THE GENIUS OF THE CUSTOMS INSPECTOR

...there was a Dutch-man, Van Gogh, who made mud pies Kwild, raw color...

...Perhaps Rousseau had a gift which most of us lose with our childhood: the gift not only to dream, but also to fix our visions permanently in color and line...

...he explained it was only his parents' poverty that obliged him "to follow at first another career than that to which his artistic taste called him...

...Had he been born in Paris instead of a barren provincial town, and in this century rather than in 1844, he might not have had to waste so many years on trying to acquire, by trial-and-error, the rudiments of his craft...

...Even the artists were not sure what to think of "le douanier...

...I could finish all these pictures," he remarked about Cezanne's paintings, and to young Picasso he said, "We are the two greatest painters of our epoch, you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern style...

...Curiously, this came from one whose maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were distinguished military men...

...Opposite hangs an earlier picture, Liberty Inviting the Artists: rows and rows of painters are seen queuing up to enter the Salon des Independants while, high up in the sky, Liberty, incarnated in the shape of a hefty winged angel, blows welcome on a trumpet...

...The maker of this unforgettable canvas once said to a friend: "If a king tries to start a war, a mother should go to him and forbid it...

...In every one of Rousseau's canvase there are elements lifting them higt above the million square miles of folk or amateur art...

...With the same intensity, the lions and tigers in his jungle pictures stare at us out of big, round eyes...

...The Changing Forms of Art, 1955...

...To us, these scenes are no more frightening than fairy-tales...

...Years after his death, there were those clever people who talked of the "omnipotence of the dream," of "hand-painted dream photographs...

...In one canvas this imaginary jungle is in upheaval, a storm tosses the branches of the trees and the tall grasses through which a terror-stricken tiger is seen skulking...

...Yet the compost tion is firmly held together by the intertwined branches of the young trees, drawn so "unrealistically" that they seem like dancers in a surrealist ballet...

...One of the most astonishing pictures of the last six decades, it shows a dark-skinned woman sleeping in the desert, and beside her a hypnotized lion...

...He used what to him seemed to be the accurate equivalents of the local colors...

...The limners of colonial and earl Nineteenth Century America, whe portrayed farmers and their families may have proceeded in a similar way In an Eighteenth Century canvai showing the fishermen from Marble head, Mass., swarming out to fight the British redcoats, each is depicted separately, and all in the same size with utter disregard of perspective In early American still lifes, ead flower, each piece of fruit is me ticulously drawn distinct from it neighbor...

...Naturally, the professors of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not regard Rousseau as a subject worth serious discussion...

...This was one of the rare instances that Rousseau allowed himself to voice an opinion publicly—it is not known what he thought of the labor troubles, General Boulanger's political machinations, the Dreyfus Case, if indeed he had any ideas about them at all...

...But nobody must be misled by these utterances into thinking that the case of the douanier is completely settled in his favor...

...Without the slightest attention to perspective, totally oblivious to modeling with light and shade, he drew pathetically funny little figures, and arranged them in unbelievable landscapes painted in impossible colors...

...Pissarro warmly praised the customs inspector's work, instead of breaking out into the expected laughter...

...Asked which of the works in the Louvre he liked best, the confused little man said: "There are so many of them I forget the names...

...The Sleeping Gypsy alone would be enough to warrant a trip to the Museum of Modern Art...

...But even recently a young British writer, Patrick Heron, himself an artist, came out with a cutting judgment: "Rousseau's finish [his coloring] was commonplace, his vision a sentimental suburban clerk's daydreams...

...But the eyes burn with a passionate intensity, as they do in all of Rousseau's portraits, revealing not so much the sitter as the strange man who painted the canvas, one who, though he looked like any pensioned official and solid family man, inwardly carried a fire that would have consumed him had it not found its outlet in art...

...But next to The Sleeping Gypsy hangs the last great work Rousseau painted, The Dream...

...It never occurred to this innocent soul that it was he who was being discussed...

...to have lived as a next door neighbor of Mr...

...Take the picture of Pierre Loti, the novelist, made after a newspaper sketch: it is neither a psychological study, nor a good likeness...

...Apparently, rebellion coursed beneath the surface of this meek ex-tollgate keeper who achieved what he desired, despite clumsiness, derision, and lifelong penury...

...To music and drama is added mystery...

...Degas, who, with Pissarro, remembered the jibes received when the first Impressionist show had opened, was stirred by the qualities of this untutored petit-bourgeois: his direct approach, inherent sense of design, and virility of color...

...Consciously, Rousseau had a very simple desire: to reproduce what he saw precisely and exactly as he saw it...

...Painting a portrait, he used the handle of his brush, as a tailor would use a tape, to get the measurement of a client, and to make sure he har the right flesh tone he would hold brush dipped in pink color up to the sitter's face...

