One hopes that retrospectives, even those celebrating so-called lesser luminaries, never go away. How else would we have the opportunity to see works from collections all over the world come together for one brief, shining, revelatory moment? Such a moment is occurring right now at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia where a retrospective of the work of Henri Rousseau is on view. Organized by the Barnes and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, this is the only American venue for this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition.
The Barnes, owners of more Rousseau’s than any other collection in the United States, is a fitting location for this bountiful exhibition. (Its neighbor on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, also owns several works including the magical “Carnival Evening” which is included in the show.). The full panoply of Rousseau’s rich imagination is on view here: urban scenes, pastorals, landscapes both real and unreal, seascapes, portraits and still life.
Rousseau began painting in his forties after a career as a customs agent. Though self-taught and working in isolation at the outset, he was acutely aware of and in a few cases became acquainted with the artists of his time, PIcasso among them. While it is easy to look at his obvious struggles with drawing, perspective, scale, and anatomy and view him as an eccentric albeit extraordinarily imaginative outlier, that would be missing the point and value of this great artist.
The sensation that jumps off his canvases is his sheer passion. Rousseau clearly lived to paint, to be an artist. The desire is palpable, vibrating off the rich, shimmering surfaces of his canvases. He knows how to tease subtlety of tone out of paint, his poor drawing skills notwithstanding, but it is his bold, dramatic use of color in the service of his singular vision that stands out. His understanding of color is second to no one. His greens are deep and vibrant and endless in their variety. He applies the colors in flat layers of saturated yellows, pinks, and blues. His fascination with patterns and details is intense, even obsessive. Looking at his numerous canvases set in jungles and forests, one is struck by the complex networks of serpentine trunks and branches, their ink-black bark slithering through the scene, while the lush, dense and variegated foliage envelopes the people and animals populating the space. Most if not all of his jungles are pastiches, freely mixing vegetation Rousseau would have seen in a variety of domestic botanical gardens. His was no window on the world as we know it, but a window on his recollection of disparate worlds he had seen.
Animals and figures come together from different continents, if not from different worlds. “Tropical Landscape, American Indian Struggling with Gorilla” is such a fusion, depicting a native American struggling with an African primate. The Surrealists embraced his psychologically charged dramas, but, frankly, his fantasies have an air not only of an active but an honest, unforced subconscious. He takes liberties in a manner at once natural and naive, and as one moves from painting to painting these “departures from reality” take on their own normalcy. Paris, with its ethnographic and natural museums to say nothing of fine art, offered him an endless buffet of source material. One of his best known works, “The Sleeping Gypsy”, finds a lion nuzzling a sleeping woman clothed in a coat of many colors, the whole mountain-backed landscape bathed in the eerie light of a full moon. Incongruous as the whole scene is, I find it as plausible as any dream of reason.
Rousseau sought approval and success and failed to achieve much of either during his lifetime. He appears to have depended on sales to friends and on portrait commissions for which he likely sought out the sitters rather than the reverse. He struggled to make ends meet and seemed to occasionally drift in and out of minor trouble with the law for everything from failing to pay bills for supplies to allegedly being part of a planned bank heist. His defender essentially asked his accusers if a fellow who painted like Rousseau could possibly be capable of masterminding a bank heist!! The story is revealing of the tendency, even among supporters, to view “Le Douanier” as this slightly whacky, eccentric painter on the fringe. Don’t be fooled. This is a painter of the first rank.
