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A moonlit evening sky and a latticework of bare black trees dwarf two figures in white fancy dress. It looks like a dreamscape, and the picture's title, A Carnival Evening, just adds to the enigma. The atmospheric, accomplished work could have been painted yesterday. In fact it's dated 1886, and was one of the first works shown in public by French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910).
The artist's flat, hard-edged style and singular imagination owed nothing to anybody. His pictures could be ordinary or outrageous: he depicted the bourgeoisie wearing their Sunday best and he painted mysterious women naked in jungles. The odd and the commonplace co-existed inside his head: he never went nearer a tropical forest than Paris' Botanic Gardens, and for much of his life combined painting with the humdrum work of a tax collector. "Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris," at Tate Modern until Feb. 5, is the first major exhibit of his work in London for nearly 80 years. It brings together paintings from Europe, Japan and the U.S., and showcases his imagined foreign scenes and modest, less well-known landscapes. A wealth of documentary material illuminates the way he synthesized his jungles of the mind. The show will travel to the Grand Palais, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Rousseau burst upon the art world in 1891 with Surprised!, the first of his jungle pictures. A tiger in a rainstorm crouches, with bared fangs and flaring whiskers, in a complex pattern of leaves and grass like botanical illustrations come alive. The soaking rain is indicated by subtle transparent streaks. When you recover from the dramatic impact, you can see how the painting has been carefully planned and built up in layers. Franco-Swiss painter Félix Vallotton wrote that it "ought not to be missed; it's the alpha and omega of painting," though he couldn't resist adding the words "childlike naiveté," which would so often be used to undervalue the artist.
Rousseau was never in any doubt about his own talent. Tate Modern curator Frances Morris admires the self-taught painter for sticking to his vision. "Until he was far on, he received very little encouragement," she says. Even when Rousseau's art grew popular, people were never quite sure what to make of him. The artgoing public might admire his output, despite or because of his "primitivism," but even his biggest fans were disconcerted that a minor civil servant could rise to such heights. Some said he painted "without thinking," others claimed he worked under spirit guidance. In fact, he put together his dramatic tableaux using photographs, postcards, book and magazine illustrations, and drawings of plants or scenes he made on the spot. Stories of life in the bloodthirsty wild were popular in his day, and the source material on show includes an album he owned called Wild Beasts with "around 200 amusing illustrations of the life of animals with instructive text."
Along with his eccentric riffs on savage nature, Rousseau applied his unique vision to portraits, allegories and landscapes. War (1894) is a large work with a simple message: war is bad. A woman rides sidesaddle over the dead through devastated terrain, waving a sword and a blazing torch. It is unquestionably weird, but the artist has used shape and color, especially the dead black of ravens, horse and drooping leaves, in an abstract way that was admired by painter Paul Gauguin.
Eventually, Rousseau was adopted by an avant-garde circle that also included the young painter Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire. They nicknamed him Le Douanier (the customs man), and traded untrustworthy anecdotes about his gullibility. "These were artists chucking the rule book away," says Morris. "They saw in him an artist who couldn't subscribe to the rule book." In Rousseau's own tall tales, he was a military hero who had visited the jungles of Mexico. But, in fact, he was just the son of a shopkeeper from Laval, northwest France, and after an inglorious army career he settled down to a dull government job in Paris. From 1886 onward he submitted works to the annual Salon des Indépendants, which was open to anyone who paid a small fee. After the success of Surprised! he retired to paint full time, and got by giving drawing and music lessons. In 1907 he was persuaded by a musician friend to take part in a bank fraud; at his trial the following year, his paintings were produced as evidence of his childishness, his testimony provoked laughter, and he walked free.
Among the unanticipated pleasures of this show is the selection of Rousseau's landscapes, which never won much appreciation. Yet these small, melancholy works are exquisite records of contemporary riverbanks and parks where men and women, in the constricting clothes of the day, stroll, picnic or fish. Rousseau omits no unromantic detail: railway bridges, factories, chimneys, piers. In the stormy View of Malakoff (1908), telegraph poles and cables arch over houses, trees and passersby. Sometimes the sky is a background for hot-air balloons, biplanes, the Eiffel Tower, even zeppelins, as in Ivry Quay (circa 1907).
Rousseau's people were not always successful. Hands look like kilos of sausages, and some of his portraits verge on the grotesque — the child in Boy on the Rocks (1895-97) resembles a stuffed toy perched uncomfortably on some small mountain peaks. Others appear overambitious failures, until you look further. The monumental Portrait of a Woman (1895) is one of several Rousseaus bought by Picasso. It might seem a clumsy copy of a commercial photograph, until you notice the woman's hand holding an upturned, withered branch, and beyond the balcony railings a bleak treeless landscape bisected by an empty road. His so-called portrait landscapes, says Morris, produced hybrids "full of riddles."
That is exactly what impressed Rousseau's avant-garde friends and the later Surrealists: they appreciated his ability to combine images to unsettling effect. The fashionable lady in Promenade in the Forest (circa 1886) is not out shopping, but lost in a misty valley filled with autumnal trees. In his last painting, the justly famous The Dream (1910), his own velvet studio couch is set down in the middle of a jungle. Lying on it is a naked woman, her arm outstretched. She luxuriates like Eve in an arabesque of luminous lotus flowers, surrounded by lionesses with gleaming yellow eyes and other half-glimpsed animals from disparate continents. And in the most erotic work on view, the haunting Snake Charmer (1907), a woman's nude figure in dark silhouette stands by a river against an unearthly sunset — or is it moonrise? Flowers and grasses glow with an inner light. Her face is partly hidden by her flute and by the snake draped round her neck — we see only the pale glint of the whites of her eyes.
Rousseau said that when he visited Paris' Botanic Gardens he felt transported: "When I am in the greenhouses and see the strange plants from exotic countries, it is as though I am experiencing a dream." His words ring true when you gaze at his deep painted forests that draw you in until your surroundings dissolve into a magical world of the mind.
- LUCY FISHER / London
- A magical voyage through the strange, hypnotic dreamscapes of Henri Rousseau