Despite the legend nourished by Apollinaire and the artist himself, Rousseau’s famous great jungles were all composed in Paris. They were inspired by the exotic scenes the capital had to offer in the late nineteenth century. However, one critic wrote, “He does not paint the virgin forest of a botanical or zoological garden, but the virgin forest with all its terrors and beauties that we dreamed of as children […]. It is the virgin forest as a fantastic adventure.” As the quintessence of his creative imagination, Rousseau’s jungles are at the heart of the exhibition.
To give visitors a better grasp of the artist’s creative process, an extraordinary series of twelve jungles is compared with other works, portraits, cityscapes and allegories. In this game of mirrors, the works seem to echo one another: there where, in the jungles, strange things look familiar, elsewhere, it is the familiar that becomes strange. An art of deviation which makes Rousseau an immediate forerunner of surrealism. Rooted in the problems facing artists at the close of the nineteenth century (academic painting, exoticism), his work was first recognised by artists in the avant-garde movement and remains unclassifiable, anticipating many of the questions raised in the following century.
A total of 50 major paintings from prestigious public and private collections in Europe, America, Japan and Russia are presented in a chronological hanging interrupted by two documentary sections which introduce a mass of new material; the first focuses on Le Douanier Rousseau and Paris in his time, the second on his sources of inspiration.
Once a humble employee in the customs office and now a legendary figure, Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) was a self-taught artist who came to painting late in life. He was a faithful exhibitor in the Salon of the Independent Artists then the Salon d’Automne. Although Paul Gauguin, his exact contemporary, chose exile in Tahiti, Rousseau never left Paris. His walks in the Jardin des Plantes, the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and the Jardin d’Acclimatation, along with popular imagery, illustrated travel books, photographs and postcards supplied a repertory of motifs that he orchestrated in mysterious, brightly coloured paintings that reveal great originality and false naivety.
Often inspired by reproductions of animals from zoological gardens in the Album des Bêtes sauvages (Galeries Lafayette), these terrifying jungles teeming with luxuriant vegetation were an arena for fights between wild beasts. A Horse Attacked by a Jaguar (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), A Hungry Lion Pouncing on an Antelope (Beyer Foundation, Basle), A Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo (Cleveland Museum of Art) contrast with peaceable scenes of monkeys, facetious human substitutes, playing in a rich tangle of trees (The Merry Jesters, Philadelphia Museum of Art). A number of his park scenes or suburban views, painted ten years earlier, are infused with vague feeling of menace, prefiguring the anguish perceptible in these Parisian jungles. Acclaimed by Alfred Jarry and Apollinaire, Picasso, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and Kandinsky, Henri Rousseau is now seen as one of the leading figures in twentieth century art and should still challenge today’s public.
