It is often said that my heart is too open for my own good.

Henri Rousseau

The Last Painting of Henri Rousseau

Rousseau wrote this about the painting The Dream: “The woman in question is dreaming she has been transported into the forest, listening to the sounds from the instrument of the enchanter.” 

He died shortly after this finishing this painting from blood poisoning and a blood clot, but no clear explanation of what caused the blood poisoning, other than he neglected the wound. One theory is that he stepped on a nail: the the protruding spike in the center of the painting.

Putting Rousseau in Perspective

Grace Gluek, New York Times

February 17, 1985

FINDING A LABEL FOR the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) is a tricky business. The word ”naive” has for so long been applied to him that it won’t come unstuck. True, the term covers his technical awkwardnesses and childlike point of view – Rousseau was self-taught as an artist, and as a man he was by most accounts a gentle, large- hearted innocent. But we might also say that he fit into modern art as a post-Impressionist-without- portfolio. The radiant poetry of his work, and its flat, decorative style in which traditional lighting and perspective play no part, evoke Gauguin and other ”advanced” artists of his generation.

Whatever we call him, there is no question that, in his ”portrait- landscapes” and lush, mysterious jungle scenes, Rousseau created a visionary world of such powerful originality that his place is secure among the great artists of history. And his spirited and stylistic inventions were of major importance to the 20th-century avant-garde. Writing of Rousseau in 1916, the Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky, one of his early admirers, said, ”He is more inseparably tied to the spiritual aspirations of the time than many an artist whose form is infallibly ‘modern.’ Through his admirable form,

Now, at a time when figuration and fantasy are again meeting in art, we get a full view of Rousseau’s enchanted world in a big retrospective exhibition. A joint project of the Museum of Modern Art and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux de France opens at the Modern on Feb. 21. Made possible by grants from the Paine Webber Group Inc., and the National Endowment for the Arts, the show was organized by Carolyn Lanchner, curator in the Modern’s department of painting and sculpture, and William Rubin, the department’s director, along with Michel Hoog, curator of the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris.

It is the first museum show of Rousseau’s work in this country since an initial exhibition at the Modern in 1942. Somewhat larger in scope than the earlier show, this one contains about 60 canvases, dating from the beginning of Rousseau’s career in 1886 to its very end. Most of his acknowledged masterpieces are included, among them ”The Sleeping Gypsy” and ”The Dream” from the Modern’s own collection, ”War” and ”The Snake Charmer” from French museums, and several key works – never seen here before – from foreign collections, such as ”Myself, Portrait-Landscape,” from the National Gallery in Prague, which is really a summation of how Rousseau regarded his art, his time and his milieu.

Though worldly success eluded idiot savant , Rousseau never doubted for a minute his own creative mastery. In a short biographical note written in 1895, he saw himself as an ”innovator, whose thought is elevated toward the beautiful and the good,” and as ”on the way to becoming one of our best realist painters.” He admired the more academic artists, Bouguereau and Ger^ome, and yearned for the official recognition they enjoyed. A his work that the real creators loved – the artists Picasso and Robert Delaunay, for example, and the poets

Rousseau’s full time as a painter didn’t really begin until the last quarter of his life, when in 1893 – at the age of 49 – he quit his modest job as a guard with the Octroi, the Paris municipal toll-collecting service (Jarry later gave him the mistaken moniker ”Le Douanier,” or customs inspector) to take ependants, a juryless, open-to-everyone alternative to the stuffy official annual Salons. (Among the 500 other works there that year was Seurat’s brand-new ”Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”) And from then on, he was a regular exhibitor – at first, one of many unknowns. He was in the company of Seurat, Paul Signac, Odilon Redon, and later, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Gauguin and Van Gogh. On first view – and for a long time thereafter – Rousseau’s work drew hoots from the public and most critics, but the Impressionist painter Pissarro took admiring notice, and a few newspaper reviews gave him kind mention. ”He is sincere, and he reminds us a bit of the primitives,” said one.

The range of Rousseau’s painting included still life, genre, landscape, portraits and historical subjects. He did them all in the quaintly rigid yet animated style – ignoring perspective and proportionate scale – that was distinctively his. But his real subject matter, as the critic Roger Shattuck has observed, the one in which his ”genius” is most evident, is a combination of landscape and figure that expresses their deep interaction. One of the first pictures that he showed at the Independants, in fact, was his now-famous masterpiece, ”A Carnival Evening.” In it, a couple dresses in carnival clothes (could they be Rousseau and his wife, who died that year?) stand arm in arm in a forest clearing, while from a hut a strange, masked face regards them. One of many ”forest” paintings Rousseau made, it is a crisp, wintry scene of bare trees, silhouetted in tonal gradations against low-hanging silvery clouds, in a sky brightened by a frosty moon. The painting itself has a wonderful freshness to it, but it is the mysterious, dreamlike tension between the trio of odd beings and their still, silent surroundings that fascinates the viewer. (It is exhibited at the Modern, as are all the paintings mentioned here.)

