified his style without basically modifying it.
Their thematic content is uniform: in either a totally barren or an
unnaturally verdant countryside, a living creature confronts a mysterious
presence. Rousseau did not himself separate these paintings from the rest of
his production, yet in them he contrives to express an almost undefinable
experience. They testify less to a special effort on his part to outdo
himself than to a happy choice of subject which released latent powers. Chronologically
they are distributed evenly through his entire career. Un
soir de carnaval 7 (
1886) The list is a minimum. The
enigmatic subjects range from the serene arm-in-arm pose of Un soir de
carnaval to the savagely carnivorous attack of Le lion ayant faim.
La bohémienne endormie owes its effectiveness to the fact that the
encounter is unresolved: we cannot know whether the lion will devour the
gypsy or respect her dark sleep. This picture, more than the others, provides
the key to the mystery of these confrontations. In an arid desert scene of
night sky and brown sand meeting in a clearly drawn horizon, a lion stares at
a sleeping form clothed in brilliant colors. A stilllife arrangement of
mandolin and jar in the lower corner seems to hold the whole composition
motionless until one suddenly notices the lion's tail, which is lashing wildly.
Its savage movement creates a frightening challenge to the stillness. Robert
Melville writes of this work: We can abstract from The
Sleeping Gypsy a recipe for the enigma in painting: it is the situating
of utterly still, imperturbably self-contained figures in a purely formal
relationship which contrives nevertheless to simulate the appearance of an
encounter. The stillness and formality of
these paintings reside not so much in the lack of any portrayal of motion,
but in the absence of normal motivation of the events taking place. What is
the lone woman with her parasol doing out in the sinister-looking woods in Promenade? And what has startled
her? Why does a sofa appear in the middle of the jungle in Le rêve? Each work has its riddle whose
answer lies partly in the glib phrase that Rousseau "dreamed it all
up." His tranquil consciousness could transpose directly onto canvas a
waking dream. The dream aroused his full capacities as an artist when it
contained a feeling of doom, of fateful happenings not explicitly defined.
The power of these inscrutable scenes rests on the simplicity and ease with
which Rousseau the conscious craftsman could be attentive to Rousseau the
dreamer. The
works have a few more points in common. In most of them there is a detail
that corresponds to the disconcerting movement of the lion's tail. In Un soir
de carnaval, below all the intricate pattern of foliage and behind the two
costumed figures, a masked face peers out from a tiny window in the hut: some
baleful presence lurks in the calm moonlight. In Nègre attaqué par un
léopard, the small all-black figure of the Negro against the thick
undergrowth looks more like the shadow of a man than like solid flesh. The
leopard has locked its jaws on emptiness. In the manner of Uccello's battle
and hunt paintings, several scenes gain in mystery by creating great depth of
perspective without any atmospheric softening of line. Values of near and far
are partly suppressed. A distant line of mountains on the horizon in La
guerre is etched as cleanly as the tree trunk in the foreground. Space is at
the same time projected and flattened. * In the trop- ____________________
ical compositions, every
carefully painted leaf tends to come to rest in the front plane, as in
tapestry work. Behind the matted foliage one imagines the watchfulness of
creatures whose forms cannot be clearly distinguished. Whatever their subject
and treatment, all these paintings partake of an atmosphere of ritual and
formality. The emotional charge they communicate resembles that which
emanates from Egyptian hieratic art; yet like Oedipus before the Sphinx, we
find our awe mixed with irreverence and defiance. For a detached observer,
sacred ritual can easily change in appearance into stylized preposterousness,
and one must acknowledge a realm of art which is both disturbing and
diverting. "The riddle," writes J. Huizinga in a sentence that
fixes one of the neglected cultural contexts of art, "was originally a
sacred game, and as such cut clear across any possible distinction between
play and seriousness." Rousseau's most haunting paintings are riddles in
this profound sense: true grotesques which provoke apprehensive laughter
followed by long wonderment. Having seen them once, one never forgets them. These riddle paintings do not,
however, form a compact classification. They are all hors série,
exceptional in the sense that they stand apart from the rest of Rousseau's
work, from each other, and from the whole history of painting. In order to
give reality to each separate vision of mystery, Rousseau labored over every
inch of the huge canvases and filled them with a sense of transformed
reality. Within their borders landscape, wild beast, and human being partake
of a single life. That life can be regarded as the all-absorbing presence of
Nature, or, better, as the singleness of Rousseau's internal eye. A
classification of Rousseau's painting based on the changing balance between
landscape and human figure omits the important series of still lifes, that he
began around 1890. In 1892 he painted a curious decorative panel of a hand
holding three roses, called Bonne
fête. 17 Probably of the same period is Bouquet de poète, 13 a simple arrangement of flowers in a bowl set against
areas of solid color. It is difficult to date the subsequent works that,
almost without exception, show a vase of flowers standing on a table against
a plain background. A small painting belonging to Louis Stern, 25 with a pinkish-brown background and impasto technique,
may well be the earliest of a series of four or five painted of the same
white vase filled with different flowers in a variety of color combinations.
