Venice

by PHILIP RYLANDS

The penurious Henri Rousseau, Le Douanier, never travelled outside France. Now he is celebrated in the august surroundings of the Doge’s Palace, Venice (to 6th September), in the exhibition Henri Rousseau. Il candore arcaico (translated as ‘archaic naivety’). As with the 2014 exhibition in the same venue dedicated to Manet, this is a joint project of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the Musée d’Orsay and l’Orangerie.1

The exhibition presents thirty-seven ­paintings by Rousseau, with several of his masterpieces: War (cat. no.12, Fig.63), The snake-charmer (no.22, Fig.02), The merry jesters (no.23) and other ‘jungle’ pictures, The football players (no.90), and Me-myself. Portrait-­landscape (no. 7), as well as some well-loved paintings such as The cart of Père Junier (no.85), The country wedding (no.92), the putative ­portrait of his second wife, Joséphine (no.93), various children, and several blithely incompetent small landscapes. But the show exhibits twice as many paintings by others: Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi and Tullio Garbari, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Louis Anquetin, Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac (the three founders of the Salon des Indépendants where Rousseau exhibited so regularly), Victor Brauner, Edward Hicks, Maurice Denis, Pablo Picasso, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, even Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and a magnificent still life by Paul Cézanne (no.59) – to name only some. Jan van Scorel’s Portrait of an Italian gentleman (no.5), apart from a vague affinity to Rousseau’s portraiture, alludes to the Italian Renaissance precedent (since it was painted during Van Scorel’s visit to Venice) for what Rousseau claimed to be his own invention, the ‘landscape-portrait’. Paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Félix-Auguste Clement in the first room remind us that Rousseau was encouraged by them to become an artist; the paintings also exemplify the academic standard against which Rousseau measured himself.

In his lifetime Rousseau was once referred to as l’isolé, but in this exhibition we are asked to consider him in the tradition of the Italian primitives, of folk or votive paintings, as a provocateur of new ways of seeing and as the precursor of an anti-academic, primitive vein in the strata of the European avant-garde in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The question of if or how Rousseau was a ‘primitive’ is central to every discussion of him. Wilhelm Uhde, collector, critic and early admirer (they met in 1907), classified Rousseau with four younger northern French, self-taught, naive painters (André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis and Louis Vivin) and exhibited them together in 1928 as the ‘Sacré Coeur modern primitives’. Yet all of them are purged from this show, and there is no mention of them in the catalogue. The intention would seem to be to dissociate Rousseau from anything resembling what Jean Dubuffet later labelled art brut, despite the childish drawing, the inept perspective and the naivety alluded to in the exhibition’s subtitle. We are encouraged not to think of Rousseau as simply responding to an ‘an urge for self-expression’, a phrase associated with art brut and which was used about Rousseau by, for example, Ronald Alley in 1978.2 Yet it is as a ‘modern primitive’, with his images comparable to folk art and the art of children, that Kandinsky (writing both as anthropologist and art theorist) admired Rousseau, and considered him exemplary of a ‘greater absolute’ of realism, parallel to his own abstraction.3

Rousseau entered the canon of the avant-garde through the notice and actions of others. In 1907 Picasso found in a junk shop, and bought for five francs, the near life-size Woman with a tree branch (no.92). Always hard up, Rousseau had virtually no market in his lifetime; his audience was made up exclusively of other, younger artists (the oldest of them, Félix Vallotton, was twenty-one years younger than he), and writers (Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire above all). In 1891 Vallotton lauded Surprised! (National Gallery, London) as the ‘alpha and omega of art’; in 1905 Rousseau’s huge Hungry lion hung in Salle V of the Salon des Indépendants together with works by Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, prompting, surely, Louis Vauxcelles’s metaphor of the ‘cage of wild beasts’; in 1908 Uhde gave him his first one-man show, and in 1910, weeks after his death, Alfred Stieglitz exhibited work by Rousseau in New York at his 291 Gallery; in spring 1911 Robert Delaunay curated an hommage at the Indépendants and in the same year two paintings by him, owned by Kandinsky, were exhibited in the first Blaue Reiter show (one of them The courtyard; no.65); the following year seven were reproduced in Der Blaue Reiter almanac; in 1914 an entire issue of Apollinaire’s Les Soirées de Paris was dedicated to him. In 1925 the frontispiece of Franz Roh’s founding text Nach-Expressionismus – Magischer Realismus was a reproduction of The sleeping gypsy. A virtual apotheosis came in 1936, when Alfred Barr published his genealogy of Cubism and abstract art, with Rousseau in the upper-right corner, an arrow pointing downwards to Cubism.

