Beautiful Dreamer
BAYLES, MARTHA
Beautiful Dreamer Henri Rousseau and the apotheosis of the Sunday painter. by Martha Bayles You know the type. He's the guy at your high school reunion who just quit his job (dull to start with)...
...Rousseau himself seems to have been nicely put together (by all reports, the ladies of his acquaintance thought so...
...In 1908, two years before Rousseau's death, Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire threw a banquet in his honor, attended by a who's who of the Parisian avant-garde...
...And strikingly, there is no perspective to speak of, because the line of the horizon has been brought as low as possible—suggesting a ridge, or the crest of a hill...
...The bananas get bigger, but they do so from left to right, not from front to back— no doubt because Rousseau wanted to balance out what is essentially a flat composition...
...Question for a Sunday painter: How do you keep a dream alive after it has come true...
...being totally incapable of using it was another...
...Even at the time, it was obvious that Rousseau was taking a free hand, placing a Mongolian deer in the jungle (The Waterfall, 1910) and conjuring encounters not found in nature (Tropical Landscape— An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla, 1910...
...In The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck's superb study offin-de-siecle Parisian culture, he compiles a list of Rousseau's finest works, including four jungle pictures (about which more below) and the stunning Carnival Evening (1886...
...Does this mean there's hope for our Sunday painter, even though his attempts at perspective give the viewer a migraine, and his renderings of the human body are, to quote Cole Porter, "less than Greek...
...Rather it is the dropped horizon, which creates an eerie emptiness behind the figures and the dark woods that loom at their back...
...And when you see that gleam in his eye, you don't need to ask what kind of art...
...Nor an installation artist, re-creating his own grungy bathroom in an even grungier downtown gallery...
...Certainly the National Gallery show is organized around this happy ending, with The Dream hung at the very end, where it attracts countless oohs, ahs, and contented sighs...
...It is weirdly academic, in the sense that it is crammed with everything you could possibly want, all the goodies in Rousseau's bag of tricks, plus a nude...
...At best, Rousseau spoofs the genre, introducing such bizarre elements as the striped cat, red fez, and itty-bitty smokestacks in Portrait of Monsieur X (Pierre Loti) (1910...
...But the same cannot be said of the human figures he painted...
...If you want to see Rousseau's most beautiful jungle painting, go back to the first, Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised), painted 19 years earlier...
...But Rousseau had little use for their work...
...But as Christopher Green writes in the catalogue, Rousseau's real accomplishment was to create a dream jungle, "a theater of fears and desires" for his fellow bourgeois Parisians...
...If you'd prefer not to see that line erased, then your reaction will be closer to that of the Paris Salon-goers who, accustomed to the lofty subject matter and polished technique of the Academy of Fine Arts, scoffed at Rousseau's doltishness...
...not beautiful...
...Obviously there's nothing crude or backward about great works created by civilizations that did not study perspective: medieval manuscripts, Chinese paintings, and Persian miniatures, to name a few...
...Take anatomy...
...For example, students were forbidden to touch a paintbrush until they had completed several years of figure drawing and accumulated an acceptable portfolio...
...But it is not thrilling and (dare I say it...
...Are the best of the jungle pictures—Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised) (1891), The Hungry Lion Throws itself on the Antelope (1905), The Merry Jesters (1906), and The Snake Charmer (1907)—decorative...
...It's fascinating to see how this early canvas prefigures Rousseau's later triumphs...
...The calculations required to create this illusion have evolved from Giotto's rudimentary algebra to the elaborate ratios worked out by Erwin Panofsky...
...Rousseau's self-delusion is perhaps best revealed in John House's contribution to the catalogue, which recalls him "submitting designs to the competitions for the decoration of several of the town halls in the Paris region— those of Bagnolet, Vincennes and Asnieres...
...Compare that fabulous canvas, full of gorgeous color, movement, and pattern, with the formulaic jungle paintings in the room just before The Dream, and you'll see a definite decline...
...And, ironically, how many tourists would now be trooping to any provincial town whose officials had been clairvoyant enough to commission a mural by Henri Rousseau...
...or by scale, with fruits and flowers getting smaller the farther they recede...
...No way...
...Much has been made of the tiny grimacing face attached to the gazebo on the left, but that is not what makes this picture so haunting...
...It is probably worth remembering that five francs was chicken feed, and that Picasso was a Spaniard...
...But through it all, any malfunction of approved perspective has been called crude and backward...
...Too bad The Dream is not the culmination it is chalked up to be...
...As this exhibition makes abundantly clear, Rousseau's images of tropical flora, fauna, and humanity came from popular magazines, travel books, the Paris botanical garden and zoo, and the 1889 World's Fair, which featured 44 different ethnic and historical pavilions surrounding the base of the brand-new Eiffel Tower...
...By the time he painted The Dream, success had turned to formula, and he was, as they say, churning them out...
