Exposition au musée

The Douanier Rousseau. Archaic Candour.

From March 22nd to July 17th, 2016

Introduction

Introduction

Henri Rousseau-Les représentants des puissances étrangères venant saluer la République en signe de paix
Henri Rousseau
Les représentants des puissances étrangères venant saluer la République en signe de paix, 1907
Paris, musée Picasso de Paris
Donation héritiers Picasso, 1973/1978
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée Picasso de Paris) / René-Gabriel Ojéda
Henri Rousseau’s work defies classification; his paintings, like his artistic career, are highly individual. Born into a modest family from Laval, Rousseau was a self-taught artist, described an “amateur painter” by his early biographers. He worked for many years at the Paris city toll and was therefore somewhat inaccurately dubbed Le Douanier (customs officer) by his friend Alfred Jarry. He began to paint at the age of about forty. He had no formal training, but sought to learn the rules of official painting from artists such as Gérôme, his erstwhile neighbour Clément, and Bouguereau, whose “flesh tone” he admired. In 1884, he obtained a copyist’s permit for the Louvre. He also visited the Musée du Luxembourg and Versailles.
However, Rousseau followed no rules besides his own, turning the refined painting of academic artists into a unique idiom suffused with dream elements. He was well aware of the originality of his art and sought constantly to keep up the appearance of naivety acquired according to him “through stubborn hard work”. The striking feature of his work is indeed the uniformity and consistency of his style once he had perfected it.
The unusual nature of Henri Rousseau’s work, which bridges two centuries, has earned it a significant place in the history of art, thus prompting the question: was he a product of the 19th century or an exponent of 20th century art? The question remains open. In order to re-examine it, the exhibition reappraises his painting in the light of some of his sources of inspiration and explores connections with works by artists who were familiar with it. Avant-garde artists (writers, poets, and painters) were among the first to take an interest in his work, attracted perhaps by its “timeless” nature. By freeing himself from the constraints of perspective and adopting a realist pictorial idiom to transcribe a mental image onto canvas, Rousseau created works which formed the cornerstone of a new syntax for many artists. Picasso, Delaunay, Léger, and Italian and German avant-garde artists, starting with Kandinsky, not only admired Rousseau’s oeuvre, which informed their own work, but also collected it.

Portrait-Landscapes

Portrait-Landscapes

Henri Rousseau-Moi-même, portrait paysage
Henri Rousseau
Moi-même, portrait paysage, 1890
Prague, Narodni Galerie
© bpk / Lutz Braun / Lutz Braun
Rousseau painted Myself. Portrait-Landscape for the Salon des Indépendants in 1890. Adopting the style of an official portrait, he depicts himself full-length, in a stiff pose, wearing a black suit enlivened by a medal in his buttonhole (possibly referencing the palmes académiques, an honour he would have been delighted to accept). His beret is pulled down firmly on his head, and he is proudly holding a palette and paintbrush. The ship decorated with flags, the hot air balloon floating among the clouds and the Eiffel Tower, which had made its appearance on the Paris skyline a year earlier, appear to celebrate the painter’s stature and the spirit of modernity in equal measure.
A few years later, Rousseau claimed that he had invented the “portrait-landscape”. In Portrait of Monsieur X, the man sporting a red fez stands out against an outdoor background in which factory chimneys rise incongruously. The painter substitutes a depiction of the industrialisation transformation in the early 20th century for the rural landscapes of the Renaissance portraits whose composition on canvas he adopts.
In The Mechanic (1918), Fernand Léger pays an explicit tribute to this portrait. A great admirer of Rousseau, whom he met in 1909 through the intermediary of Robert Delaunay, Léger considered him to be a worthy representative of a “conceptual realism” with its roots in the art of the Italian Primitives as well as in the “Master of Plaisance”.
Léger was not the only painter to seek a new model for modernity in Rousseau’s portraits. For many years, Delaunay owned Portrait of the Artist with a Lamp and its companion piece, a portrait of Rousseau’s second wife, before they were bought by Picasso.