Rousseau took the dominant color of whatever flowers he happened to have,
used it in two different tints in the background, and developed it through
contrast into a vibrant harmony of tones. One of the best of this series, 35 belonging to the Tate Gallery, is a study in shades of
red and pink interspersed with green, dark brown, yellow, and blue. Confined
by flat treatment to the front plane of the composition, the still lifes
nevertheless gain movement from the subtle lines Rousseau wove into
the background color. His literal vision had its own freedom. If he painted a
vase so tall as to make the composition topheavy, he placidly added a sprig
of ivy in the lower foreground to readjust the balance. These still lifes, by their
directness and simplicity and by their sensitive color, go beyond elementary
values of composition and decoration. Generally the smallest of his works and
the most thickly painted, they carry an intensity of feeling--feeling about pure
color and natural form-that often becomes diffuse in his larger canvases.
Their intensity resembles that of Redon's flower paintings, a subdued passion
which contrasts with the monochrome analyses of early cubism. The palpably
objective existence on canvas of Rousseau's still lifes produces a set of
subjective harmonies which can be conveyed only by those colors, those
arabesques of stem and petal. The term "magic realism," a misnomer
for most of Rousseau's painting, partly describes his flower still lifes. The
very plainness of their reality is mysterious. Several of Rousseau's most
ambitious paintings have not yet been discussed: Le centenaire de
l'indépendance 16 ( 1892), La liberté invitant les artistes 40 ( 1906), La
république 43 ( 1907), and Les
joueurs de football 45 ( 1908). The first three are large paintings of festivity
and celebration performed in the spirit of the professional artist in his
public and civil role. The Centenaire,
in fact, began as a project submitted to a jury for the decoration of a borough
hall in Les joueurs de football is
almost the only significant painting in which Rousseau concentrated on the
human form in movement--focused on it as intently as on the stillness of a
vase of flowers. * In a carefully laid-out clearing, four players in
brightly striped costumes quite literally gambol. Rousseau is not concerned
with an accurate documentary vision of the game. He turns it into a
remarkably convincing dance. The figures move-for it is possible in a work of
art--in total stillness. One partial explanation of the paradox can be
discerned. Despite some obvious awkwardness in execution, the poses of raised
hands and high-stepping legs imply vigorous movement; but in their dance
these well-lit bodies cast no shadow. They appear to have no location, to
float in air, as do many of Rousseau's subjects. Movement without location
achieves a kind of abstraction or purity. ____________________
Still, there is nothing ethereal
about the strongly featured faces. Even a note of comedy appears when one
notices that the two yellow-and-red-striped players are blond and the two
pink-and-blue-striped players are dark. Around them stands a close frame of
foliage; in the center background Rousseau marks off the field of action with
the clean white ruling of a rail fence which jumps forward out of the blurred
leaves. None of the anatomical inaccuracies can diminish the liveliness of
the composition, which rates among Rousseau's best. Considering the wide variety of
works from his brush, one can hardly assign Rousseau to any restricting
classification. The term "primitive" allows him as great a range as
the term "modern." Aside, however, from certain of his still lifes
and Les joueurs de football, the
most interesting aspect of his work is its constant readjustment of the
components of landscape and the human figure. The same could be said of the
Sienese Sassetta, certain of whose paintings in the Saint Anthony series
depend on the placement of the people within a studied arrangement of trees
and rocks. And with all his mastery, Poussin devoted himself to the same
problem. Poussin, however, setting his figures in lovely pastoral
countryside, creates a feeling of Olympian nostalgia; Rousseau was content to
paint familiar scenes within walking distance of Artists
have many signature. Conventionally they supply name and date in a lower
corner, an indication that the painting is finished and ready for its public
career. Another kind of signature, one that helps identify Rousseau's work,
can be read not in a single painting but in the recurrence of certain objects
or combinations of detail through a whole series of paintings. The category
does not include the deliberate repetition of principal subject such as the
Annunciation in Christian art or the façade of the Cathedral of Rouen in
Monet's series. It applies, rather, to the unconscious tendency of the artist
to include a few familiar items in painting after painting: the cupped candle
in the best of Georges de la Tour's works, the smokestacks on the horizon of
Degas's race-track paintings, the ubiquitous cow that wanders in and out of
Chagall's dreams. Such a repeated detail can easily become a mannerism: for
