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Exoticism and Rousseau
The myth of Exoticism captivated the minds of many avant-garde
artists and writers as the 19th century drew to a close. It
represented an escape from bourgeois society, with its declining
spiritual values, and an urge to travel to distant lands
uncontaminated by progress in order to pursue a more natural,
"savage" lifestyle. Following in the wake of
Gauguin's move to
Tahiti, Kandinsky travelled around north Africa, Nolde sailed to New
Guinea, Pechstein explored China, and Klee and Macke spent time in
Tunisia. The French painter
Henri
Rousseau (1844-1910) pursued this
same ideal in his quest to capture a spirit of innocence. While
still very much rooted in French city life, and for many-years a
conventional man, he nevertheless projected images of an exotic
world of magic and freshness. Known as "Le Douanier" because he
worked for the Paris customs service until 1893, he was an untrained
painter. However, amid much criticism and controversy, the exclusive
intellectual elite of late 19th-century Paris at the end of the
century claimed to understand the "hedonistic mystifications" of
symbolism in his work.
Rousseau worked within a climate that
borrowed elements from African sculpture and contrasted them with
Greek classicism, achieving a style that was unpretentious, shunning
facile mannerism and the pretentious intellectualism of "art for
art's sake".
Rousseau made a name for himself as a primitive artist
through the Salons des Artistes Independents, to which he was
invited in 1886, and gained widespread recognition from 1904 to
1905, when he embarked on his "jungle" scenes, such as Explorers
Attacked by a Lion and The Hungry Lion, the latter shown at the
Salon d'Automne in 1905 in the room of the Fauvists. He was adored
by literary figures, such as Alfred Jarry, whom he had painted in
1894, and Apollinaire, to whom he dedicated The Muse Lnspiring the
Poet in 1907, as well as by other painters such as Robert Delaunay,
whose mother commissioned The Snake Charmer in 1907. He was also a
composer of songs, which he performed at the banquet given by
Picasso in his honour in 1908. |
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see also collection
Henri
Rousseau
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A Carnival Evening
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"Nothing makes
me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.
Just imagine, when I go out into the countryside and see the
sun and the green and everything flowering, I say to myself,
'Yes indeed, all that belongs to me!' "
Henri Rousseau
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On 18th August
1886 a spectacular e opened its doors to the public, in the
temporary premises of the Pans Post Office Headquarters on the Place du
Carrousel. It was organised by the Société des Indépendants, a group of
independent artists founded two years earlier by Georges Seurat, Paul Signac
and others. Some fifty works were exhibited, all of which would have failed
miserably in the eyes of the official Salon and would have scandalised even
the small circle that supported Impressionist painting. The organisation was
revolutionary in that there was no jury and no imposition of stylistic
criteria. For a fee of fifteen francs any artist could participate, with or
without academic training or aesthetic philosophy.
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A
Carnival Evening, 1886 |
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The
exhibition took up Gustave Courbet's challenge and declared
the field of art a democratic one, open to all comers. Two
pictures caused a sensation: Georges Seurat's Sunday
Afternoon on the Ile La Grande Jatte, a composition in
contrasting sections of dotted primary and complementary
colours, and the night scene, A Carnival
Evening by Henri Rousseau, the little toll collector
whose contribution to the Salon des Refuses in 1885 had
caused many viewers to laugh till they cried. Although some
few critics were well-disposed and ascribed to both artists
a spontaneity comparable to that of pre-Renaissance Italian
art, sharp distinctions were drawn between the two. Seurat
was seen as an intellectual, as the potential leader of a
new movement and inventor of the pointillist technique which
provided a scholarly response to the problems of
Impressionism, Rousseau as an amusing innocent, who
disregarded all the refinement or French painting and all
the achievements of optical illusion. He demonstrated
neither consciousness of the history of art nor the bracing
experimentation of a modern daredevil but only the canvas
itself - a surface on which he outlined and coloured with
meticuluous care a white moon, clouds against the deep
indigo of night, black tracery of bare trees, a transparent
woodland pavilion and a couple in fancy dress, hovering like
figures straight out of a Belle Epoque chocolate
advertisement.
