Jungles of his mind

Rousseau is a typical obsessional "outsider" artist. He makes images of intense, elaborate, repetitive, decorative density. There is no distance between artist and subject,
writes Tom Lubbock

THE paintings of Henri Rousseau are tangled in a thicket of legend as dense as any of his famous jungles. A great legend it is, much of it true, and it is extraordinary and so popular. Rousseau, the naif of genius.

Rousseau, the untaught but undaunted suburban petit-bourgeois who, in middle life, gave up his clerical job and devoted himself to painting; who ignored the derision of the public, who aspired to be a grand academic painter, but instead got taken up and lionised by the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and unwittingly taught them a trick or three. Rousseau, who said to Picasso: "We are the two greatest painters of our time. You in the Egyptian style, I in the modern." What did he think he was doing?

As a matter of fact, in his work for the customs office, Rousseau never did rise to the rank of douanier— "le Douanier" was just the nickname that the poet Apollinaire’s gang bestowed on him. As a matter of fact, he never did make a voyage to Mexico, though this story circulated, providing a biographical key to his exotic imaginary world.

No, the jungles of his mind were entirely home-grown, derived from picture books, magazines, the Jardin des Plantes, stage spectaculars, stuffed animals in dioramas, etc. The exhibition at Tate Modern — Henry Rousseau: Jungles in Paris — goes to great lengths to track down the probable sources of his imagery.

It has most of the marvellous pictures, too, and not only the jungles.

Between the 1880s, when Rousseau first hung his work at the non-selective Salon des Independants, to his death in 1910, he tried out many genres. He made views of city and park and countryside, sometimes with new flying-machines occupying the sky.

There are stiff portraits of big ladies and bug-eyed children, and celebrations of the official public ceremonies for which Rousseau had such enthusiasm. And there’s his madly charging allegory of the horrors of war, with an insane baby riding a horse that looks like an anteater, over a field of luminous corpses.

But it’s the jungles that are still the most captivating scenes, these burgeoning, teeming plantations with their wild-eyed big cats, skulking monkeys, peeping eyes, lurking monsters, glowing oranges and deep-red suns.

And when you look at a picture such as The Snake-Charmer, the real puzzle isn’t where the imagery comes from, but how Rousseau got to be so good, so modern. Notice the incredible range of deep greens, the orchestration of interleaved overgrowth, the figure of the pipe-player almost black against the hard white sky, the burning gold edges of the fronds, the bendy interplay of snakes and branches. How did he find this very strong and original vein of visuals? It seems a mystery.

But I think it’s only a mystery because, in other ways, Rousseau is so wonky. Power and originality, as such, are only as surprising as they ever are in art. But great power and originality combined, in the same oeuvre, in the same picture sometimes, with utter helplessness — that’s baffling.

And when you look at Rousseau’s work, you’re always coming up against this incongruous fact, the stubborn presence of his "naivety". How can we reconcile such visual sophistication with such awkwardness, cack-handedness, childish whimsy? Well, sometimes we have a bit of a laugh at the awkward bits, like the matchstick-man civic allegory of Liberty Inviting Artists to Take Part in the 22nd Exhibition of the Societe des Artistes Independants, and then move on to admire a detail: lovely way he’s done the striped banner. Sometimes the crudeness of the drawing seems to positively reinforce the image, as in the crazy War, with its aardvark-headed horse.

But mostly, I feel, we just take Rousseau’s awkwardness for granted. We accept it and treat it as a kind of handicap, which he magnificently makes the best of. We say to ourselves: Rousseau, he’s astonishing, considering (that he couldn’t draw properly, had a crazy fantasy life, was a bit of a simpleton, etc). And in the process, we pat the artist on the head, and fail to see both how bad and how good he really is. So, cancel that "considering". Don’t make any allowances. Try to take all of Rousseau’s art seriously, and see what happens then.

It’s astonishing — up to a point. It’s a bizarre hybrid of the sublime and the ridiculous. Rousseau is a colourist and a texturiser of genius. His ability to organise masses of sharp-edged details, to contrast and syncopate the formations of leaves, petals and fruits, to weave foliage together, with an inexhaustible, ungraspable play of silhouettes and overlaps and peeps: nobody does it better.

Look at the jungle in The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope. Look at the almost gaseous filigree of branches in Rendezvous in the Forest.

His colours are as bold as Gauguin’s, and much superior. It’s not just in the overall palette of a picture, or the sudden tone contrasts, or the overt harmonies — like the sharp pink, blue and black of War — where Rousseau shows himself completely surprising and sure-footed. It’s the way he can make colour mutate and modulate across a picture, as in Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!), moving from one intense hue to another in subtle blends and swifter jumps.

In many ways, Rousseau is a typical obsessional "outsider" artist. He makes images of intense, elaborate, repetitive, decorative density. He has a weird but equally repetitive subject-matter, which springs crystal-clear from an inner vision. Crucially, there’s no distance between artist and subject. The pictures are not about what they’re of. They don’t deal with this vision, they simply reveal it. You, the viewer, can, of course, find things to think about. You can make a psychological diagnosis of the artist’s fantasies. You can try to identify his visual sources. Whatever.

— By arrangement with The Independent

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