On Art

...At the trial, the disarming simplicity of his painting—inspiring laughter among the spectators—and the testimony of friends got him off with a suspended sentence and a small fine...

...De Chirico turns fragments of classical statuary and Renaissance vistas into pictures that have an air of the sinister and morbid despite their deceptive calmness...

...The choice of imagery available to the fantastic artist is wide indeed: it ranges back through human history...

...The paintings, then, subscribed to the modern doctrine of the flatness of the picture plane, obviating the need for illusionary vistas...

...As Dora Vallier notes in her valuable study of the artist, however, there is evidence that Rousseau never served in the Mexican campaign...

...The supposed innocent of the legend, in fact, proved remarkably effective at managing a career...

...Still, Rousseau, with touching ambition, considered himself a realistic painter even though his subject matter often included scenes that could have materialized only in his mind's eye...

...Helped along by poets and critics like Apollinaire and Louis Vaux-celles, Rousseau entered the pantheon of the 20th century vanguard...

...It seems doubtful that we shall ever have more than a superficial understanding of De Chirico's enigmatic vistas, of Rousseau's jungle paradises full of menacing animals and brilliantly colored birds...

...It is tempting to see fantasy art as innocent and escapist, merely a production of romantic idylls...

...Most of the initial reviews were funny at his expense, but gradually they became more favorable...

...Given Rousseau's clumsiness with the human figure, his problems with hands and feet, his need to circumvent perspective, the tropical forests of his pictures ereated a subdued, even light that emphasized the silhouette at the expense of sculptural modeling...

...Unfortunately, in his last years, Rousseau became involved in a much more serious charge...

...At first, his work was scorned and ridiculed...

...De Chirico was a shadowy, figure, Rousseau covered his tracks, Miro—in his interviews—is as non-commital as a clam...

...Male and female connections, electrical circuits, magnetos, rods—the possibilities of this Freudian play upon visual forms extend far beyond the equipment pictured...

...His figures were often placed knee-deep in the intermeshing leaves, blossoms and vines that spread a decorative screen across the surface of the canvas...

...With Odilon Redon, Rousseau's contemporary, the fantasies are more genteel, almost too pretty—the stained glass windows of his cathedral dissolve into a gorgeously colored garden...

...Several of the Rousseaus are straightforward landscapes and genre pictures, albeit in a primitive style...

...While none of this personal history entirely explains Rousseau's special vision, it does, perhaps, account for the tropical locale, the sense of urgency, and the painstaking detail with which he fabricated his dream world...

...In the works of the Belgian painter James Ensor, grotesque masks become faces and faces become masks, skeletons piss and play pool...

...And we have the example of his years spent trying to decipher and unravel the symbolic content of his patients' dreams...

...It was not altogether strange that the modernists should have favored Rousseau...

...his figures were awkward and misshapen, his roads hung down like neckties...

...On analysis, dream paintings are likely to yield up the surprising condensations, disguises and role-substitutions that Freud discovered within the splendid dramaturgy of sleep...

...A large and sometimes delightful exhibition of paintings and drawings, Rousseau, Redon, and Fantasy, currently installed as the summer offering of the Guggenheim Museum, is devoted to the subject of fantasy art...

...In this charming idyll, the sofa came straight from Rousseau's studio, the flora from the Jardin des Plantes...

...Aside from the lyrical intensity of his subjects, it was undoubtedly the directness and ingenuity of these formal solutions that appealed to Rousseau's modernist colleagues...

...In modern art, the work of the fantasy artist is closely tied to his own personal history, the one aspect of art we have been taught to ignore as irrelevant to its formal purposes...

...The jungle settings of most of his masterpieces?The Lion's Repast, for instance, or Merry Jesters—provided a perfect solution for many of his technical difficulties...

...Out of that Freudian conjugation, apparently, we get fantasy art...

...It is the need to reorder visual facts in some new, more acceptable and, often, surprising arrangement that produces the original stimulus for fantasy art...

...The one, apparently, stimulated Rousseau's taste for wildlife and exotic scenery...

...Arrested, Rousseau confessed his part in the crime...

...That bit of the past was as invented as his exotic landscapes...

...The wish is father to the dream...

...There were good reasons, though, for Rousseau's secrecy about the past...

