HENRI ROUSSEAU: JUNGLES OF PARIS
National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC
Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris edited by Francis Morris and Christopher Green. Harry N. Abrams/The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 230 pages, $50; $35 paper. ISBN 1-85437-702-7
July 16 to October 15, 2006
By JOSEPH PHELAN
Henri Rousseau The Hungry Lion Throws itself on the Antelope 1905
oil on canvas, 79-3/8 x 118-3/4 inches
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/ Basel
Henri Rousseau, whose enchanting yet untutored art produced some of the most imaginative paintings of the early years of the 20th century, forms the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. The show has been organized by the Tate Modern and the Musee d’ Orsay and offers visitors an opportunity to revisit forty nine paintings including twenty of the artist’s legendary jungle visions -- the largest number ever displayed in North America-- as well as a selection of his less familiar landscapes of Paris and its environs, political allegories, and portraits.
An unlikely figure to have become an important artist in a period when the academic establishment still dominated French painting, Rousseau was born into a petit bourgeoisie family in Laval and was completely self taught as far as his artistic development was concerned. Lacking the web of social and academic connections which often determine artistic success in the metropolis, Rousseau had to rely on his own inner drive and native talent.
Determined to win honor and glory with the conservative academic establishment, Rousseau took early retirement from his job as a toll collector at the age forty-nine in order to fully devote himself to the art of painting. While the official apotheosis he desired never came to pass, the story that did play out proved to be much more important for the history of modern art. If he never learned how to stay within the rules of the game he aspired to play, his version of the game was so fantastic that it opened up new and vital artistic possibilities for the modernists who embraced him and his work.
The exhibit opens with Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) (1891) the first and the most exciting of his jungle paintings. Felix Valloton, a discerning young contemporary observed that Rousseau’s tiger “surprises its prey” by crushing every other painting hung in its neighborhood. Ridiculed when first shown at the Salon des Independents for its bold palette, strong graphic lines, and over all clarity and flatness the canvas still astonishes today.
Lovely early pictures such as Promenade in the Forest (1886) Rendezvous in the Forest (1889) in which mysteriously costumed figures meet in the silvery moonlight of forest clearings show that the sense of enchantment and menace which were fundamental to Rousseau’s best pictures was there from the beginning. They may have been rejected by the academy for lack of correct perspective but what they lacked in terms of artistic formality they made up for in terms of visual poetry and aesthetic allure.
When Rousseau attempted to work in the prestigious academic genre of historical allegory the results were frequently clumsy if charming all the same. But the results were different with his painting War (1894) which was inspired by the Franco-Prussian conflict which had taken place nearly a quarter of a century before. Here on a wide canvas, the uglyfemale personification of war runs through the air alongside a monstrous horse like creature, while below are littered the broken forms of scores of dead and wounded men. Rousseau’s portrait of war emphasizes only the violence and horror of the battle without any of the counterbalancing elements of renewal and rejuvenation which tended to be the norm in the representations of war within the classical tradition. Rousseau’s may not have understood the requirements for the government commission for which he hoped but the authenticity of his vision of the dark side of human nature pointed to the nightmarish history of the 20th century in such a way as to qualify Rousseau as something of a prophet.
Over a decade after the failure of Surprised!, Rousseau returned to the faraway territory which was to become synonymous with his inventive power. What made him come back? Gauguin died in 1903 and several retrospectives of his work created a boom for tropical scenes. This was the period when France’s colonial expansion into far off lands was at its height. Unlike Gauguin, Rousseau never left France; instead he was an inveterate walker in the city frequenting the botanical gardens, the zoos, the colonial expositions and world fairs, making sketches of the flora and fauna on display there and dreaming. Thus the subtitle of the exhibit “Jungles in Paris”. During the last six years of his life Rousseau produced no fewer than twenty six variations on the jungle theme which the curators have organized into categories such as “the peaceful exotic”, the “dangerous exotic” and “mysterious meetings”.
Henri Rousseau Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) 1891
oil on canvas, 51-1/8 x 63-3/4 inches
The National Gallery, London
Unlike the previous Rousseau retrospective twenty years ago at the Museum of Modern Art which focused on his place in the narrative of modernism, the organizers of this show are more interested in located the sources of Rousseau’s jungle vision in the popular culture of his time. The results are installed throughout the two floors of the West Building. Thus in front of The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (1905) there is the taxidermical display which Rousseau used as his model. On either side of the entrance to the jungle paintings there are clunky “man vs. animal” sculptures by Emmanuel Fremiet. On the opposite wall there are scores of covers from the lurid tabloid Le Petit Journal which inspired some of Rousseau’s designs and suggested some of his colors. Rousseau emerges here as an eager scavenger whose use of popular culture once again separated him from the academic conservatives who wanted to maintain a wall of separation between high art and popular culture.
Yet all these artifactoids have the unintended effect of suggesting (as they did to Peter Schejdahl in his New Yorker review) that Rousseau’s talent has less to do with his fecund imagination than with good memory and mimetic skill. However, the fine scholarly essays in the catalogue by the curators Frances Morris, Christopher Green, and Vincent Gille demonstrate that none of the jungle paintings are faithful sketches of what could be seen in Parisian zoos or taxidermical displays. Rousseau could not have based his paintings directly on urban zoos where live animals were kept in filthy cages as opposed to the fresh and natural environments we see depicted in Rousseau’s pieces. Even the stuffed fauna were segregated from the greenhouse displays for exhibition at that time.
Moreover, we know that in the course of nature jaguars don’t encounter horses and monkeys don’t go fishing. But in suggesting that they could do such things Rousseau was investing his animals with almost human personalities in order to heighten the viewer’s identification with animal life in all its variety and vitality. Rousseau manifestly thought that nineteenth century man’s animal spirits were flagging under the impact of ever advancing civilization and that the obvious place to look for a renewal of his energy and innocence was in the Darwinian struggles of the animal kingdom. Bringing humanity and animality closer together artistically might even go some way towards mitigating the effects of modern civilization’s inevitable alienation of man from his innate and instinctive nature.
So we know that Rousseau was not interested in the “scientific” quality of his pictures. Only the first of his jungle paintings (Surprised!) tends in this direction. In The Repast of the Lion the flowers and plants have been imagined and combined solely for the pleasure of the eye, without any concern whatsoever for botanical accuracy. Rousseau may have been inspired by book and newspapers illustrations but he was not constrained by them. His art was not defined by what he saw but by the pictorial quality of what he dreamed.
The case can be made that in the great paintings of his last years, The Dream and The Snake Charmer, Rousseau sought to revitalized “the exotic,” which was in danger of becoming mundane, making of it something rich and strange once again. Obsessively investing the entire surface of his great canvases with exquisite details and charming surprises he combines a convincing realism, a high degree of abstraction and decoration, and a tremendous sense of scale. The way Rousseau marshals such complex material and sets it out in a symphonic style reveals him to be of the first order of those painters distinguished by their architectural sense.
A version of this article appeared in the September issue of The New Criterion