Both exhibition and catalogue are divided into sections: the portrait, Le Jardin des Plantes, the Blaue Reiter, still lifes, Parisian art and Italian art. One of these (‘La cavalcata della discordia’) focuses on War (c.1894; no.12; Fig.63). The subject reminds us of Rousseau’s aspirations to Salon status; in 1884 he had obtained a permit to copy in the Louvre, and the pile of cadavers echoes Antoine-Jean Gros’s Napoleon at the Battle of Eylau. War is exhibited in Venice in the company of a desastre by Goya, a later lithograph of the same subject by Rousseau, Triumphs of death both by James Ensor and by Masaccio’s brother Lo Scheggia (with the trope of the skeleton sweeping its scythe) and, most vividly, a murky, rhetorical War, with four horsemen, by Gaston La Touche (1898; no.18). The ­contrast with La Touche renders vivid what appealed to both Kandinsky and Picasso – the freshness of Rousseau’s vision. He reimagined Death in bright daylight as a grinning girl. She does not, as pointed out in the exhibition wall text, ride the monstrous speeding horse, with its tapering muzzle and protruding red tongue, but rather ‘glides’ beside it, like an archaic Greek Medusa. Her hair is of the same stuff as the horse’s mane. All four of the horse’s hooves are visible on the underside – a visual logic worthy of Cubism, as is the dip in the horizon obligingly silhouetting the horse’s hind leg. There are no cast shadows, and chiaroscuro is deployed at random to model bodies and trees. The ground is of some unnamable Léger-like substance – pebbles or woodchips perhaps. All of this gives élan, both specific and general, to Barr’s arrow pointing to Cubism.

Claire Bernardi, writing in the catalogue, offers a plausible explanation both for Rousseau’s celebrated remark to Picasso that he, Rousseau, was the greatest painter in the modern style, and for Delaunay’s admiration:4 quite simply that Rousseau painted modern life – aeroplanes, the Eiffel Tower, smokestacks and cranes, dirigibles and iron bridges such as the old Pont du Carrousel visible in his Prague self-portrait, and even the new sport of rugby football, with players practising in the Bois de Boulogne (no.90). Delaunay did the same, although in his Orphist manner, and quoted the festively flagged boat of Rousseau’s self-portrait in his monumental The city of Paris (Centre Pompidou, Paris). He is represented in the exhibition both by a watercolour of Football (no.89) and by a conté crayon head and shoulders of Rousseau (no.4).

The weirdest painting in the show is by Victor Brauner. Intrigued by the hypnotic eyes of Rousseau’s The snake-charmer (Fig.64), Brauner made a copy and added a pale white creature with ten limbs, two torsos (of opposite sex) and one head with huge eyes (no.34). The snake-charmer (in addition to its imaginative power as one of the great jungle pictures) reveals a flash of uncharacteristic technical brilliance in the reflected moonlight on the water and the atmospheric, dense foliage on the far side of the lake.

It is difficult to imagine how this exhibition could be better, unless the Museum of ­Modern Art, New York, had deprived itself of two of its best-loved paintings, The sleeping gypsy and The dream, or the Philadelphia Museum of Art of A carnival evening. It is intelligently hung in the comfortable small rooms of the Doge’s apartments, with their huge late Renaissance fireplaces, and with excellent wall texts in English and Italian. A few vitrines show publications such as Der Blaue Reiter almanack, the Album des Bêtes Sauvages (Rousseau’s source for the animals in his ­jungle paintings), the catalogue of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, and the 1914 issue of La Voce, edited by Ardengo Soffici (in which Morandi noticed Rousseau’s still lifes). In the final rooms one hears a plaintive violin playing the tender waltz Clémence, which Rousseau composed in honour of his first wife.

1     Catalogue: Henri Rousseau. Il candore arcaico. Edited by Gabriella Belli and Guy Cogeval, with essays by the editors, Valerio Terraroli, Laurence des Cars, Yann le Pichon, Claire Bernardi, Elena Pontiggia and Angela Lampe, a critical anthology by Annabelle Matthias and a chrono-biography by Yann le Pichon. 282 pp. incl. 164 col. and b. & w. ills. (24 ORE Cultura, Milan, 2015), €42 (HB). ISBN 978–88–6648–244–4.
2     R. Alley: Portrait of a Primitive. The Art of Henri Rousseau, Oxford 1978, p.7.
3     V. Kandinsky: ‘Über die Formfrage’, Der Blaue Reiter, 1912, pp.74–100.
4     C. Bernardi: ‘Henri Rousseau il Doganiere agli occhi dell’avanguardia parigina’ in Belli and Cogeval, op. cit. (note 1), pp.63–71, esp. p.69. Elena Pontiggia writes on ‘Il Doganiere Rousseau e l’arte italiana della prima metà del Novecento’, pp.73–79. Soffici introduced Rousseau’s art to Italy where, together with the Italian primitives, it had considerable impact on Carrà, Morandi and the little known Garbari, a highly educated painter from the Trentino (1892–1931).