In 1890, Rousseau showed his first ”portrait-landscape,” a genre that he took credit for inventing. A full- length self-portrait depicts him suitably dressed for his high calling – black suit and floppy black beret – holding a palette and paint brush. The bearded artist dwarfs his background, a quay scene with a bridge and a boat in the river rigged out with brightly colored signal flags. In the distance looms a row of chimneyed buildings and the controversial new Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World’s Fair. A balloon hovers in the sky. What he celebrates in this gala, assertive canvas is not only his fantasy of himself as a respected master, but his solid, even joyful, relationship with the city he knew so well, and his affirmation of the technological future portended by the tower, a hated symbol to many Parisians. So admired was the picture by his artist friends that, some 20 years later, Robert Delaunay, one of Rousseau’s great champions, included a ”quotation” from it in his major painting, ”The City of Paris.”

After his wife’s death, Rousseau carried on his work and his life in a single-room studio shared with his son, who died in 1897 at the age of 18. (Of seven children born of the marriage, only a daughter survived to adulthood.) He scrambled for bread by giving music lessons and even playing his fiddle on the street. Meanwhile, at the yearly Salons, his contributions drew increasing notice, often – but by no means always – derisory.

In 1891, he showed the first of his many junglescapes, a marvelous painting called ”Surprise!” In a dense setting of tropical foliage drenched by a violent storm, a tiger crouches, fangs bared, waiting for prey. So masterful are the colors and the vegetal rendering that they moved the painter Felix Vallotton to write the first serious article about Rousseau, in a Swiss journal. ”His tiger surprising its prey ought not be missed,” he wrote. ”It’s the alpha and omega of painting and so disconcerting that the most firmly held convictions must be shaken and brought up short by such self-sufficiency and childlike naivete.”

That same year, in one of the confusions that seemed to converge on his hapless life, Rousseau was told that the City of Paris had awarded him a silver medal. But it was actually intended for someone else with a like name. A similar incident occurred on a later occasion when, also through a mistake, he was awarded a decoration, the ”Palmes academiques,” meant for another person. Nevertheless, he wore the rosette in his buttonhole for the rest of his life. ROUSSEAU’S ”JUNgles” occupy a very special place in his work. He did more than 20 of them, mostly large-scale, most dating after 1904. Typically, they involve a savage encounter between beasts, or beast and man, surrounded by lush, exaggerated foliage and flowers. But, occasionally, he showed the jungle as Paradise. In the Modern’s magnificent canvas, ”The Dream,” for instance, a nude woman reclines on a sofa in the jungle’s midst, sharing with birds and animals the music made by an exotic piper. In his jungles, as Michel Hoog notes in the Modern’s catalogue, Rousseau broke fully free from tradition to develop his own masterful painting vocabulary that owed nothing to tradition. Too poor to travel, he ”researched” flora and fauna from books, magazines and visits to the Jardin des Plantes and the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Sometimes he just made it up. And then, as in Persian or Japanese or medieval manuscript painting, he laid down the greenery flat on the picture surface to give the effect of a decorated screen. On that level, the paintings are sheer delight. But in them he created something else, a charmed arena where life, if precarious, still blossoms with warmth and abundance.

Given the rigors of his daily existence, the jungles may have had a wish-fulfilling function for Rousseau. But also, romantic notions about the tropics were very much in the late-19th-century air, bodied forth by such dreamers as the poet Arthur Rimbaud, the novelist Pierre Loti (whose portrait Rousseau painted) and the artist Paul Gauguin (with whose work Rousseau’s own gives evidence of familiarity). Another, more practical, reason for the jungles was that these sultry extravaganzas sold better than any of his other pictures. (One of the real masterpieces, ”The Snake Charmer,” dated 1907, was commissioned by the mother of Robert Delaunay. Her exotic account of a visit to the tropics, and her plant-filled apartment in Paris, gave Rousseau inspiration.) Roger Shattuck, who contributes an essay to the Modern’s catalogue, speculates that perhaps Rousseau was aware of the ”primitive” label attached to him, and attempted in this way to capitalize on it. There is also the suggestion, advanced by Michel Hoog, that in these works Rousseau developed a formula that not only gave him a chance for a different kind of expression, but at the same time allowed him to get around certain technical problems hard for him to solve.