Archaic candour

Archaic candour

Henri Rousseau-La Noce
Henri Rousseau
La Noce, 1905
Musée de l'Orangerie
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée de l'Orangerie) / Hervé Lewandowski / DR
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Innocence and boldness mix with archaism and innovation in Rousseau’s works.
Throughout his career, the artist painted portraits of his family, artist friends or simply his neighbours in the working-class Plaisance district. He took accurate measurements of his sitters’ faces, sometimes working with a pantograph, an instrument which can be used to reproduce an image with the correct proportions. He also worked from photographs. The eight figures in The Wedding Party (1905), and even the dog accompanying them, have clearly delineated individual features, yet look like silhouettes without any depth.

Le Douanier Rousseau-La carriole du père Junier
Henri Rousseau
La carriole du père Junier, en 1908
Musée de l'Orangerie
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée de l'Orangerie) / Franck Raux / DR
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For Père Junier’s Cart, the artist drew inspiration from a photograph taken while out on a walk with friends. He reworked the vegetation and the position of the figures and had no qualms about subverting the traditional rules of perspective, lining the subjects up so that they are facing forwards.
Rousseau was a staunch Republican, and his belief in the values of citizenship is clear in his ambitious compositions. Representatives of Foreign Powers coming to Salute the Republic as a Sign of Peace (1907) brings the major states together around a figure depicting the Republic, sporting a toga and Phrygian cap.

Monumental women

Monumental women

Henri Rousseau-Portrait de Madame M.
Henri Rousseau
Portrait de Madame M., vers 1896
Musée d'Orsay
Donation baronne Eva Gebhard-Gourgaud, 1965
© Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / DR
There are very few examples of full-length individual portraits in Rousseau’s work. However, the artist did paint several pictures of women with heavy sculptural features in enigmatic and symbolic settings.
His Young Girl in Pink stands out against a two-dimensional background in a disarming full-frontal pose. It has been suggested that she is Charlotte Papouin, the daughter of a stone-cutter friend of Rousseau’s, to whom the blocks of stone scattered around her feet would seem to allude.
The female subjects painted circa 1895 both appear to have been based on studio photographs. The Portrait of Madame M. may have been a studio portrait of Rousseau’s first wife, Clémence Boitard, who died in 1888. Portrait of a Woman was a commission inspired by a photograph. The draperies on the left are reminiscent of those found in photographic studios. The original owner does not appear to have appreciated the portrait as Picasso apparently bought it from a bric-a-brac dealer in 1905 for the modest sum of five francs. However, it was more highly prized subsequently as it was presented at the famous banquet in honour of Rousseau organised by the Spanish Master at his Bateau-Lavoir studio in the autumn of 1908.

Cruel childhoods

Cruel childhoods

Henri Rousseau-L'enfant à la poupée
Henri Rousseau
L'enfant à la poupée, 1892
Paris, musée de l'Orangerie
© Photo RMN - Franck Raux © RMN-Grand Palais (musée de l'Orangerie) / Franck Raux
Although Rousseau’s oeuvre features few portraits of children, these paintings represent some of the artist’s most disturbing and fascinating images. For him, the world of childhood was neither joyful nor carefree. His models are depicted in rigid, frontal poses against a background of motionless landscapes and stare at the observer with the unsettling gaze of melancholic, adults.
In In Honour of the Baby! Rousseau resorts, as he often does, to a “hierarchical” construction of the perspective. The puppet appears too large and the child itself, because of the “disproportion” of his sturdy legs, takes on a monumental aspect Thus, he becomes an enigmatic totem standing between a tree in bloom and bare branches which foreshadow the future.
A similar feeling of unease can also be found in Child With A Doll, in which a little girl in a red dress is depicted against the backdrop of a green meadow dotted with small flowers. The simplified perspective is reminiscent of the work of Italian Primitives such as Paolo Uccello. Engulfed in a loneliness from which her doll seems to offer no consolation, she exudes an air of strangeness which the artist reinforces with anatomical “inaccuracies”: the model has no neck and her legs are depicted in profile, despite the frontal pose.
Of the many portraits of children created at the turn of the century, these eccentric works exerted a lasting fascination over a number of artists including Carlo Carrà and Pablo Picasso. In Maya With her Doll, in which his solitary daughter is engaged in a silent dialogue with her toy, the Spanish master appears to draw his inspiration explicitly from Le Douanier Rousseau.