This puppet
theatre on canvas is a key work, initiating as no other work could have done
the mystical career of the Douanier and the pictorial anarchy of
post-Impressionism. At the age of forty-one Henri Rousseau appeared upon the
scene in just so surprising a manner as his harlequin. Undated, like his
little figures, he held his place among the avant-garde for twenty-five
years alongside Paul Signac, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse
and others. He was thought bizarre, an ambitious painter with the inadequate
technique of a six-year-old. His pictures won acclaim as jokes. His works
could be relied on to raise a laugh, even when they were hung in obscure
places by the committee of the Independants, or when in 1907 Frantz Jourdan,
president of the Autumn Salon, relegated them to the less prestigious
section devoted to decorative arts. Rousseau gained a reputation gradually
year by year, but it was a kind of succes de scandale, and some
artists who were striving for new perceptions began to lose patience. It was
only by appealing to an artist's agreed right to exhibit without the
approval of a jury that Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was able to save Rousseau
from exclusion by the Independants in 1893. The American Max Weber reported
that his teacher Henri Matisse passed over any mention of Rousseau in frosty
silence.
When at sixty-six Henri Rousseau died of blood-poisoning, he was listed in
the Necker Hospital records as an alcoholic, but he at once became a legend,
the "gentle Douanier", as Guillaume Apollinaire named him, the "angel of the
night-life quarter" (Montparnasse). His is the simple and yet incredible
story of an unworldly petit bourgeois who painted in an introverted, almost
autistic manner. He himself cannot have been fully aware of what he was
doing; he did not distinguish between his pictures and reality, and in art
as in life remained gullible to the end. It is clear that, as he ceaselessly
attracted public attention, such eccentrics of the fin de siècle as Alfred
Jarry, Paul Gauguin and Guillaume Apollinaire saw him as a kind of talisman
and living proof of the ideas with which they sought to combat bourgeois
ignorance and blinkered values. It is no less clear that Rousseau played
along with the intellectuals' game, as his first biographer, the German art
critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde, surmised in 1911 and the historian Henry
Certigny confirmed fifty years later; he shaped his own naive persona partly
in self-defence and partly to gam the recognition he craved.
The following
anecdote, though it may be apocryphal, is typical of Rousseau's muddled
circumstances. As so often, his fellow artists thought up a practical joke
at his expense; they sent him an invitation to a reception at the residence
of the President of the Republic. On his return Rousseau told them that
guards had prevented him from entering the building, that the President
himself had come out and tapped him sympathetically on the shoulder, saying:
"Too bad, Rousseau, that you are wearing everyday clothes. You see that
everyone else is in evening dress. Come another time". Extravaganzas of this
sort made the best of a bad job, but behind the good-humoured clown's mask
there was another face.
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In 1895
Rousseau presented to the publishers Gerard et Coutances a
biographical notice and a self-portrait in pen and ink as a
contribution to the projected second volume of "Portraits of the
Next Century". The drawing is of an apparently unremarkable old man,
shabbily dressed, who turns to face the observer with faun-like
features reminiscent of Paul Verlaine's. His eyes are in sharp
contrast to the wearily sagging shoulders. His gaze is keenly
perceptive but also mistrustful, fearful, kind, manically ecstatic
and introspective, alternating between tragedy and comedy, a
physiognomy divided in two. At this time Rousseau was fifty-one
years old, but the psychographic portrait matches the descriptions
given by contemporaries such as Gustave Coquiot, Arsene Alexandre,
Robert Delaunay, Wilhelm Uhde and even the police records of 1907.
Rousseau's dual personality made him at once kindly and childish, roguish
and intolerably malevolent, and inscrutable to a degree that suggests an
inner life of suffering. Indeed, his life resembled a game of hide-and-seek.
