In "Portrait of Monsieur X (Pierre Loti)," circa 1910, Henri Rousseau combined man and animal, nature and industry, Orient and Occident in an intriguing image. Courtesy of Kunsthaus Zurich.
:Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), one of the most intriguing, enigmatic - and popular - artists of all time, created a variety of paintings that have long captivated yet puzzled viewers. A self-taught genius, whose work was often ridiculed by the art establishment, he brought determination, originality and remarkable skills to the development of an unusual style. His career culminated in a series of fantasy jungle pictures for which he is best known.
"Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris," on view at the National Gallery of Art through October 15, is the first American retrospective of the painter in 20 years. It offers a unique opportunity to gauge the range of his achievements in landscape, allegorical, portrait and jungle painting and, as National Gallery director Earl A. Powell III observed, how he "set the stage for some of the groundbreaking innovations of modernism."
An extensive display of documents, popular ephemera and other source materials shed additional light on Rousseau's career.
The show, organized by Tate Modern, London, and Reunion des Musees Nationaux and Musee d'Orsay, Paris, in association with the National Gallery, has already been seen in London and Paris.
Born in Laval in northwest France, the son of an ironmonger, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 and lived there the rest of his life. After stints in the army, he married twice, and for many years worked as a minor customs clerk on the outskirts of the city. Thus, his nickname, "Le Douanier" (the customs agent).
Explaining the incongruous imagery of his culminating masterpiece, "The Dream," 1910, Henri Rousseau said, "The sleeping woman on the sofa dreams that she is transported into the forest, while hearing the music of a snake charmer. That explains why the sofa is in the picture." To a fellow artist, he confided, "The sofa is there only because of its glowing, red color." Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art.
Training himself, Rousseau copied works at the Louvre, but was unable to paint full time until he was 50. An admirer of academic titans Adolphe-William Bouguereau and Jean-Leon Gerome, he aspired in vain to join the refined French Academy. Although respected and collected by such vanguard artists as Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, he was always the untutored outsider, exhibiting in the nonjuried Salon des Indépendants.
After leaving the customs service, Rousseau lived frugally, gave drawing and music lessons to augment his meager pension and persevered in making art. Traditionalists laughed at the odd ways in which he transformed conventional landscapes, allegories, portraits and exotic scenes.
As a result of contacts with writers like Guillaume Apollinaire and modernist artists such as Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, by the early 1890s Rousseau abandoned academic art for a more progressive manner. He relished being called a "modern primitive."
Toward the end of his life he was championed by the avant-garde, led by Delaunay and Picasso, who saw in his idiosyncratic art new possibilities for the future. Surrealists, like Max Ernst, were influenced by Rousseau's work.
