100 Years After the Death of Henri Rousseau, Fondation Beyeler Celebrates with Exhibition
One hundred years after the death of the French artist Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), the Fondation Beyeler is devoting an exhibition to this pioneer of modernism. Forty outstanding works provide a concise overview of the development and diversity of his oeuvre. A customs official, Rousseau had no formal art training and initially painted in his free time. Many years passed before his art, non-academic and long considered merely naive, found recognition in the Paris salons. In addition to the legendary jungle pictures characteristic of his late work, Rousseau also painted views of Paris and environs, as well as figures, portraits, allegories and genre scenes. With Monet, Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin, Rousseau was one of the artists whose visual inventions paved the way for incipient modernism. After the great Impressionists and their direct heirs had developed a new view of the visual world, Rousseau tapped sources beyond the academic tradition for modern artists to come. Never having attended an art school and supposedly naive, he brought genres such as the imaginary, dreamlike landscape to an unexpected culmination in his jungle paintings.
The exhibition illustrates how Rousseau brought together aspects of civilization and nature and adapted highly diverse themes to his visual conception. Individual motifs such as leaves and trees, but also figures and entire compositional schemes or elements were transferred from picture to picture. These basic patterns, expanded by means of combination and variation into a rich range of motifs and genres, were applied both to French and exotic subject matter. Rousseau defined the picture space by staggering pictorial elements from background to foreground, a method that would later be adopted by the Cubists. This additive pictorial structure, in the form of painted collage, anticipated the autonomy of the picture plane that would become so characteristic of modernism and fascinated young artists such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger.
In order to bring out these special aspects of Rousseau’s oeuvre, the exhibition employs two forms of presentation. On the one hand, it shows Rousseau’s thematic focuses on the basis of groups of works distributed among the different exhibition rooms. An introductory documentation room is followed by rooms devoted to portraits and the small-format French landscapes, and finally by the large hall, whose effect is primarily determined by the jungle pictures. Within this arrangement, space is reserved for a selection of special groupings and pairs of paintings in which the conventional genre borderlines are purposely transcended. This enables us to trace the migration of motifs and play of oppositions that are so typical of Rousseau. For instance, the late jungle painting Forêt vierge au soleil couchant, c. 1910, is directly confronted with the figurative Les joueurs de football, 1908. The ball hovering over the players recalls a setting sun, spirited from the forest picture – a well-nigh surrealistic composition that would later inspire Max Ernst and René Magritte.
Also for the first time in the present exhibition, three major Rousseau works will be shown in immediate proximity with one another, works in quite different genres yet based on a nearly identical compositional scheme: the rural scene La noce, 1904-05, La muse inspirant le poète, 1909 (from the series known as “portrait landscapes”), and Joyeux farceurs, a jungle painting of 1906...
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The exhibition illustrates how Rousseau brought together aspects of civilization and nature and adapted highly diverse themes to his visual conception. Individual motifs such as leaves and trees, but also figures and entire compositional schemes or elements were transferred from picture to picture. These basic patterns, expanded by means of combination and variation into a rich range of motifs and genres, were applied both to French and exotic subject matter. Rousseau defined the picture space by staggering pictorial elements from background to foreground, a method that would later be adopted by the Cubists. This additive pictorial structure, in the form of painted collage, anticipated the autonomy of the picture plane that would become so characteristic of modernism and fascinated young artists such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger.
In order to bring out these special aspects of Rousseau’s oeuvre, the exhibition employs two forms of presentation. On the one hand, it shows Rousseau’s thematic focuses on the basis of groups of works distributed among the different exhibition rooms. An introductory documentation room is followed by rooms devoted to portraits and the small-format French landscapes, and finally by the large hall, whose effect is primarily determined by the jungle pictures. Within this arrangement, space is reserved for a selection of special groupings and pairs of paintings in which the conventional genre borderlines are purposely transcended. This enables us to trace the migration of motifs and play of oppositions that are so typical of Rousseau. For instance, the late jungle painting Forêt vierge au soleil couchant, c. 1910, is directly confronted with the figurative Les joueurs de football, 1908. The ball hovering over the players recalls a setting sun, spirited from the forest picture – a well-nigh surrealistic composition that would later inspire Max Ernst and René Magritte.
Also for the first time in the present exhibition, three major Rousseau works will be shown in immediate proximity with one another, works in quite different genres yet based on a nearly identical compositional scheme: the rural scene La noce, 1904-05, La muse inspirant le poète, 1909 (from the series known as “portrait landscapes”), and Joyeux farceurs, a jungle painting of 1906...