Dali House

A bit more on the Artist.Ranking (A.R) system mentioned in our Rousseau biography, as found at ArtFacts.net.

As mentioned, lonely old Henri is currently ranked #724 with a bullet on this overtly mercenary chart, which arranges 62,436 artists by volume of exhibitions over the last five years.

Picasso is #1, Cezanne 32 and Monet 62, just to grab some examples.

“The basis of the A.R thinking is the so-called economy of attention (after a book from Georg Franck),” the website explains. “Franck says that attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that works with the same mechanisms as capitalism. Capitalist, or economic, behaviour is based on property, lending money and charging interest.

“For Franck, the curator (eg the museum director or the gallery owner) acts as a financial investor. The curator/investor lends their property (their exhibition space and their fame) to an artist from whom they expect a return on their investment in the form of more attention (reputation, fame etc).”

Here’s the top 10 after Picasso: Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, Henri Matisse, Edward Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.* See the rest.

Where everybody knows your name: Fernand Leger comes to grips with Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso while Henri Matisse and Georges Braque wisely look for hiding places.

Ah, the Musee du Montparnasse – genteel, meditative, scholarly. Actually, this quiet little pile of bricks in south central Paris is where the post-impressionists posted some very, very bad impressions with nightly piss-ups early in the last century. That was long before it became a museum, of course.

The gendarmes were summoned more than once to 21 Avenue du Maine, seen here in a Google Earth view, most memorably one night in January 1917 when they had a party there for Georges Braque, who’d just been drummed out of the military on account of having a hole in him. See the rest.

Last of three parts, continued from here.

During his last years Rousseau stayed close to the exotic landscapes that made his reputation, all of them bursting with turgid plants and fine detail looming from the shadows.

In “The Merry Jesters”, above, from about 1906 (click on the detail to see the whole painting), the simians play with back-scratchers and a milk bottle. In another work from 1910, the denizens of “Tropical Forest with Monkeys” are fishing. Such anthropomorphism may have been a conscious attempt to remind man that his innocence was being robbed by modernisation.

In “Virgin Forest”, or “Negro Attacked by a Jaguar” (also clickable), the action at the centre of the painting and almost engulfed in the surrounding jungle. Despite the Douanier’s painting style being unrealistic, there is a different kind of realism at work here that’s disturbingly compelling. See the rest.

A little joie de vivre with “Happy Quartet” and “The Football Players”, both from 1908.

Second of three parts, continued from here.

This is “View of the Ile de la Cite, Paris”, painted sometime in the 1890s, an extraordinary scene from Rousseau’s imagination concocted in crimson paint and contrasts. It seems to suggest the destruction of the old city to make way for the new, but has also been interpreted as a representation of the mystery he always found in the City of Light.

Rousseau finally retired from the Octroi in 1893 to paint full-time. Just 49, he supplemented his small pension with part-time jobs and busking in the streets with his violin. Soon after he met the iconoclastic writer Alfred Jarry, who coincidentally also hailed from Laval (and would be buried in the same cemetery as Rousseau).

It was in fact Jarry, soon to be the infamous playwright of “Ubu Roi”, who gave him the nickname Le Douanier. In the avant-garde review Mercure de France, he praised Rousseau’s “War”, from 1894, seen above: “The black leaves that populate the purple clouds; the ruins, tumbling like pine cones among the corpses, translucent with lack of oxygen, littered with pale-beaked crows.”

With its striking use of allegory, the work, alluding to the Franco-Prussian conflict of 25 years earlier, almost prophetically broke from Romantic tradition and showed only the horror of battle – and it convinced many that Rousseau was much more than a minor landscapist. It marked the beginning of his recognition as a serious painter. See the rest.

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.