Henri Rousseau The customsiere: life (difficult) of an artist who painted like a child

Strange destiny that of Henri Rousseau called « the customsiere »: born in 1844, it crosses a difficult youth (which includes an arrest for theft), finds employment in the office of duties (hence the name of art), cultivates for a lifetime an idea as consistent as it is misunderstood of painting and then, then, Two years after full recognition in the community of artists, he died in 1910, weakened by poverty and alcohol. Needless to look for a plaque: when he arrived in the hospital it was too late and nobody found the money for decent burial. He ended up in a common pit. However, in the last hours of life next to him there was an important, recognized and sophisticated painter: Paul Signac.

A signal: Rousseau had, yes, after a life that is not easy and marked by the waste of merchants and exhibitions, but the great artists – the more far -sighted ones – had seen a small revolution in him Aesthetics. To understand it, you have to start almost from the end, from that memorable Parisian evening in the chronicles of art that was consumed in 1908 in the legendary apartment-studio of Picasso At Rue Ravignac’s Bateau-Lavoir. Pablo divided him with his girlfriend of the time, Fernande Olivier. Rousseau was 64 years old. Only recently his canvases had won the distrust of critics and in 1905 the Salon d’Automne (in the edition that launched the « Fauves ») had welcomed three of his paintings. He was malandata, but shiny and cheerful and Picasso wanted to dedicate a banquet to him, a sort of mockery dinner: he appreciated him, but Rousseau was irresistibly eccentric, who became one prey Too delicious for a group of Goliards. In short, it was a party that mixed sarcasmaffection, admiration.

Henri arrived at the arm of Apollinaire, who was just 28 years old then. The young poet had first caught everyone’s true heart of the painter, derided by many for his apparently childish and naive scenes: Rousseau’s was a strange innocence, which had little to do with an arkism of a manner or artifact. It was something more and both Apollinaire and Picasso had understood it. That evening, between colossal drinks and improvised food (they forgot to order dinner and so Fernande began to cook rice and fish), It was Rousseau himself who perfectly defined his place in the art world, when he approached Picasso and whispered: « We are the two most important artists of our time: you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern style ».

Cryptic? No, Picasso understood very wellalso because in that apartment, in the next room, there was a painting by Rousseau that Pablo had purchased for little money but that he jealously guarded, so much so that today he is in the museum named after him in Paris: Portrait of a woman. A high female figure dressed in black, well defined in the traits but completely free of that expressive intensity that at the time emerged in almost all the paintings of the Impressionists, the Verists and the Fauves: This woman seems born from a Mediterranean fairy tale, she is a creature of the woods, she is one with nature, indeed, it seems a fair in the form of a woman, there is realism and together magic. This was Rousseau the customsier: An authentic naiveténever end in itself, at the service of a curious innocence not « innate », but « regained», As if the artist’s difficult life had guided him towards a primitive purity, typical of those who have nothing to lose.

Rousseau had never seen a Liana in her life, let alone a ferocious beast: yet in her paintings, the jungle and tropical paradises alternate naturally thanks to the fidelity with her style contiguous to the primitives, those artists that is, which preceded the conceptual and brain roads of the Renaissance. But, as he observed years later André Malraux, he was not influenced: Rousseau did not copy Giotto or Botticelli, but we are faced with a case of magical « contiguity ». Whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not, every now and then in the history of art certain things come back, at the distance of centuries or millennia. That same freshness that had crossed the primitives returned to the end of the nineteenth century in the fertile fantasy of a poor and malanded artist, One who had used a public office so as not to die of hunger and who stubbornly painted tropical landscapes, flesh women, innocent girls, lions, bizarre visions.

There was no affectation, but a real devotion to certain lines of forgotten or snubbed painting by the avant -garde, inclined to conceptual, often brain experiments. For example, Rousseau looked at popular art: in his paintings there are echoes of the ex-voto. He loved the music listened to by the subordinate classes, he went to dance and, although in love it was a disaster (a separation, a daughter with whom he had scarce relationships, many fleeting and alcoholic relationships), was capable of important emotional momentum, as Picasso pointed out. In short, the luxury of living to the end is allowed. And this helped to refine an originality appreciated by many artists of the last century, including Italians. Carlo Carrà, for example, in his The wheelchair (1916) takes inspiration from Rousseauiano Calesses of dad junier. That’s why at his approximate funeral there were seven people in all, but two of these with an important name: Signac, Apollinaire, Brancusi.

And this is also the reason why his « attributed innocence » deserves an extra paragraph. In one of the deepest novels by Marilynne Robinson, « Gilead », there are passages dedicated to this, that is, to a form of innocence not innocent, but the result of a path. Both forms, says the American writer, possess the same dignity, because most likely (and certainly in Picasso’s thought) a life is needed to get to paint like a child. Rousseau’s is a conquered candor, the result of a difficult provision of conventions, social seductions, compromises. The chronicles tell us that Rousseau was a Scialbo little man, who wrote long letters to gallery owners and merchants, proposing his works that were regularly rejected. But not for this he sought other paths, on the contrary.

Faithful to his own line, he maintained it and deepened it in an increasingly radical way, so as to reach its peak at the end of life. It was in the year of death, in 1910, that he made his masterpiece, the most ambitious painting, the one that mixes dreamlike visions and classic references. The one in which he had the courage to put a huge and modern red sofa in the middle of the equatorial jungle. The dream It is the true testament of Rousseau: The true naiveté (that worthy of consideration, in Robinson’s words) is not an exercise in style, but an act of loyalty to themselvesto one’s unmistakable human nature.
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