Artist's lives tend to follow a rather even tenor - in spite of the mythic magnificence cooked up by Hollywood and, before that, chroniclers of the bohemian lifestyle. Henri Rousseau is a case in point. In fact, he didn't live the artist's life - a la La Boheme - at all. When he moved to Paris from a country village at the age of twenty-eight, he got himself, through timely connections, a job as a customs agent, where he remained until his retirement at forty-nine. At that moment in his life, he'd been painting on his own for some years and was fully ready to join the ranks of the full-time, well-remunerated, and absurdly decorated artists whose coyly pornographic and extravagantly triumphalist concoctions were the toast of the official art world at the time. Problem was, Henri really didn't know what he was doing in this regard and was quickly dismissed from these ranks. This must've hurt, but the plodding Henri bounced back - as he always did - and found another outlet for himself. He was, in fact, welcomed into the independent fold and exhibited at its own salon for years. Here he began to garner a reputation as a man who could take a bit of foliage from the Jardin des Plantes, dress it up with a monkey, a lion, or some other recognizably fiercesome thing, and create a world of strange and peculiar harmony; a world in which it was possible to be an animal, but have the manners of the petit bourgeosie;
a world that was wild - but welcoming.
I imagine Henri, known to all of his friends as "Le Douanier", or "The Customs Agent", walking as a young man in the Bois de Boulogne dreaming of his civilized jungle running riot with wild beasts who are unaccountably fond of each other and eat just now and then. (The pictures he actually did, however, often had that element of cruelty, without which wild Nature could not survive.) He hallucinates a palm-fronded place where gentle creatures congregate and, incidentally, pose for him. He's just been to the great World's Fair and he can't get enough of the exotic people - tamed for a strictly Parisian audience; the bloodthirsty animals - lunging at one another as taxidermy specimens; the astounding natural marvels - permitted to flourish in gigantic fin de siecle greenhouses. His solitary ruminations would, however, become the basis of his most memorable work.
And it was this work that would garner him the fame and recognition this man of the people most sincerely craved.
Rousseau's odds-beating career is sort of a marvel.
Yet like another outsider artist, Maurice Utrillo, he did get just about everything he cared to have during his own lifetime, which spanned a couple of minor European wars, but stopped short of the first really big one. I would even hazard to say that some of his paintings, The Dream in particular, are among the most recognizable images in the Western World. Even the Simpsons poked fun of another landmark painting, in which a lion nudges a different dreamer, who sleeps on a coat of many colors, and does not - being dedicated to his inner vision - awaken. Not bad for an indifferently educated fellow with no ostensible training and a complete blank in that part of his brain where artistic theorizing generally occurs.
Which, in my opinion, ain't a bad thing in the least.
After Rousseau left his job, he did little paintings of the Parisian suburbs - paintings that lacked the spatial integrity of the impressionists while also losing out a bit to the academics in the way of form.
Yet today they charm us; they are a lonely man's loving portrait of a real place he knew extremely well. And they were purchased, for modest prices, by people who knew, and loved, these scenes in pretty much the same way old Henri did. In these paintings, Henri explored the "real" world - whatever that is.
He would return to it, over the years, as a sports enthusiast, a super-patriot (no intentional maverick, he), and as a collector of postcards and other ephemera that would occasionally find their way into his quirky masterpieces.
But for the most part Henri stayed in his private world. And it is with this aspect of his work that scholars and even dopeheads have been enthusiastic from the git-go.
In 1907, Pablo Picasso threw a big party - which he called a "banquet" - for Henri at his Montparnasse studio, Le Bateau Lavoir. The place was thronged by the Parisian avant-garde, which by that time had embraced the naive, but captivating inner life of the former customs agent. Picasso even owned some of Rousseau's work. Two little portraits of Rousseau's mother and father were among the emerging modernist's prized possessions. Three years later, Henri would paint The Dreamer and then pass out of this earthly existence.
And so a modern fable has been told. You start out with nothing but the dreams in your head and by dint of hard work and solid connections AND persistent dreaming, you rise to the very top of your profession, get in the textbooks, and have irony-drenched, but eminently respectful, cartoons made from your work.
"Jungles in Paris", which runs at the East Wing of the National Gallery through October 16th, shows the evolution of a humble, but recognition-craving bourgeois gentleman, who was both untutored and intelligent; lockstep conformist and supreme individual; little man and larger-than-life visionary.
If anybody painted from his heart, it was Henri Rousseau and we need such people now and then. We need them to remind us of our own lost innocence as well as our unassigned and uncontrollable. .
.possibility.