Meanwhile, in 1893, Rousseau met the first of his bright young appreciators – the poet, playwright and career eccentric, Alfred Jarry, who came from the same home town of Laval. Jarry, almost 30 years younger, saw visual links in Rousseau’s work to the French folkloric traditions that interested him, and the two became close friends. The author of ”Ubu Roi” wrote favorably about Rousseau, and in 1894 the artist painted his portrait (apparently destroyed by Jarry). Rousseau’s most ambitious canvas up to that time, a fierce, enormous apocalypse called ”War” which, in the current show, is bound to be envied by apocalypteers of today’s neo-Expressionist persuasion, was painted that year, and shown at the Salons. Jarry persuaded him to make a lithograph of it – Rousseau’s only print – for reproduction in ”L’Ymagier,” a literary review Jarry co-edited. It was something over a decade before, through Jarry, Rousseau would meet Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, critic and publicist for the avant- garde who gave Rousseau’s career a significant boost. Nevertheless, by this time – whether others did or not – the aging aspirant regarded himself as very much part of the Paris art world, showing up at the Saturday parties thrown by his neighbors Gauguin and the composer William Molnard and frequented by the likes of Degas, Mallarme and Strindberg. A BREAKTHROUGH occurred in 1905, when two of Rousseau’s paintings were accepted by the Salon d’Automne, a new, juried annual of lively young artists. The company that year included Matisse, Derain, Braque, Dufy, Rouault and Vlaminck, and their highly chromatic work caused a sensation when it was labeled ”fauve” (wild beast) by the critic Louis Vauxcelles. Nor did Rousseau’s huge ”The Hungry Lion,” his biggest canvas to date, go unnoticed. Another of his jungles, it depicts a lion attacking an antelope, watched by birds, a strange prehistoric creature and an avid panther in a tree. The explosive plant growth that surrounds them, through which peeps a violent orange sun, is painted with the brilliant stylization that was becoming increasingly characteristic of his work.

In the context of the Fauves, his ”Hungry Lion” received considerable notoriety. (It has even been suggested that Vauxcelles’s coinage was prompted by the proximity of this painting to those of the heady colorists.) It was reproduced, along with the work of such other salon- mates as Cezanne, Matisse, Vuillard and Rouault, in a popular magazine, thus for a brief time placing Rousseau in their company, and it drew (faint) praise from Vauxcelles himself – who compared it with Byzantine mosaics and the Bayeux Tapestry.

This notice, and getting to know Apollinaire – who, at first critical, became lavish with both praise and introductions – gave Rousseau a needed push. Through Apollinaire, Rousseau met Picasso, then Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who became enthusiastic supporters. The disarming innocent, a generation older than his new friends, became someone to know. Dealers and collectors began to buy his works – although at the lowest of prices.

Basking in his modest celebrity, Rousseau began to hold his own Saturday soirees in his one-room flat. Amazingly, they soon attracted not only neighborhood friends and tradespeople, but troops of young artists and writers, among them Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Vlaminck, the poet Max Jacob, the critic Felix Feneon and the novelist Jules Romains. They were drawn by the artist’s spirit and wholesomeness, his wide-eyed zest for life, despite its lack of promise. To be sure, some of their interest was patronizing or prompted by a mischievous desire to egg the jester on. Possibly, Picasso’s own feeling for Rousseau was tinged with such ambivalence. In any event, one day in 1908 the 27-year-old Picasso came on the elder’s ”Portrait of a Woman,” circa 1895, at a second-hand dealer’s, and bought it for five francs. Falling in love with the work (he cited it as ”one of the most truthful of all French psychological portraits,” and kept it all his life), Picasso decided that his purchase should serve as an occasion to fete Rousseau at a banquet.

The resulting soiree, a bibulous affair held in Picasso’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir during the early fall of 1908, was for all its high jinks certainly the most gratifying occasion of Rousseau’s difficult life. It has also become one of the most celebrated stories in 20th-century art, recounted in a number of, sometimes conflicting, versions by guests who were there, such as Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo Stein, the art critic, and Fernande Olivier (Picasso’s companion at the time).

Picasso’s studio was prepared with benches and tables and the Rousseau portrait he had found was draped with flags and wreaths. After the company of 30 – which also included Georges Braque, Marie Laurencin, Maurice Vlaminck, Alice B. Toklas, Andre Salmon and Maurice Raynal – had sat down to dine, Rousseau was brought in by Apollinaire. (”Rousseau a little small colorless frenchman with a little beard like any number of frenchmen one saw everywhere,” is Gertrude Stein’s description.)

More than a banquet for him, the event was a metaphor for what it meant to be alive and young in one of history’s most exciting artistic eras. In his 1958 book, ”The Banquet Years,” Roger Shattuck characterizes it as ”a celebration of unpredictable new resources in the arts, a spontaneous display of high spirits to greet ideas being unearthed every day by Picasso and Apollinaire, by Max Jacob and Braque, by everyone present at the gathering, including Rousseau. Taking Rousseau as a unique pretext, the banquet celebrated a whole epoch.”

Rousseau died two years later, of blood poisoning from a leg infection he had neglected. By this time, he had achieved a certain fame, his work was beginning to sell and it was even getting reviews unmixed with derision. His poetic vision and his fresh handling of form were to play a significant role in revealing ”the possibilities of new ways of painting to 20th-century artists” – most particularly, to Picasso and Leger, de Chirico and other Surrealists – as Carolyn Lanchner and William Rubin point out in their catalogue essay.

Nevertheless, he was penniless to the end, and, had it not been for his landlord and Robert Delaunay, would have remained buried in his pauper’s grave. Yet Apollinaire wrote his epitaph, and his tombstone was made by Brancusi.