He served as a toll collector for the City of Paris for twenty-two years
before retiring early in 1893; he never commented on the fictitious
inspector's title "Douanier" which the public bestowed on him. He encouraged
the persistent legend that he had been a member of the overseas forces
helping to bring about the coronation of the Hapsburg Maximilian of Austria
in Mexico, and that he had saved the city of Dreux from civil unrest during
the Franco-Prussian war. The fact is that at the time in question, in 1863,
he was serving a juvenile sentence for stealing the paltry sum of twenty
francs from his employer in Angers, the advocate Fillon, and for the
duration of his voluntary military service with the 51st infantry regiment
he stayed at home, far from any scene of battle.
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Self-portrait,
1895
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He took every opportunity to mourn in public the death of his first wife
Clémence, who died of tuberculosis in 1888 at the age of thirty-seven. On
festive occasions he regularly played the waltz that he had composed for her
during her lifetime. He hardly ever mentioned the deaths of four children of
this marriage, or his daughter Julia, the only child to attain adulthood.
When he was prosecuted in 1909 as accomplice to a certain Louis Sauvaget on
a charge of embezzlement and forgery, and given a two-year suspended prison
sentence and fined one hundred francs, lie strove for recognition as a
respectable citizen. He presented himself as a patriot, as "father of the
poor", as honorary drawing teacher at the Association Philotechnique, a
philanthropic institution for education of the people founded in 1848, and
stressed his earlier role as father of the family, who had cared for the
sick in addition to working a sixty-hour week. Above all he insisted on his
pressing obligation to paint, and it was in this connection that he made a
point which touches his life's deepest complexities: "If my parents had
recognised my gift for painting . . . today I would have been the greatest
and wealthiest painter in France." In the biographical notes of 1895 he had
written: "... since his parents were not well-to-do, he was compelled at
first to follow another path, rather than the one to "which his artistic
disposition inclined him. It was only in 1885 that he began to work as an
artist, after many disappointments, alone, with no teacher except nature,
and with occasional advice from Gerome and Clement." These pronouncements
suggest that throughout his life Rousseau suffered from a feeling of
inferiority - afraid that without academic training he was bound to remain
an amateur painter. The tendency to blame his parents was probably caused by
the shock he experienced as the gifted nine-year-old son of a respected
family of skilled craftsmen, merchants and officers, when his father lost
all they possessed - three houses and a business - through speculation. The
social decline of the parents had serious consequences for Rousseau. His
schooling, with its poor results, his military service and his time as toll
employee, promised no prospects. The only escape route lay in art, and he
was encouraged in this direction by his Paris neighbour Felix-Auguste
Clément, winner of the Prix de Rome, who had started from humble beginnings.
Taking up the challenge, Rousseau found a way of offsetting all his dreams
of material wealth and social recognition. In spite of the continual risk of
mockery, he exploited every opportunity to rise out of anonymity. Alongside
the intellectuals, the dandies, the provocateurs of his time, he divided his
existence between the uninfluential milieu of the poor and the
aggrandisement of the artist who knows how to turn each slight of fortune to
his own advantage.
Part of the Rousseau legend lies in the obscurity of his beginnings as a
painter. He repeatedly maintained that he did not pick up a brush until he
was forty or forty-two, but in 1884 he had obtained a licence to copy in the
state galleries, the Louvre, the Musée de Luxembourg and the palaces of
Versailles and Saint Germain-en-Laye, thanks to a recommendation submitted
by the artist Clement to the Minister of Education, Armand Fallières. In
1886 he contributed to the Salon des Independants for the second time. The
events of these years put him in the public eye, and must have been preceded
by earlier attempts at painting, but it is impossible to reconstruct exact
details since his manner of painting was soon imitated by others, and he was
constantly re-working and re-dating earlier canvases.
The two hundred pencil and chalk drawings which have survived from the
years up to 1895 are informative. They seem to be the work of a self-taught
artist who would sketch his surroundings at work or undertake excursions
outside the city in his leisure hours, The Quai d'Auteuil, one of the
numerous Seine ports, and the city gates were
among the locations where Rousseau inspected incoming supplies of wme,
grain, milk, salt and methylated spirits, and issued passes. The two views
of 1885, which focus on a rural suburban idyll almost entirely -without
human figures, demonstrate the layman's exclusive interest in simple,
visible reality. Rousseau was concerned to transfer to his canvas the
three-dimensional configuration of tree and fence, toll house and tenement,
with great care and without foreshortening. His purpose was to show things
as they were commonly perceived, which meant that a fence must consist of a
row of identifiable posts, while the foliage of a tree must comprise
innumerable tiny elements. House, wall and reinforced river bank must give
evidence of the building materials' texture and of the principles of
construction, whereas clouds were to be seen as intangible silhouettes.