example, certain letter combinations in cubist collages, like journal
and vins, went through such an evolution. Or, in the hands of a highly
self-conscious artist, it can be incorporated into the normal signature:
Whistler's butterfly. Used discreetly or unconsciously, these details are
best described as emblems, objects whose recurrence gives them
heightened significance. They are like tiny still lifes carried over into
landscape and portraiture and noticeable only to the unhurried eye. In Rousseau such emblems are
reasonably frequent and remain unconscious. His two principal stylizations or
formalizations, namely, of the human face and of trees and foliage, cannot be
considered emblems. They constitute his principal and conscious subject
matter. But when he reduces the human figure to miniatures in broad-brimmed
hats walking through the park, then he is using these tiny black shapes
differently. Are they casual people strolling through the Vue de Malakoff
48 or Le Parc Montsouris 20? There appears to be
more to them than that. As a child does, Rousseau painted himself into every
composition that he could: in the back row left of Une noce à la campagne,
38 out in front shaking hands with Redon in La liberté
invitant les artistes, 40 to the right of Père Juniet in La carriole du père
Juniet, 47 and so on. Correspondingly, the little men with canes
that parade through the landscape take on the significance of Rousseau's
emblematic presence in the scenes he paints. They do, in fact, look like him.
He inhabits his paintings the way most of us inhabit our dreams. In the
middle ground of Un soir de carnaval appears a curious object for that
forlorn spot--a street lamp. It occurs with equal irrelevance in the isolated
countryside of Petit paysage 32 (c. 1900) as if it had grown like the trees around it. In
many paintings, like L'octroi 29 and La passerelle de Passy 21 and Vue de Malakoff, 48 the street lamp asserts itself in clear outline. Rousseau
must have liked its stable convenient shape. It is doubtful if he ever
thought of it as an urban symbol to be slyly introduced into pastoral scenes.
Rather, he felt at ease with so totally familiar an object. When one occurs
in the scene he is painting, he assimilates its simple lines into his
composition; when he needs something to fill out a space in one of his
landscapes, he often gratuitously supplies a street lamp, as if every corner
of In
several early canvases, Rousseau worked out a compact little shape to occupy
part of the background. It consists of a village of red tile roofs clustered
around the tall spire of a church. He used it as a point of color and a
triangular shape--and also probably as the emblem of the village that exists
just over the horizon of every French country landscape. But before long,
this simple sign of man's habitation on earth bursts out into a far more dramatic
shape--the sky line the year before. Soon
after, he painted Tour Eiffel et Trocadéro, 26 and from
then on it becomes as familiar in his painting as the street lamp. While
cultivated people were complaining about this blemish on the Comparison
of the painting Tour Eiffel et Trocadéro with the original sketch 54 reveals that Rousseau added one principal detail: the
little man in the foreground fishing in the river. If there was a single
human pose that Rousseau found appropriate to his scenes, it was that of the
fisherman. He is both active and passive; his action consists in keeping
still. He appears so regularly beside Rousseau's painting of the The
emblems mentioned so far are sprinkled through Rousseau's landscapes. In the
portraits, which tend to reduce the components to face, costume, and
background, there is only one set of objects that asserts its presence as
more than normally significant. The clue comes, perhaps, from the decorative
panel Bonne fête 17 ( 1892), which represents a hand holding some roses. This
severed hand with its clean cuff and distorted shape has already appeared
holding a cigarette in the Portrait de Loti 11 ( 1891), reappears eerily foreshortened in L'enfant aux
rochers 24 ( 1897), and takes its place in many subsequent
portrait-landscapes. Rousseau makes one aware that our clothing leaves
exposed only two areas of flesh, the face and the hands. They are our most
sensitive centers of expression. In Une noce à la campagne 38 he keeps all hands hidden
except those of two old grandparents in the front and the bride's holding the
groom's. That awkward clasp, placed just where her white dress meets the jet
black of the men's suits, is the most conjugal touch in the painting. In the
Brummer portrait the relaxed hands hang from the arms of the chair and convey
a repose that does not appear in the stark face. It is no great distance from
Rousseau's independent treatment of hands to their removal from context in
cubist and surrealist painting for display as suggestive or symbolic
fragments. The
special significance of emblems in Rousseau's work lies in their double
nature as arbitrary and appropriate. When he painted a street lamp into a
landscape or placed a hand against a black coat in an anatomically impossible
position, he was often arbitrarily adding to a composition for reasons of stress and balance.
