"Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris".

"Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris"

National Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C.

July 16, 2006-October 15, 2006

Henri Rousseau, whose enchanting yet untutored painting produced some of the most imaginative works of the early years of the twentieth century, is the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The show offers visitors an opportunity to revisit forty-nine paintings, including twenty of the artist's famous jungle pictures, and helps us to understand the sources of Rousseau's vision in the popular culture of his time.

Rousseau, an unlikely figure to have become an important artist in a period when the academic establishment still dominated French painting, was born into the petit bourgeoisie in Laval. He was completely self-taught. Lacking the web of social and academic connections which often aides artistic success in the metropolis, Rousseau had to rely in part on his own ambition and native talent.

Determined to win honor and glory with the conservative academic establishment, Rousseau retired early from his job as a toll collector in order to devote himself to painting. While the official acceptance he desired never materialized, the story that did play out around him proved to be more important to the history of modern art. If Rousseau never mastered the rules of the game he aspired to play, his version of it was so fantastic that it opened up new and vital possibilities for the modernists who embraced him and his work.

The National Gallery exhibition opens with Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised! (1891), the first and the most exciting of Rousseau's jungle paintings. Felix Vallotton, a discerning young contemporary, observed that Rousseau's tiger "surprises its prey" by crushing every other painting hung in its vicinity. Though the piece was ridiculed for its bold palette when first shown at the Salon des Independents, the strong lines, flatness, and clarity of the canvas still astonish.

Unlike Gauguin, Rousseau never left France; instead, he was spent much of his time walking in the city, frequenting the botanical gardens, the zoos, and the colonial expositions and world fairs, dreaming and making sketches of the flora and fauna on display. Thus the subtitle of this exhibit: "Jungles in Paris." During the last six years of his life, Rousseau produced no fewer than twenty-six variations on the jungle theme.

Unlike the Rousseau retrospective twenty years ago at the Museum of Modern Art, which endeavored to trace the artist's influence on the masters of modernism--Picasso and Leger, as well as the Surrealists--the organizers of this show are more interested in locating the sources of Rousseau's art. The extensive display of more than a hundred documents, popular ephemera, and other source material are installed throughout the two floors of the National Gallery's East Building exhibition rooms. Rousseau emerges here as an eager scavenger, whose use of popular culture separated him from the academic conservatives.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume, as Peter Schjeldahl did in his New Yorker review, that Rousseau's "imagination has less to do with his talent than is generally supposed." The fine scholarly catalogue essays by the curators Frances Morris and Christopher Green demonstrate that the jungle paintings are not faithful sketches of what Rousseau could have seen in Parisian zoos or taxidermy displays. Live animals were typically kept in filthy cages in urban zoos as opposed to the fresh and natural environments we see depicted in Rousseau's pieces. Even the sniffed fauna were segregated from the greenhouse displays for exhibition at that time.

We know that Rousseau was not interested in the "scientific" quality of his pictures. Only the first of his jungle paintings tends in this direction. In the others, the flowers and plants have been imagined and combined solely for the pleasure of the eye, without any concern whatsoever for botanical accuracy. Rousseau may have been inspired by book and newspapers illustrations, but he was by no means constrained by them. His art was not defined by what he saw but by the pictorial quality of what he dreamed.

In these great late paintings, Rousseau revitalizes the popular understanding of the "exotic," which was in danger of becoming mundane. He made of it something rich and strange again. Obsessively piling on details and surprises across his entire surface, he combines convincing realism, a high degree of abstraction and decoration, and a tremendous sense of scale. The way Rousseau marshals such complex material and sets it out in a symphonic style reveals him to be a painter-architect of the first order.