De Rerum Natura

De Rerum Natura

Henri Rousseau-Nature morte à la cafetière
Henri Rousseau
Nature morte à la cafetière, 1910
Collection particulière
© DR

Rousseau depicted the most traditional genres in painting with powerful poeticism, restoring the lyrical essence of ordinary subjects for the viewer. His still lifes are far from the formal experiments which, in the wake of Cézanne, had become one of the favourite themes of avant-garde artists, notably Picasso and Cubist painters.
The flat depiction, precise drawing and rhythmic recurrence of motifs transform these meticulously arranged floral compositions into pictures with a strong decorative impact. The profusion and precision of detail is also reminiscent of the lush green jungles painted by Rousseau.

Anonyme-Nature morte aux fruits
Anonyme
Nature morte aux fruits, vers 1865-1880
Washington, National Gallery of Art
Don d'Edgar William et Bernice Chrysler Garbisch
© National Gallery of Art, Washington / National Gallery of Art

Nature is observed with a pure, spellbound gaze, which seems to prefigure the limpid vision of the principal exponents of Magical Realism in Italy, such as Antonio Donghi, and New Objectivity in Germany. The Italian painter Giorgio Morandi admired Rousseau’s work and his early paintings mirror Rousseau’s flat composition and archaism.
Wilhelm Uhde, Douanier Rousseau’s first biographer, accurately captured the “lyrical” quality of these works. In a monograph written in 1911, he said: “Rousseau looks at nature like a child. For him, every day is a new event whose laws elude him. He believes that there is something invisible behind phenomena, which is their essential attribute, as it were.”

Strange places

Strange places

Henri Rousseau-Les pêcheurs à la ligne
Henri Rousseau
Les pêcheurs à la ligne, 1909
Paris, musée de l'Orangerie
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée de l'Orangerie) / Hervé Lewandowski
Le Douanier Rousseau began painting landscapes when he was still employed as a toll collector and continued to do so throughout his career. He loved Paris and its surroundings and his walks provided an opportunity to make studies en plein air, but he also worked from postcards and photographs.
Quite unlike the Impressionists, who sought to capture the atmosphere and its constant variations, Rousseau’s landscapes are fixed in a static realm and populated with anonymous figures who seem to defy all the rules of perspective. They are silent witnesses to the changes brought about by progress: aeroplanes, airships and hot-air balloons fly over the views of the Paris suburbs in a touching tribute to modernity. Rousseau was fascinated by the feats of the early days of aviation and Fishermen depicts the biplane in which Wilbur Wright made his first flights in France in 1908. The image is simplified in the manner of illustrations published in the popular press. The sense of surprise is accentuated by Rousseau’s stylistic traits: a front view, clearly defined foreground, middle ground and background, sharp drawing, and distortion of perspective.
The sensation of strangeness aroused by his suburban scenes turns to fear in Ship in a Storm, which is primitive, terrifying and reminiscent of ancient sailors’ ex-votos.

War

War

Henri Rousseau-La Guerre
Henri Rousseau
La Guerre, vers 1894
Musée d'Orsay
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / image RMN-GP
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When Rousseau presented War at the Salon des Indépendants in 1894, its absolute originality attracted attention. The artist, who admired the academic art of his era, reconnects with it here through the allegorical genre. In this composition, which is rigorously divided into two horizontal registers, he regains the symbolic power of his elder colleague Bouguereau’s Equality before Death.
A few years after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, pictures personifying the conflict abounded. However, Rousseau’s unique style brings out the unreal aspect of the scene. When the work was first presented it attracted sarcasm and condescension for its inept execution. However, Louis Roy, a young painter and critic for Le Mercure de France, praised this “brave attempt at symbolism” and its innovative “strangeness”.
Rousseau achieves this high degree of symbolic potency through his deep sense of synthesis. War, an ageless, snarling woman holding a sword and smoking torch, is riding side-saddle on a flying horse. She hovers over a desolate landscape and a mound of male corpses. The composition, which is stripped of any anecdotal or narrative elements, is reminiscent of an icon. Rousseau is said to have been inspired by an engraving in the press illustrating a serial called The Tsar. The stylised shapes, absence of realistic perspective, and areas of flat colour are also inspired by popular illustrations.
The total lack of any historical information and the metaphorical power of this work raise it to the ranks of the very best pictorial anti-war manifestos.