...He edited the Little Art Book Series...

...He would have certainly disclaimed paternity at the sight of the configurations of a Masson and Miro, a Dali and Tanguy...

...If the case of Rousseau proves anything, it proves how difficult it was in Europe even in the time of our grandparents for a talented man (to say nothing of a woman...

...It is sad enough that they defend their right to exhibit and sell by pointing to Grand-ma Moses (who was a hired girl on an upstate New York farm when Rousseau started to exhibit at the Salon des Independants but to this very day has never heard of him...

...But the visits to the Louvre could teach him little beyond telling him (what he must have known intuitively) that his approach had to be a different one...

...My six-year-old son could not do worse," the Parisian of 1886 would say, feeling happily superior to the presumptuous idiot...

...but he knew how to orchestrate the flowers into strik-ing color harmonies, and to drama-tize their grandeur by keeping table top and vase austere and subdued...

...Centuries could have passed between the small stiff landscapes and awkward "portraits" he produced in the beginning, and The Dream of 1910 which is one of the great excitements of modern art...

...Parisians found the Salon of the Independents on the Champs-d'Elysees as good as a circus...

...This canvas of 1910 is a superb summing-up of all elements in the jungle series: the tropical flowers and fruics, stylized and drawn many times their original size...

...and finally there was a retired customs inspector Wbuanier) named Henri Rousseau who, although old enough to know wtter, appeared to be the most infantile of all...

...Why, then, make a fuss about Rousseau...

...For a small fraction of this amount, Henri Rousseau could have had an education fitting his talent...

...There were others who felt the spark of genius in this strange, poetic figure...

...But even some of the Independents, noticing that the laughter increased year after year, wondered whether they had been wise in admitting Rousseau...

...For there is very much that is forced, studied, or cerebral even in their best works, whereas Rousseau apparently did little more than painstakingly transfer day-dreams onto canvas...

...Painting flow ers, Rousseau scrupulously arranged them in the vase to paint each leaf each petal with minute care...

...Unlike many of our "Sunday Painters," he revered the art of the masters...

...But though he saw each flower singly, the sense of the bunch was never lost There is music here, and drama...

...In his autobiographical sketch he explained that he had joined the Independents in die belief "that complete freedom to create should be left to the artist whose thoughts soar into the realm of the beautiful and the good...

...He knew that the time would come when the public would no longer laugh about him: "I have been told that my work is not of this century...

...One may speculate what would have become of a Cezanne, as unworldly, shy, and naive as Rousseau, and, like him, a provincial, had not Cezanne pere been a well-to-do banker who could send his son to the best schools...

...In an autobiographical sketch of 1895...

...Even in Rousseau's renderings of people, certainly not his best productions, there is something uncanny...

...But it is known that he, who had taken part in the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870-71, violently abhorred war...

...In a large canvas, now in the Louvre, a figure symbolizing war is seen on a black horse riding over mutilated and bleeding men...

...Inevitably, these Surrealists claimed the douanier as their father...

...for Rousseau, painting was not a hobby, but a religion...

...to break through the rigid boundaries of class and caste...

...In Spring in the Valley of the Bievre (Metropolitan Museum), little promenaders are seen rambling on a suburban street...

...his talent for simplification...

...A Grandma Moses was able to admit, with disarming frankness: "If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens...

...But for the poet Rousseau everything was real, and when he was painting a subbject of this sort, he "scared him-self so much that in fear and trembling he had to open a window...

...The progressives of the 1890-1910 period clearly realized the genius of this man whose paintings could be had for the price of a meal...

...Does Heron speak for the 1950's...

...Degas said to a group of friends, pointing at a picture by Rousseau...

...Rousseau's with any degree of intellectual acceleration...

...But the difference was that he was able to re-assemble and re-fuse these hundreds of ele ments into a unity...

...the wild beasts and strange birds in the mass of dark and dense verdure...

...for rhythm and color relation...

...Because none but he, with the possible exception of Edward Hicks, the Quaker preacher from a Pennsylvania village, had been blessed with the additional gift of percehv ing the Gestalt of a person or scene True, Rousseau, with his unyielding respect for every object in nature, wished to convey the sense of every tiny leaf, delineating each with the precision and delicacy of a medieval miniaturist...

...If the art of the past could teach him as little as that of his own time— and he lived in a fertile period that saw the rise and decline of Impressionism, Pointillism, Symbolism, Fauvism, along with another half dozen isms—Nature was a willing and patient teacher...

...the anachronistic, yet exciting vision of one who took nothing for granted, of a man-child freshly discovering the world...

...But Toulouse-Lautrec insisted that the douanier be retained, and he won...