...Yet at times Redon turned to a personal and eerie symbolism, particularly in his charcoal drawings and graphic works: Eyes float up, disembodied, or faces stare back, somewhat too cheerily, from a hairy spider or an eggcup...

...What we do not have is the cooperation of the dreamer...

...Rousseau religiously kept a scrap-book of every critical notice that came his way...

...The Dada painter, Francis Picabia, requisitions contemporary forms, fn his Child Carburetor, mechanical parts are turned into metaphors of sex...

...Aside from their formal excellences, we are reduced to appreciating these paintings on the basis of their subliminal effects, guessing at their meanings, puzzling out their meager clues...

...Strictly speaking, a few of the works, which range through European painting from the Post-Impressionists to the Surrealists, are not fantasies...

...Rousseau aspired to the official heights occupied by his idols Gerome and Bouguereau ?9th century academic painters par excellence...

...In the Museum of Modem Art's The Dream, a late painting not included in the present exhibition, a nude woman reclining on a red plush sofa is set down in the midst of one of Rousseau's most beautiful lattice-work jungles full of prowling creatures, giant lily blossoms and exotic birds...

...Redon's images are of a sophisticated and Eterary order...

...they issue out of Symbolist poetry and the works of Poe and Shakespeare...

...Rousseau's nude Yadwigha, transported into the jungle on his divan, might represent, among other things, the wish-fulfillment of his unrequited love for a 54-year-old saleslady...

...the other served as a model of eminent respectability and success...

...The mixture of the fantastic and the ordinary raises the issue of the downright dependence of fantasy art upon reality...

...necessity is the mother of invention...

...There are formal considerations, too, that may be linked to Rousseau's exotic landscapes...

...Either willingly or in innocence, he was conned by an unscrupulous acquaintance into a near-successful attempt to defraud the Bank of France...

...When questioned about this period of his life," the poet observed, "he seemed to remember only the fruits he had seen there, which the soldiers were forbidden to eat...

...He had forged a past in his paintings that was more attractive than the real one...

...But in confronting fantasy art, one has to begin by keeping Rousseau's red plush sofa firmly in mind...

...Rousseau found his jungles in the hothouses of Parisian botanical gardens...

...He encouraged Apollinaire to believe that he had done military service in Mexico as a young man...

...In Chagall's paintings, fantasy is more benign—nostalgic and pitying...

...As a young man he had joined the army to escape imprisonment on charges of theft and embezzlement...

...But we have the authority of Freud for suspecting that these painted images employ the same ingenious mechanisms and the economy of means that he describes as belonging to the dream-work...

...In the Guggenheim exhibition, each of the 21 artists represented places fragments of observed reality in some new and bizarre order...

...Chagall's images are often blissfully personal, as in Birthday, in which the painter and his fiancee, in a floating kiss, hover above the studio furnishings, levitating like saints in a world of placid dinner-ware...

...Toward the end of his 26 years as a painter Rousseau even achieved some modest financial success, selling regularly to the Parisian impresario of modernist art, Am-broise Vollard, and to Joseph Brum-mer, a dealer who later settled in New York...

...There appears to have been some duplicity in Rousseau's dealings with his intellectual sponsors...

...An old Russian man trudges forward, his small cabin strapped to his back...

...Viewing their pictures, we are apt to peel off only the outer layers of meaning, to read only the most obvious symbols: Ensor's pool-playing skeletons may be a sardonic comment on the walking-death that is the human condition...

...They adopted him at about the same time that they discovered African sculpture and primitive art in general...

...But his eyes had preserved other memories: tropical forests, monkeys, and strange flowers...

...By and large, fantastic artists—always excepting Dali—tend to be taciturn and elusive about their lives...

...Although he was taken up by such champions of modernism as Picasso and the poets Apollinaire and Jarry, his ambitions were hardly radical...

...He cultivated the right people—at least so far as posterity is concerned...

...Knowledge of that early record might have endangered his position as a municipal employe and his later pension...

...He showed regularly in the right places, in the Salon des Independ-ants, the Salon d'Automne—the spearhead exhibitions of new esthetic movements...

...We hardly apply the term, for example, to a purely abstract painting...

...Rousseau began painting late in life, retiring from his post as a municipal toll collector at the age of 49 to devote himself entirely to his art...