Occasionally he must have acted on pure whim. But the detail added is almost
always appropriate to his entire vision. It is right that there should be
fishermen along the Seine; the world now agrees with Rousseau that the Rousseau's primitivism and his
modernism finally come into focus most revealingly in his method--for he had
a method. It involved a regular sequence of procedure, and rested, despite
his estimate of himself, far more on plane composition and interplay of color
than on conventions of optical representation. Usually he began with a small
rudimentary version of his subject: a photograph, sketch, or engraving. The
subjects he chose were formal and (except for the tropical scenes, which he
rapidly made his own) familiar. * His basic method was free copying, a technique that
allows a painter to work quietly in his studio and avoid long hours before a
model or landscape. Manet and Degas used photographs, often to produce a more
literal transposition than any of Rousseau's copies. Blake's florid treatment
of the classic human figure and drapery resulted from his having copied
fragments of engravings and prints. For Rousseau, as his portraits show, the
photograph or print served as a preliminary assembling of materials, out of
which he composed the painting. The photograph of the Juniet family from
which he painted the celebrated La carriole du père Juniet 47 shows how he selected and revised at will. The bleak
snapshot is transformed into a study of red wheels and shafts penetrating
masses of black. In the painting the people sit in a compact arrangement in
the cart, with space around them, instead of standing formlessly on the curb.
They have become, recognizably, creatures of Rousseau's vision. His own sketches, even more than
photographs, reveal the logic of his method. They range from fairly crude pen
and ink drawings on paper to expert impressionist landscapes in oil. Few
measure over twelve inches in either dimension. In at least nine instances we
can compare the sketch ____________________
-78- and the completed painting based
on it. There are no sketches of portraits or of tropical scenes, for in both
cases he probably painted partly from photographs and partly out of his own
imagination. It is for landscapes that he developed a shorthand technique
comparable to that of Seurat in his croquetons. Again the problem of
dating arises in the attempt to trace the maturing of his sketching style. * After the sensitive but somewhat uncertain ink drawings
of 1885, Rousseau turned to rapidly brushed oil on cardboard and increased
the terseness and suggestiveness of his line. In two outstanding sketches in
this style, Paysage avec pêcheur 57 and Tour Eiffel et Trocadéro, 54 he painted
with obvious ease, leaving areas of bare canvas to express mass and even line
(the fishing rod) and employing only restrained tones of gray, green, and
black. Out of these highly sophisticated drawings he formed the schemes of
finished paintings which, totally different in style, insist upon precise
detail, local color, evenly covered canvas, and balanced design. This
transformation is the heart of his work. He taught himself an amazingly
skillful technique in sketching, yet he refused to consider these sketches
the final product of his talent. Considering this clear discrimination of
purpose, we cannot call him a naïve painter. Rousseau
signed his sketches and in earlier years exhibited many of his drawings. In a
letter to Apollinaire in 1908 he wrote, "Excuse me for not having
answered your letter right away, I was working in the country and only came
back yesterday." He considered sketching from Nature an essential part
of his work. Yet the size and scrupulousness of detail never leave the
slightest doubt as to what is a sketch and what is a finished painting. In his
studio Rousseau went about laying out and filling in his canvases in a
systematic manner. Contradictory reports of his work methods yield a general
idea of how he proceeded. First he outlined the general scheme of the
composition and indicated areas of color. Then, starting at the top and
working toward the bottom "like pulling down a window shade," he
filled in color and detail. In huge paintings like the tropical scenes, he
found it preferable to apply one color at a time, especially since these
paintings were predominantly green. † At the end he frequently revised the position of a tree
or a figure or a detail, as we can see from a few illdisguised patches of
overpainting. Yet in general the making of the finished work was a matter of
steadily applied craftsmanship during which he could ____________________
reckon the number of days or
weeks required to complete the task. We owe his unfailing meticulousness of
detail to an ability to sustain the craftsman's role throughout the long
labor of transferring onto canvas the complex image in his imagination. Speed
of execution is not the flavor of his art, as it is of Frans Hals' or
Toulouse-Lautrec's. Few modern artists have succeeded so well in filling
immense canvases both with a massive composition and with detail and color
applied to every visible area. The need for order resides in
every aspect of Rousseau's work, even in the places where his style verges on
the uncouth. His perspective strikes us as exceptionally awkward, for he was
reluctant to relinquish any object worth painting to the obliteration of
distance. He never mastered the rules of foreshortening, and painted such odd