...But, as always, imagination got the better of him, resulting in the creation of huge tapestries in which every detail is linked to another with the illogical logic of a dream...

...There is hardly any progress to be noted in the more than two thousand paintings between her 76th and 96th birthdays...

...He speaks of his "many mortifications," of his "hard experiences," referring, not to his financial difficulties, but to his utter lack of training...

...Of artists who knew him and who are happily still with us, I might mention Vlaminck (who praised the "so rare gift of his creation" and voiced "the surprise at finding immediately in this bonhomme what we seek through knowledge"), Picasso ("the first work of the douanier which I chanced to purchase obsessed me from the moment I saw it") and Weber ("He seemed a pure, almost saintly man, full of love, and joyous at the sight of the world...

...For the vogue of this delightful, but highly overrated lady will not survive those dealers, collectors, and flag-wavers who transformed the innocent hobby of a mildly talented rural character into an international hoax...

...Rousseau recorded all details, induct ing the dark picket fence in the fore ground and the railway viaduct in the background, as carefully and literally as possible...

...Painting has become a favorite pastime of "the lonely crowd," and even if only one out of a hundred succeeds in getting a picture hung in an accredited gallery, the threat to the fine arts from untutored, impatient, self-seeking, and, alas, rather untalented men and women is serious...

...It all started seventy years ago...

...There were Seurat and Signac who levered their canvases with milky pays of confetti...

...His leaf by leaf render-ing of a tree is reminiscent of the art of children...

...Rousseau had been dead for over two decades when a contributor to an American art magazine came out with this statement: "I can think of nothing more depressing than to own a Rousseau picture and see it day after day . . just as one would find it impossible...

...The wild beasts are painted after sketches made in the Paris Zoo, while the exotic flora came from the botanical gardens...

...The Museum of Modern Art, having paid $25,000 for The Sleeping Gypsy in 1939, paid four times that sum for The Dream in 1954—a fantastic price level reached only by Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Gauguin of Rousseau's fellow Post-Impressionists...

...Humble and non-political as Rousseau was, one thing he knew: that society did not treat its creative members with the decency due them...

...It is this which distinguishes Rousseau from the dozens of "primitives" who found success in his wake: that, though he started painting relatively late in life, he had never wanted to be anything but an artist (it can be assumed that he painted even before 1880, the year of his first dated paintings...

...Why shouldn't that be the painter of the future...

...I cannot . . . change my manner which I have acquired as the result of obstinate toil...

...In another, all animals pose for the artist in complete peace in an untouched primordial landscape much too ordered to be real...

...Rousseau probably never set foot outside France, and the story that as a youth he spent time in Mexican jungles as a member of a French expeditionary corps is no longer accepted...

...Nor by the fact that his canvases now grace all the great museums of the world, among them the Louvre (which only in 1924, fourteen years after the master's death, reluctantly accepted the gift of a Rousseau), and such American institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the art museums in Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery at Washington...

...It is a picture adored by children, fascinating to Freudian analysts because it lends itself to rich interpretation, and revered by artists who are struck by its paint quality...

...But when they use the shining name of Henri Rousseau to gain acceptance of their base coinages, then it is the critic's task to cry halt...

...Rousseau may have been a mediocrre musician (he gave violin and singings lessons to children in his semi-prole tarian neighborhood, and even "composed"), and his dramatic writings are plain silly...

...Both Degas and Pissarro noted the douanier's feeling ALFRED WERNER has written of art for a number of publications in this country and abroad...

...In the majority of the jungle scenes, however, lions and tigers attack other animals or natives...

...For there a few trazy men who believed themselves artisls exhibited canvases so absurd that all visitors laughed out loud...

...the white moon in the light sky...

...Thomas Craven, in Modern Art, first published twenty-two years ago but still widely read, praised him with faint damns: "He has the charm of a blind fiddler playing sweetly by ear, or of an untutored old man lisping in the musical numbers of a child...

...that from 1885, when he retired from the customs service on a tiny and insufficient pension, to his death twenty-five years later, he devoted his life to art with a zeal that has no parallel...

...What makes a creation of man real art is the transcendental element pervading it, and it is that which is largely lacking in the work of folk artists or "Sunday painters," however "charming...

...When some Committee members suggested that the mirth-provoking colleague be expelled, as his participation was too embarrassing, Rousseau was all in favor of this action...

...and in the center two eerie figures, a nude woman on a red couch, and a dark snake-charmer piping a melody one can almost hear...

...The prices now paid for Rousseau do not make one think so...

...Rousseau, however, grew and developed...

...When Max Weber tried to pay him a compliment—"Your pictures seem to me as beautiful as those of Giotto"— the douanier wondered who Giotto was...