Since it was Rousseau's intention to match what he saw with the facts as
he knew them, there was no cause for him to seek to impose the spatial
rationality of linear perspective which had prevailed since the Renaissance.
It was equally impossible for him to establish an individual style which
lessened the importance of what he saw and knew to be the nature of things.
Mysteriously, Rousseau must have been able to produce conies of nicrures
such as the Lion and Tmer minted bv Eugene Delacroix in 1828/29, since one
was hung in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts retrospective in 1885. The moderately
successful copy is accurate and professional in the use of materials and
perspective, which suggests that the painter may have made a deliberate
choice in not conforming to convention - a consideration which would make
the so-called "naivité" of his art even more of an enigma. If there was a
deliberate choice, then it was taken on intuitive rather than on theoretical
grounds.
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Port Saint-Nicolas.
Photograph,
Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale |
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In the evening view of Ile Saint-Louis as seen from the
Seine port of St Nicolas, today's Port du Louvre, the
two-dimensional area of the picture prevails over the
perspective of the left side (View of the Ile Saint-Louis
seen from Port Saint-Nicolas).
Painted by another hand, or by Rousseau copying from another
picture, the cobbled and rutted quay with its navigator's
hut and the shadow cast by the distant exciseman display a
familiar concept of space, in which things are arranged
according to distance and relative size as on a receding
stage. By contrast, the cargoes unloaded on the quay, the
barges, the iron architecture of the Pont des Arts, the
houses and the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the island, all
contribute to an effect of unfamiliar and mysterious
density.
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View of the
Ile Saint-Louis seen from Port Saint-Nicolas, 1888 |
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Nothing is just
itself. Cool blue-green transforms the piles of cargo veiled in tarpaulin
into a gleaming moonscape of strange transparency. The piers of the bridge
hover over the seemingly frozen river without supporting the structure above
them. The lights reflected in the water take on an existence of their own,
independent of the bright gas-lamps to which, by rights, they belong. The
ships' masts with their little tricolor pennants reach upwards into the
clear evening sky, in harmony with the Paris rooftops, chimneys and towers,
but without spatial reference to the bridge. Liberated from the everyday
bustle which Emile Zola's hero Claude Lantier experienced at this very spot,
the metropolis becomes a picture of peace. Into this still life, the little
exciseman Rousseau paints himself centre-stage, on the borders of day and
night, of outer and inner reality, dreaming and keeping watch over his idea
of beauty.
This tightrope walk between optical impression and visionary outcome
explains why both traditionalists and avant-garde agreed, albeit for
different reasons, on the label "naive" for the creator of this magical
other world. Both used the picture in their reflections on what was possible
in the realm of painting, and on the historical development of aesthetic
theory. In the face of such theorising it is indeed tempting to see Rousseau
as the embodiment of the grass-roots artist unencumbered by cultural
baggage. His interest is always directed immediately and impartially to the
object before him. Method, style, his own distinctive mark are subordinated
to his perceptions. His concern is with precision, with the meaningfulness
of detail rightly observed. Since he was no master of linear perspective, and yet desired to convey the
familiar illusion of space, the objects painted in the View of the He
Saint-Louis undergo an involuntary planar transformation. Lacking central
focus, the individual items are aligned with equal prominence alongside one
another. The flat surface itself begins to take effect as an elementary
system of axes and diagonals. The carefully linked crosswise ornamentation
of the bridge's balustrade introduces a strong horizontal element into the
composition, which is balanced by the many vertical lines of towers, funnels
and masts. Intuitively the Douanier ceases to "open a window on reality" and
paints his way into the tradition of surface and segment. Camille Pissarro,
who with Odilon Redon was one of the first to admire the artist, attached
great value to this spontaneous creativity, which, in his opinion, replaced
studied technique by true feeling.
