Joe’s September 2019 Art Newsletter

You might say, Henri Rousseau, why Henri Rousseau?
 
Most people love or hate his work. I am of the former. What I love about him is that he created his art in solitude from his imagination as a self-taught amateur painter who didn’t start painting seriously until he was forty-nine.

He once claimed he had “no teacher other than nature”. My favorites are his twenty-five sometimes-gigantic jungle paintings (although he never saw a jungle) with primitive figures and animals (he used taxidermy specimens). His inspirations were derived from the artist’s numerous visits to the glass houses of the Parisian Botanical Gardens, the Jardin des Plants. Rousseau described what he felt on those frequent visits. “When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream.”

I entered one of his dreams when I saw his painting, The Snake Charmer at The Legion of Honor in San Francisco in September of 2010. As I went to view the last painting in the show, I was suddenly looking up at his ominous Snake Charmer. At its six by six-foot size, I felt like I could walk right into Henri’s mysterious jungle.  The show, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Beyond presented more than 100 paintings from the incomparable collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, including Van Gogh’s Starry Night. What a treat it was to go from a starry night to a jungle within minutes.

Henri Rousseau’s was a professional toll taker in the French Customs service, so he was affectionately known as Le Douanier, the toll taker. He created a vast volume of wondrous mystical paintings to become a key actor in the development of postimpressionism (characterized by painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism).

After a life of anonymity, he eventually attracted the Parisian avant-guard when he exhibited at the Salon des Independents in 1885 at the age of 46. He became widely admired by Pablo Picasso and his circle for his fresh and direct vision, so obviously unaffected by academic training.
 

From 1886, he exhibited regularly in the Salon des Independants. As you may know, for a few years, the Impressionists were derogatorily labeled The Fauves, or the wild beasts (e.g. Henri Matisse). Mainly because they finished their paintings in one session, often outdoors.  The paintings of the Fauves were characterized by bold brushwork and vivid colors. Their subject illustrated a  new element of simplification and abstraction,  an extreme development of Van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism.  Some experts say Rousseau’s The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope may even have influenced the naming of the Fauves.

 

From Henri Rousseau biography, Archived 24 October 2008 at the Guggenheim, we learn of Le Banquet Rousseau. When Pablo Picasso happened upon a painting by Rousseau being sold on the street as a canvas to be painted over, the younger artist instantly recognized Rousseau’s genius and went to meet him.

In 1908, Picasso held a half-serious, half-burlesque banquet in his studio at Le Bateau-Lavoir in Rousseau’s honor labeled Le Banquet Rousseau, American poet and literary critic John Malcom Brinnin wrote “It was one of the most notable social events of the twentieth century, neither an orgiastic occasion nor even an opulent one. Its subsequent fame grew from the fact that it was a colorful happening within a revolutionary art movement.” 

Richard R. Brettell tells us that guests at the banquet Rousseau included Leo and Gertrude Stein as well as a host of other now-famous artist and writers. French writer Andre Salmon  recalled the setting of the illustrious banquet: “Here the nights of the Blue Period passed… here one evening in the year 1908 unrolled the pageantry of the first and last banquet offered by his admirers to the painter Henri Rousseau called the Douanier.”^[

After Rousseau’s retirement in 1893, he supplemented his small pension with part-time jobs and work such as playing a violin in the streets. Roberta Smith in the New York Times tells us that he also worked briefly at Le petit journal, where he produced a number of its covers. Rousseau exhibited his final painting, The Dream, in March 1910, at the Salon des Independants.

Whether you love him or hate him I hope you will recognize the art of the humble toll taker who made a place for himself in the history of art, painted from his amazing imagination and caused quite a stir in Paris.