The Henri Rousseau show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (through June 4) alters one's view of his work, as retrospectives are meant to--but downward. It is, however, a delight to visit. One could write a little dictionary of received ideas about this engaging "primitive." It would begin with his nickname, the Douanier. (He was not, as MOMA's excellent catalog stresses, a customs inspector, but a much lowlier form of bureaucratic life, a gabelou, or toll collector.) The dictionary would go through a whole list of legendary things that Rousseau did not do or see or say, things he cooked up himself (such as the innocent fiction that he had been to Mexico in the army of Napoleon III and had seen real jungles) or that were invented by friends (like the playwright Alfred Jarry's absurd story that he, like Pygmalion, taught the old boy to paint). And it would finish with the belief that Rousseau (1844-1910) was one of the greatest protomodern artists.
This reputation rests, for Americans, almost wholly on one painting. It was no slight thing to have painted The Sleeping Gypsy, by now perhaps the most famous dream image in Western art. The silhouette of a sniffing lion, with one unwinking yellow eye and a tail stiffly outstretched, its tip erect as though charged with static electricity, quivering like Rousseau's own paintbrush; the swollen, white Melies moon; the black nomad like a toppled statue, her feet with their pink toenails gravely sticking up; the djellaba, with its rippling stripes of coral, Naples yellow, cerulean; and the lute, like a pale lunar egg, hanging on the brown sand as the moon hangs in the blue night. Reproduced a millionfold, this oneiric image became the Guernica of the tots, the standard decor of upper-middle-class childhood. Such fame, decanted on a single picture, can distort an artist's entire reputation.
What we see in this wholly enjoyable show is a painter whose high moments (two owned by Paris' Musee d'Orsay, War and The Snake Charmer; two by MOMA, The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream; and one by a private collector, The Hungry Lion) must be weighed against a good deal of medium-rate work and potboiling. Enjoyment of the lesser Rousseaus is usually tinged with condescension, though at least they are not cute or kitschy, like the truckloads of pseudonaive painting that would sprout from Montmartre to Haiti after his death. They have their period charm; you have to love his dirigibles and Wright biplanes creakily copied from postcards. But most of his city and country scenes are as platitudinous as Utrillo's.