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Eugene Atget
Toll Station Porte de Vanves
Photograph
Paris, Musee Carnavalet |
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An
early peak of intuitive achievement was the highly unusual
Toll Station, usually dated 1890. With this
unspectacular view of what was simple and close at hand,
Rousseau celebrated his workplace, one of the numerous toll
stations on the fortified city wall extended under Louis the
Sixteenth. There is a similar photograph taken by Eugene
Atget: midday rest has settled on the border between city
and country, where one seems to merge into the other. There
is no trace of the hectic metropolis behind the hills. The
gates are open, but time seems to stand still. The toll
collectors doze at their posts, fixed to the spot, immobile
as the lamps.
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Toll
Station, 1890 |
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Rousseau himself
conceded that his superiors in the toll service gave him an easy time so
that he could work better; the still life structure reflects these
circumstances. The responsible and yet ridiculous position of the little
official who becomes for an instant all-important consists for the most part
of sitting and waiting in readiness. Driven in this way to meditation and
self-forgetfulness, Rousseau became absorbed in the beauty of his
surroundings. The gate stands strangely without function amidst the greenery
which is interrupted only by the buildings of brickyard and village. The
brick wall rises, railings, cypresses and chimneys are aligned, while all
else is submerged in glimmering foliage as under the eye of a new Vermeer.
In this timeless setting the inspection of the vehicle loses prime
significance. Imperceptibly the border idyll is transformed into a dream of
the world's edge. The paved road is replaced by grass and narrow footpaths,
denying access to the gate.
This picture, small in format, is a further key work. It contains the
barrier motif, sign of twenty-two exhausting years of service, determining
the whole course of Rousseau's life, a metaphor of the tightrope-walker's
power and lack of power. Formally the picture yields an astonishing
synthesis between pure perception, a preoccupation of the Impressionists,
and the flat constructed surface sought by the post-Impressionists. The
light green suggests air and vibrant light, but without actual realisation
of either, since the entire canvas is taken up with the thick and flat
application of paint. The landscape presupposes precise observation of
nature, without concessions to the fleeting moment. Like Seurat, and like
Gauguin and the Pont-Aven circle, Rousseau derived from visible reality the
principles of densely balanced composition reaching to the very edges of the
picture. The tree becomes an element of design, matching the structure of
fence and railings. For the sake of balance the artist "discovers" a white
window in the wall and puts the areas of sky and grass in proportion to one
another. Every detail is an essential part of the composition. Yet this
totality is achieved without the imposition of a rigid system, since
Rousseau lets his perception of the object determine his manner of painting
- dotted, planar or linear. Unlike other artists of the time, notably
Cézanne, who was only five years his senior, Rousseau did not attach prime
importance to method; rather he allowed several forms of expression to
co-exist in a single picture, and let what he saw become the determining
factor. His thinking followed the rules of two-dimensional composition with
ease, which helped him to persevere and to achieve consistency, as did his
readiness to accept the advice of the Salon painters Felix-Auguste Clément
and Jean-Léon Gerome, namely that he should let nature be his only teacher.
He painted what he saw, the way he saw it, undisturbed by nagging
intellectual doubts or aims.
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The
upright seriousness with which Rousseau regarded visible
reality and followed the leadings of his heart, for instance
in the subjective portrait of his first wife Clemence
(The Walk in the Forest, 1886), could irritate his
consciously modern contemporaries. |
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In 1909 the art critic
Arsene Alexandre wrote in the journal "Comoedia": "With will
alone the good Douanier Rousseau could not have done it. If
this touching allegory had been intended, if these forms and
colours had been derived from a coolly calculated system, he
would be the most dangerous of men, whereas he is surely the
most honest and upright..." These words remain an apt
indication of the fascination exerted by an artist who by
following his natural disposition "naively" achieved
intuitive compositions that an artist given to theory could
have achieved only by means of great labour, having first to
escape the trammels of rational thought.
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The Walk in
the Forest, 1886 |
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Henri
Rousseau
(see collection) |
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