effects as the shutters in La fabrique de chaises, 27 which appear to project into a dimension totally removed
from the rest of the scene. Yet his gawky treatments serve their purpose. He
sought no more from perspective than a bare minimum of order in space; space
in itself as an independent construct did not interest him. He could never
have played tricks with it like Van Eyck and Velasquez placing a mirror on
the back wall of a room to intensify and disrupt the illusion of depth. A much
stronger order in Rousseau's painting is his sense of pure form and his
relating of forms within the picture space. He did not generalize his forms
as did Gris or, more extremely, Mondrian. Yet there are few more expert
compositions than the L'octroi, 29 in which various obtuse, acute, elongated, and globular
shapes embed the precise geometry of an iron grillwork gate. He seems to have
painted the scene in order to set the regular lines of the gate against soft
forms of shrubbery. And in Les bords de l'Oise 22 four slender poplar trees in the left background contrast
with a round bushy tree in the right foreground. Rousseau liked this
arrangement so well that he kept it intact for another version 23 in which he changed only the position of some cows and
incidental shrubbery. There are also two versions of L'été. 41, 42 But
Rousseau's combination of forms cannot be separated arbitrarily from his
principal means of ordering a composition: color. It expresses all relations
of distance, value, and mood. He used color in broad areas of slightly
changing intensity such as skies and backgrounds for still lifes; he used it
in more rapid contrast in the greens and reds and yellows of his landscapes.
The academic practice of muting color by adding black is rare in Rousseau's
highly toned works. Yet, unlike the impressionists, who had introduced a
scientifically based use of color, he did not hesitate to use pure black. In
most paintings his color shows a remarkably high degree of saturation, and
yet his tones convey a sense of repose and completeness that is absent from
the rebellious clashes of fauve painting. He keeps the tensions in discreet
balance. Richness of color suits the deceptive stillness of his work and is not intended to suggest
movement and change. * On completing a work, he carefully chose the color as
well as the dimensions of his signature: it forms part of the competition. He
kept his palette immaculately clean and used a selection of paints that shows
the economy and sureness of his technique. † A few critics have tried to dismiss Rousseau's value as a
painter by celling him "only" a colorist. However, that is already
saying a great deal. He avoided the smothering "brown sauce" of
academic practice and preserved color as both a sensuous and an expressive
property. Rousseau's decorative sense is
almost as sure as his sense of color and, like it, serves the luxury effect
as well as the need for order. (The terms are Roger
Fry's). In both color and form, decorative styles fall into two general
categories: repetition and variation (complication). The former tends toward
simple rhythmical patterns, like a row of trees; the latter tends toward what
Focillon called the "system of labyrinth"--Arabic decorative
borders, baroque devices, and old-fashioned stencils. Most
"primitive" art favors repetitive decoration; Rousseau employed
both techniques. His love for forms in series can be seen in the row of
pennons in Centenaire de l'indépendance 16 or the repeated shoulder straps of Les artilleurs. 21a Yet the
intertwined foliage of his tropical paintings illustrates the system of the
labyrinth. In a painting like Bois de Vincennes, 33 the beautifully drawn trees in the front plane partake
both of repetition and variation. The trunks rise at approximately regular
intervals across the width of the canvas and then branch out in independent
linear designs. In several
of Rousseau's early works, roads or paths run across the scene with so little
adjustment to depth that they occupy the surface of the canvas more than the
distances of landscape. As a result they divide the picture like a mosaic: Le
paradis 17a displays just such a "primitive" effect. The
assertive diagonal and horizontal lines in paintings like La carriole du pére
Juniet 47 and Pêcheur á la ligne avec aéroplane 30 have a similar effect of throw ing the composition
forward into the front plane. No representation of threedimensional space
according to Renaissance tradition holds Rousseau's work together. It coheres
according to a large-scale surface arrangement, similar to cloisonné. His
scenes and portraits are not so treated as to have one focal point for our
attention. Equal areas of canvas within the frame tend to be filled with
passages of nearly equivalent significance. Even the wide spaces of blue sky
are not merely areas of color. The craftsman in Rousseau could devote
enormous patience to brushing his skies to a perfect ____________________
* By striping the
men's costumes in Leg joueurs de football, 45 Rousseau gives the necessary nervousness to his usually
tranquil contrasts. It is proper that his color should have reacted to a new
subject. † Maximilien
Gauthier states that analysis yields the following as the standard
composition of his palette: white lead, ultramarine, cobalt blue, lake,
yellow ocher, ivory black, tint
and texture and add a cloud or balloon when a space was about to go dead.
