Dali House

Just finished a Google Earth tour of Henri Rousseau’s life and times, a hefty elaboration on Dali House’s earlier foray. See the GE post here.

This is the whole story, and then some, in three parts, on an artist who, though known and loved the world over, somehow doesn’t rate an appearance in my “Essential History of Art” from Parragon, and he’s not in my “Great Artists” from DK’s Annotated Guides either, although many lesser-known names are. There are reasons for this, not all of them good ones …

“Rousseau walks on trumpet paths,” Joni Mitchell sings against a gauntlet of Burundi drums in “The Jungle Line”.

Henri Rousseau, “the very-good-very-bad painter”, remains enigmatic nearly a century after his death. He is the not-quite-post-impressionist who always requires an explanatory sidebar of his own. All his life he felt he didn’t fit in, probably because he didn’t, until Picasso threw a rowdy party for him that enthroned him as “the master”. His fellow artists were being facetious, but they genuinely loved the way he rubbed the high-brow art world’s noses in his garish palette.

The funniest thing was, “the Douanier” really did believe his paintings were realistic. “The hungry lion throws itself on the antelope, devours him,” he trilled about one of his jungle scenes, enrapt by its frightening authenticity. “Birds of prey have each torn a strip of flesh from the poor animal that is shedding a tear! The sun sets.”

And to Picasso, at the end of the soon-to-be-legendary Banquette Rousseau, he pronounced tearily, “You and I are the greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern.” Onlookers sniggered at the audacity, but Le Douanier knew what they did not yet know, that his spirited jungle had been colonised by a race of people who walked sideways and spoke in hieroglyphics.

It’s been said, oversimplistically but sympathetically, that “he didn’t know the rules well enough to break them”. But of course there are no rules in the kingdom of the imagination. See the rest.