The Blaue Reiter

The Blaue Reiter

Henri Rousseau-La basse-cour
Camille Corot
La basse-cour, 1874
Musée d'Orsay
Legs d'Alfred Chauchard, 1909
© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Droits réservés / DR
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In the opening years of the 20th century, the German Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) movement led notably by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Paul Klee, proposed a renewal of art via a return to its roots. Although it swiftly moved towards abstract art, the group, which formed in Munich, viewed Rousseau as one of its precursors. Kandinsky discovered his work in 1906-1907, when he went to Paris with his partner, Gabriele Münter. A few years later, he acquired two canvases by the painter: The Painter and his Model (1900-1905) and The Poultry Yard (exhibited), which Kandinsky presented in 1911 at the first Blaue Reiter exhibition at the Tannhäuser gallery in Munich.
In March 1912, the group published an almanac with a wealth of illustrations designed to present different aspects of art reflecting the roots sought out by the Munich movement. In it, Kandinsky penned an essay entitled Über die Formfrage (On the problem of form) which he illustrated with seven works by Rousseau, alongside figurative works drawn from the popular realist tradition. The almanac also published Portrait of Kandinsky by Gabriele Münter, displayed here, whose simplified brushstrokes and range of bright colours seem to reflect Rousseau’s work.

A glimpse of Paradise

A glimpse of Paradise

Henri Rousseau, dit le Douanier-La Charmeuse de serpents
Henri Rousseau
La Charmeuse de serpents, 1907
Musée d'Orsay
Legs Jacques Doucet, 1936
DR
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Besides his famous jungle scenes, Rousseau painted many pictures inspired by a primitive world, a lost paradise where nature is still unspoilt.
In Eve, the biblical character takes the apple offered to her by a snake; the sunset alludes to the loss of innocence and serves as a reminder that paradise will soon become an untamed jungle.
The Snake Charmer, a painting commissioned by Robert Delaunay’s mother following a trip to India, also refers to a primitive world: an androgynous dark-skinned figure casts a spell over snakes and the natural world with its flute playing. This work, which is one of Rousseau’s most fascinating and enigmatic paintings, inspired generations of artists, and the Surrealists in particular. Victor Brauner, who worked in the Douanier Rousseau’s former studio in the 1940s, paid tribute to it in The Meeting at 2 bis, rue Perrel.
Similarly, The Dream, the last painting presented by Rousseau at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910, provided inspiration for artists such as Paul Delvaux and Max Ernst, who adopted the same dream-like approach in Garden Inhabited by Chimera.
The enigmatic Yadwigha (as Rousseau dubbed her) is depicted reclining naked on a Louis-Philippe sofa in the heart of a lush forest, surrounded by exotic fauna and a bizarre “black charmer”. This fantastical, timeless vision is Rousseau’s final tribute to a lost paradise which never ceased to haunt his dreams.

The wild procession

The wild procession

Henri Rousseau-Joyeux farceurs
Henri Rousseau
Joyeux farceurs, 1906
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection
© Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia
Although he never left Paris, Rousseau gave life to an exotic world in his “jungles” paintings. These fantastic visions, suspended between dream and reality, remain his best-known works.
Fascinated by the tales of fellow artillerymen who had fought in Mexico and by the pavilions at the Universal Exhibition of 1899, he created a magical and mysterious world inspired by his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes and Natural History Museum in Paris and also by the widely available exotic picture books such as the Album des bêtes sauvages (Wild Animal Picture Book), published in the early 20th century by Les Galeries Lafayette.
All these influences fed into the richly-detailed, brightly-coloured paintings in which real motifs coexist with fantastic inventions.
In addition to scenes describing fights between wild animals, which are metaphors for the never-ending struggle for life (The Hungry Lion, Horse Attacked by a Jaguar), the Douanier Rousseau painted idyllic visions (The Waterfall, Tropical Forest with Monkeys) suffused with nostalgia for a lost paradise and its unspoilt nature. The iconography is occasionally obscure: in Merry Jesters, two monkeys are depicted in the heart of a lush jungle with a bottle of spilt milk and a backscratcher – two objects whose meaning remains unknown. Thus, Apollinaire rightly observed in Les soirées de Paris in 1914: “Rousseau is undoubtedly the oddest, most daring and most charming of painters of exotic scenes.”