Surface tension carries the unity of his compositions to the edges of the
canvas. The frontality or pull toward frontality of the portraits also favors
the location of the composition in the front plane. Obliqueness would imply
depth. The forward plane of many landscapes is established by a very close
foreground painted in precise detail. In Le rêve 53 lush
magnified leaves spring up in the foreground, and meet, as if in the same
plane, other plants which are much farther away. All these devices prevent us
from entering too easily into an expected illusion of space. He incarnates his
universe by painting it exhaustively and palpably close. We can enter his universe, then,
because he "saw his paintings through to the end," as Apollinaire
wrote. He meticulously created a smooth, varnished surface which draws no
attention to itself as paint. In general he applied enough paint to cover the
canvas and no more, though in still lifes he tended--almost as if he could
create a leaf--to employ a technique more like impasto. (Accordingly, his
paintings have kept well except for the canvas, which was, of necessity, the
cheapest.) Wholeness of effect remained his technical and artistic ideal. The
Douanier was once moved by a collection of Cézanne's work to say: "I'd
like to finish all these." André Derain was talking about the same thing
when he stated: "Compared to Rousseau, Cézanne is a trickster."
Rousseau wanted to achieve "natural" appearances, which Cézanne
strove long to surpass. No matter how one estimates the qualities of these
two modern masters, one must admire the devotion with which Rousseaufinished
a painting, from the moment of choosing a subject, through sketching,
composing, and executing, to the final stages of signing, varnishing, and
framing. Method guided his hand always. However, the ultimate qualities
lie beyond method. Most subtly of all, the light that fills Rousseau's
paintings from no apparent source or direction holds everything in peaceful
equilibrium despite any difference in size. His titles lay claim to many
variations in atmospheric effect, including many sunsets and "storm
effects." Yet in spite of impressionist titles and occasionally
impressionist touches, Rousseau painted only three lights: high noon,
moonlight, and the uniform floodlighting of a photographer's studio. Even
this division is precarious; they resolve into a single mysterious lighting
from all sides, shadowless, without high lights, without any power to
dissolve color. It is this steady emanation that lifts his human figures off
the ground unless their feet are actually buried in the grass, that isolates
his flowers in profound stillness, that moves through all the intricacies of
his foliage. As Daniel Catton Rich points out, the light in his paintings
has, if any, a movement out of the background into the foreground. * But
essentially ____________________
* The whole
paragraph is worth quoting: "His approach was far from literal. Inspired
by his vision he arbitrarily rewove the appearance of nature to suit his
purpose. The long series of imaginative paintings show Rousseau obsessed by
one repeated it is static, as in Les
joueurs de football. 45 It stills
all movement, not in the instantaneous seizure of a flash bulb, but in the
prolonged stillness of noon or night. Like his perspective, Rousseau's even,
undramatic use of light releases objects to the voraciousness of surface
design. Only color works forcefully to preserve contrasting distances from
the eye. One of the revelations of black-and-white reproduction of Rousseau
paintings is that they flatten out and lose their depth. In
dealing with light in Rousseau's work one finds oneself moving already within
the realm of his meaning. The formal effects of his light guard the enigma of
his work, the feeling that we cannot fathom its sheer simplicity. There is,
of course, a level of significance in his canvases that is easily accessible.