...He's the guy at your high school reunion who just quit his job (dull to start with) and cut loose from his family (wife deceased, kids farmed out to relatives) in order to devote himself entirely to his art...
...But here, too, Rousseau proved resourceful...
...If you favor the postmodernist erasure of the line between high and low art, then you'll enjoy seeing daubs such as The Environs of Paris (1909), Banks of the Oise (1905), and Ivry Quay (1907) given the same royal treatment as the Venetian masters on display in the West Building...
...The painful truth is that Rousseau's career peaked early, with a handful of astonishing canvases in which he overcame his technical limitations and expressed something urgent and ineffable that had clearly been bottled up in his soul...
...It is hard to attach any real artistic merit to his stabs at the formal black-suited portrait, a genre for which the standard was set back in 1524 by Titian's Man With a Glove...
...Full disclosure: Carnival Evening is not only my favorite Rousseau, it is also one of my favorite paintings, period...
...Accounts of that legendary event differ, but the overall tone seems to have been part mockery, part affection for the guest of honor who, 20 years older than anyone else present, had never aspired to be part of the avant-garde...
...We can only imagine how quickly Rousseau's designs got shot down...
...And sometimes he uses neither...
...For instance, in most of the jungle paintings, depth is suggested either by color, with the greens in the background darker and more saturated than those in the foreground...
...The Great Artist wannabe is typically just that—a Sunday painter with no real training, who earnestly believes that hard work Martha Bayles teaches in the honors program at Boston College...
...And definitely not a transgressive artist, running dead rats up flagpoles or nailing plastic Nazis to a cross...
...But no advice, however kindly or condescendingly given, could substitute for the rigorous course of study enforced at the Academy...
...His last jungle painting, The Dream (1910), is right up there with Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's Sunflowers as one of art's All-Time Greatest Hits...
...Rather than struggle to make his pair of carnival-goers lifelike, he transforms them into exquisite little dolls, dressed in pale garments that glow as luminously against the bare, black trees as the full moon and delicate clouds glow against the twilit sky...
...But these have, at times, been called decorative— or as the phrase goes when the intention is to disparage, merely decorative...
...In Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo (1908), the colors are uniform, and despite a faint hint of horizon, the space is extremely shallow...
...It's nice to know that, after all those years of rejection and poverty, Rousseau finally made it big...
...Rather than wrestle blindly with sight lines and vanishing points, his best paintings simply abandon the whole enchilada and find other ways to evoke a sense of distance...
...As House adds, "town-hall decorations were perhaps the single most significant form of public-art patronage in France during those years...
...Modernism back then was not the insulting joke that postmodernism is today...
...In a way, yes...
...After all, playing with or even subverting classical perspective was one thing...
...This exhibition does a nice job of highlighting the mismatch between the modernists' embrace of Rousseau and his own somewhat deluded self-image...
...You bet...
...Ever since the artists of the 14th century read the Latin translation of Ibn al-Haytham's 10th-century treatise, Optics, Western painting has valued pictorial depth, or the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface...
...It was definitely a clueless amateur who painted the dreary small landscapes of suburban Paris now filling one room of the Rousseau exhibition at the National Gallery...
...In Rousseau's day, Cezanne's dismantling of perspective was being eagerly taken up by the cubists and other modernists...
...Does that make them inferior to umpteen thousand academic paintings in which fully sculpted nudes writhe in deep illusion-istic space...
...But at worst, his portraits bear more than a passing resemblance to the stiff, labored ancestor pictures that stare grimly from the walls of every preserved colonial homestead in America...
...and exalted thoughts will turn him into Titian . . . or at least, Bouguereau...
...But that didn't stop them from condescending to Rousseau...
...Did Henri Rousseau fit this bill...
...At the same time, the early modernists—many of whom had been trained in the academic style, even as they spurned it—praised Rousseau's art as "naive," "primitive," even "folk," meaning that it was ignorant of anatomy and perspective...
...But Rousseau got around this problem by the ingenious device of dressing his human figures in fancy costumes and reducing them to decorative motifs, preferably in landscapes where his other weakness, a lack of perspective, had already been solved...
...His hero was Bouguereau, the ultimate academic painter, and he bragged of having received advice from two others, Jean Gerome and Felix-Auguste Clement...
...Indeed, the oranges in the grass in front of the struggling beasts are the same size as those in the trees behind them...
...Picasso, who had mastered classical draftsmanship under the tutelage of his father almost before he could walk, paid five francs for Rousseau's gawky Portrait of a Woman, and called it "one of the most truthful French psychological portraits...
...Perhaps—if he is immensely gifted, incredibly tenacious, and capable of following Rousseau's example, which was to find a way around his weaknesses, build on his strengths, and manage to live in the right place at the right time...
...This type never wants to be a conceptual artist, exhibiting piles of toenail clippings or streaking through the financial district on a skateboard...
...On the contrary, Rousseau's fan club included some of the most significant artists of the 20th century...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 5
