Henri Rousseau: In Imaginary Jungles, a Terrible Beauty Lurks

Washington

HENRI ROUSSEAU’S paintings have been stopping people in their tracks for nearly 120 years, and despite their familiarity, the force is still with them. A group of 49 is currently working its magic in “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris” at the National Gallery of Art. Although the show gives a fairly complete account of the artist’s development, including many examples of his Paris scenes and portraits, it concentrates on his especially mesmerizing jungle paintings, in which moments of Darwinian struggle or startlingly Surreal strangeness unfold amid velvety botanical Edens.

What happens when a lion fells an antelope in the forest, or (somehow) a gorilla attacks an American Indian, and no one hears it? Life goes on. The focus might also be a dark-skinned snake charmer or an alert nude on a red couch. But Rousseau’s leafy grandeur, his tapestrylike parade of starchy, incipiently Cubist foliage and outsize lotuslike blooms, remains profoundly indifferent, decoratively intact, nearly abstract.

Rousseau was entirely self-taught, which may be why his unruffled jungle visions count as some of the most instantly lovable yet persistently mysterious advances in the history of art. Large in scale, flat of space, they dismiss one-point perspective with astounding aplomb. Their radicalism needs no explanation; it simply casts a spell. It combines the serenity of Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings and the clashing forms and piercing eyes of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a work that they surely influenced. Strangest of all, Rousseau painted his jungles without leaving Paris.

This show, which was seen at and organized by Tate Britain and the Musée d’Orsay, builds on the two most recent museum exhibitions of Rousseau’s work, in 1984-85 (in Paris, at the Grand Palais, and New York, at the Museum of Modern Art) and 2001 (Tübingen, Germany). These efforts countered the persona of the humble, oblivious naïf by detailing his assured single-mindedness and tracked the extensive influence his work exerted on several generations of vanguard artists, starting with Picasso and including Léger, Beckmann and the Surrealists. Beckmann’s amazing self-portraits, for example, descend from the brusque, concentrated forms of Rousseau’s portrait of the writer Pierre Loti.

The National Gallery show sets out to prove with a new thoroughness that Rousseau was brilliantly, complexly and extensively an artist of his own time. To this end, it pits the paintings against quantities of ephemera and some notable, bulkier historical props that sometimes bring the show to a halt in not entirely pleasant ways. But its imbalances give us a sharp picture of Rousseau as an astute scavenger and constructor of images, a collagist before the fact and, perhaps, the first artist to recycle popular culture on a grand scale. In his jungle paintings he magnified the silence of his boxy depictions of Paris streets, parks and riverfronts and transposed it to another world, one that he pieced together from scraps delivered to the doorstep of Paris.

For better, but usually for worse, Rousseau lived in a time when the byproducts of French colonialism, aided by new means of mass reproduction, seem to have provided the folks back home with some of their most popular, titillating forms of entertainment. Wild beasts, people and adventures were depicted in pulp novels, postcards, photographs and tabloid magazines like Le Petit Journal, whose color covers depict, pre-Barnum and pre-Hollywood, a dazzling stream of rampaging tigers, damsels in distress, bloodthirsty natives and embattled explorers and animal trainers. Real animals could be seen in the city’s zoo, which seems to have been filthy beyond belief, and its world’s fairs transplanted entire villages, and their inhabitants, from Senegal or Madagascar and put them on public view.

The 1889 fair included a towering bronze by the academic sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet, “Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman.” This direct precursor of the King Kong myth (although the victim is more Jane Russell than Fay Wray) is in the Washington show. Also here, and equally towering, is Frémiet’s “Bear Cub Hunter,” which shows a bear avenging the death of her offspring and was on regular display at the Jardin des Plantes, the city’s botanical gardens and one of Rousseau’s favorite haunts.

“I don’t know if you’re like me,” he said to the critic Arsène Alexandre, “but when I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream.”

The Jardin des Plantes also had zoological galleries, where Rousseau could study stuffed versions of exotic animals for tips both anatomical and compositional. For example, his painting “The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope” is based fairly closely on taxidermy of a lion doing just that. And, yes, that taxidermy is also here, forming a triangle with Frémiet’s bronzes and unforgivably close to the painting it inspired.

The show is organized thematically and chronologically. Its opener, “Tiger in a Tropical Jungle (Surprised!)” of 1891, is Rousseau’s first jungle painting. Seen in the Salon des Indépendants that year, it is unusually active. Lightning flashes, the big cat teeters in panic, while trees and grasses bend and twist in a wind that never recurs in Rousseau’s jungles. Across the surface, more weather: a thin, whitish glaze applied in long, diagonal strokes forms a convincing slick of rain and reflects Rousseau’s lifelong admiration for the satiny finishes of Bouguereau.

It was Rousseau’s dream to see his art hang next to Bouguereau’s in the official juried Salon. The son of a petit-bourgeois ironmonger, he was born in 1844 in the northwest French market town of Laval, came to Paris in 1868 and by 1871 was married and working as a toll collector on the boundaries of the city, painting whenever he could. He retired in 1893, at 49, to pursue his art, although his small pension necessitated an array of part-time jobs and last resorts. These included playing his violin on the streets and working briefly at Le Petit Journal, whose lurid covers command a large wall in this show.

His unschooled art was beyond the comprehension of the conservative academicians who juried the annual Salons, but luckily the Société des Artistes Indépendants began its annual unjuried salons — open to all artists — in 1884. Rousseau exhibited in them almost annually until his death in 1910. The Indépendants gave him some of the glory he so desperately wanted, and many friends and supporters among the Parisian avant-garde. He commemorated the Salon with an allegorical panorama of 1905-6, in the show’s fourth gallery. It depicts the nearly pearlescent gates of a great hall flanked by long rows of artists carrying canvases under their arms. Most wear black suits and have dark hair and beards, like him. Madeline and her classmates are not far off.

After the terrified tiger, Rousseau did not return to the jungle theme for more than a decade. He depicts violence closer to home, and further removed from natural law, in “War,” a large horizontal painting from 1894. It is littered with torn European corpses, electrified by a barefoot black-haired girl who seems to ride on air beside a black horse and strikingly evocative of the work of the American outsider Henry Darger. The remaining jungle paintings came in a spurt in the last five years of his life, starting with “The Hungry Lion.” (Exhibited in the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, it may have influenced the choice of catchword for a group of young painters — the Fauves, or Wild Beasts — whose work was hanging nearby.

Rousseau’s jungle paintings fill the last two galleries of this exhibition, culminating in the Museum of Modern Art’s sublime “Dream” (1910), which was possibly the last of the series. It brings all the habitués of this humid zone back, as if for a final curtain call. Two Hicks-ite lions stare from the underbrush, along with several monkeys, two birds, an elephant and a pipe player. In their midst the nude, tipped onto the red couch, surveys the wildlife with the imperiousness of Manet’s “Olympia.”

After this painting, there are three more vitrines of ephemera, but the point has been made. Rousseau synthesized his jungle dreams from the tumult of an urban culture that was in mindless thrall of the Other, exploitatively playing with fire and helping to set one of the many bonfires of the new century. He heightened the pristine beauty, intimated some hidden terrors and implied that perhaps neither should be disturbed. Life would go on.