The predominance of pastoral scenes and the pastoral treatment of city and
parks convey the yearning of a creature of the city for the peace and space
of the country. Yet Rousseau could be satisfied with suburban countryside and
a few scattered people wandering among the trees. Though he never painted a
crowded city street, he did not tire of describing a city of bridges, quays,
and one magnificent tower of steel. True "country" existed in his
studio. The
most singular quality of his work, however, arises from the steady light that
floods his compositions and hushes them as the world can be hushed only by
high noon and by moonlight. The very steadfastness of his light, denying the
movement of the sun and the succession of day and night, removes his
paintings from time. It represents no dramatically pregnant moment of history
and no fleeting instant of visual reality. Academic classicism and
impressionism never affected him deeply. Steady illumination creates an
expanded present which transfixes past and future in permanencies of
composition and design. The time of Rousseau's painting is the time of
abstract art. One finds the same effect in the "primitive"
compositions of Giotto, in certain Dutch interiors of the seventeenth
century, in Chardin, and then not again until the new literalness of cubism. The
timeless quality need not rob the paintings of movement, but it is movement
within plastic space, not within elapsed time. The formalized figures of Les
joueurs de football 45 and Centenaire de l'indépendance 16 move convincingly within the context of Rousseau's
painting. On the other hand, his most colossal and ferocious attempt at
realism, Le lion ayant faim, 39 which measures seven by ten feet, has the repose of
abstract art. More than his stylized anatomy and summary perspective, more
than his sure color, ____________________
it is a
profoundly spiritual peace that confounds us in his work. High noon or
moonlight--he painted the pure stilled time of eternal Sunday. Classic art
opened a window on reality. Modern art since impressionism has closed the
window and treated painting as part of the wall, a segment of flat surface.
The Renaissance, which miraculously survived until 1900, carried the former
tradition to the logical yet almost unrecognizable extreme of impressionism.
The latter tradition goes back as far as the Egyptians for its models and
today pursues the double course of abstract and expressionist art. The paradox
of Rousseau's work is that although he tried to produce works in the lineage
of the window-on-reality, he painted himself into the segment-of-wall tradition.
He could not paint (except in his nearly monochrome sketches) the world as
his eye saw it, but only as his mind reconstituted it. Instead of realism or
verisimilitude, he achieved what was far more important for his epoch--a
singularly stable vision and a poetry of light and color. His attempts at
realism can be ludicrous, a fact that need not be concealed or excused. Some
of his animals would enliven the comic strips. Other figures fully merit the
words grace and beauty. His work can be associated with both abstract art and
expressionism through its two principal strengths--design and emotionally
significant color. To find a similar combination, critics have turned back to
painters like Piero della Francesca and Poussin. After the revolts of German
expressionism, Italian futurism, and Parisian fauvism and cubism, modern
painting had to find a new balance. After bold assertions of independence, it
needed verification. It found primitive art, it found child art, and it found
Rousseau. René Huyghe has stated the point clearly. "For the cubists
Rousseau was not only an antidote; he was, like the primitives and like Negro
art, a justification by instinct of the searchings of their minds. . . .
"He was the most unexpected object lesson. In part,
Rousseau turns out to be what he was accused of being: the sandwich man of
modern art. The sandwich man carries his message on display and we lose sight
of his figure between two placards hung back and front. When the chief
figures of modern art found Rousseau in 1908 and gave him a banquet, they
were also setting him before the world as an example. He was the extreme
test. If the public could be made to understand the eminently plastic
qualities beneath Rousseau's awkward realism, then it might come to accept
the similar innovations of twentieth-century painting. Rousseau's true figure
as man and artist was sandwiched between his twin public role as primitive
and modern. His painting continues to be partly hidden by these two placards,
which must ultimately be removed altogether. Defenders of
modern art have stood stoutly by the inherent value of Rousseau's painting
despite its crudities. In much the same way, Jarry stood by Ubu Roi, the "primitive" work of his
career. But more clearly than Ubu Roi among Jarry's other writings, Rousseau
can hold his own among modern painters. At a time when, as André Malraux
points out, popular art was beginning its death agony, Rousseau carried that
declining tradition to new heights and delivered its best qualities into the
hands of twentiethcentury art. In this context we begin to understand
Rousseau's staggering remark to Picasso about their respective styles, a
remark often quoted as senseless but whose perceptiveness finally emerges:
"We are the two greatest painters of this era, you in Egyptian style, I
in modern style." Picasso had seen and celebrated the modern aspects of
Rousseau's work; Rousseau could perceive in Picasso's work primitive aspects
he was blind to in his own. Rousseau's
influence has been surprisingly wide. Artists from Gauguin to Chirico have
not been afraid to look long at his formalizations and grotesqueries. Owner
of five Rousseau canvases 5, 6, 20, 28, 40 Picasso experimented as late as 1938 with deformations of
the human figure clearly related to Rousseau's portraits. In December, 1911,
Rousseau and Delaunay were the only two French artists whose work hung in the
first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Rousseau's compositions relate
not merely to modern art in its manifold development today but also, in a
tentative fashion, to another art form, the motion picture. When Rousseau
scatters through a landscape several figures identical in size and shape,
when he paints the figures of Les joueurs de football 45 so much alike that we can easily see the same man in four
successive positions (and even those positions broken down into separate
parts), and when he fills his tropical canvases so full of detail that it can
only be taken in a little at a time as the eye moves across the surface --in
all these cases he suggests the possibility of an unrolling in time as well
as in space. It is cinematographic time (a succession of "stills"),
not chronological time. These works ask for comparison with the sequential or
panoramic style of temple friezes and medieval panels showing the same action
in several stages, and with the episodic construction of the movies. A few
almost abandon the instantaneous unity of one glance which distinguishes traditional
art. Le centenaire de l'indépendance 16 breaks down into three arbitrarily combined scenes like a
tryptich, and not even a homogeneous three-dimensional space is constructed
to hold them together. On the right side in the immediate foreground stand
three men and a woman; in the center the smaller figures of the dancers move
with a lively disjointed rhythm under a spreading tree; on the left a drummer
plays in the far background and some children watch the dancing. The three
distinct groups are connected only by a line of banners which stretches
across the upper part of the canvas. The eye moves over the scene not in a
smooth line of flowing mass but in three jumps. Rousseau knew nothing of cinematic
technique, but his work employs some of its organizing principles and would
lend itself to film treatment in close-up such as has already been given to
Hieronymus Bosch and Grandma Moses. But such an examination of art as a
collection of fragments does not do justice to the whole, and Rousseau's
wholeness, or wholesomeness, is what gives one the greatest difficulty in
settling him into a category or a tradition. Rousseau's place in the world of
art today comes to resemble that of the "Indians" whom the earliest
explorers and adventurers found already living in the Rousseau was the native who
turned up on the shore when the exploratory voyages of modern art arrived in
the new world. He was taken up and exploited, kept apart on a
reservation and disguised in myth. It is time to admit him to full
citizenship. We have too long patronizingly called him le Douanier
instead of by his true name, which is as good as any. He did not discover the
new world; he was born into it. In 1910 Rousseau exhibited his
last painting at the Salon des Indépendants, a huge canvas entitled Le
rêve. 53 An art
critic wrote him to ask why he had placed the luminous red sofa in the middle
of the jungle. Rousseau had already explained to André Salmon: "You
shouldn't be surprised to find a sofa out in a virgin forest. It means
nothing except for the richness of the red. You understand, the sofa is in a
room; the rest is Yadwigha's dream." He went on to reply to the critic
in the tranquil, confident tone of the biographical notice he had written
fifteen years earlier. The simple power of dream, he says, dictated the scene
to him; that is sufficient explanation. A child does not tell us of the
originality and daring of his dream but only of its compelling reality.
Rousseau assumed that the future would understand his doing what he
considered the most natural thing in the world--to paint what he saw. It was
one of his last letters, and written by no April fool. April
1st, 1910 Dear
Monsieur, I
reply immediately to your friendly letter in order to explain the motive for
the location of the sofa in question. This woman sleeping on this sofa dreams
that she is transported into the middle of this forest, hearing the notes of
the charmer's pipe. This gives the motive for the sofa being in the picture.
I thank you for your kind appreciation, and if I have kept my naïveté, it is
because M. Gérôme, who was a professor at the Beaux-Arts, as well as M.
Clément, director of Beaux-Arts at the Ecole de Lyon, always told me to keep
it. You will no longer find that amazing in the future. And I have been told
before that I was not of this century. I will not now be able to change my
manner which I have acquired by stubborn application, believe me. I finish my
note by thinking you in advance for the article you will write on me and pray
you to accept my deepest sentiments, as well as a good cordial handshake. Henri Rousseau Artist-peintre 2 bis, rue Perrel (14 e ) |