Henri Rousseau [antikvár]

setting up the file ight at the start, it is only fair to stress that the entire work of the Douanier Rousseau slips through the net cast by our comments on art, makes irrelevant the precautions which we are wont to take, blocks all usual approaches, defies all classifications — in a word challenges the esthetic raster of art history. Any attempt to measure Rousseau's activity against that raster would be to no avail and would only prove that we are dealing with an artist who eludes our grasp. This is why we have chosen to set up a file on Rousseau, juxtaposing biography and art, eliciting the strangeness that inextricably intertwines them and, finally, isolating the insoluble contradictions that are there. The years in which Rousseau appeared on the scene, that dazzling second half of the nineteenth century, witness the great schism in art: on the one side, there is the respect for the authority of the past, upheld by the academies; on the other, its transgression in the name of modernity. But, for Rousseau, there is no place whatsoever in this division — and this is only too obvious. Academic painting rests on received knowledge consecrated by tradition. Such painting begins with technical apprenticeship which in itself is a work-model, all the more compulsive because it is part and parcel of the actual ways of art. Reiterating well-tried devices, academic pictures end in a preordained pattern of perception. They transmit already-known messages. And they end by displaying an utter lack of authenticity which the customs-officer-turned-painter could not attain at all, since he lacked the necessary culture, education and technical know-how. But therein lay a fascination which would haunt him all his life. Yet at the same time and for the same reasons, lack of culture, education and know-how, he could not join the ranks of the transgressors of academic precepts. Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism, which unfolded during his lifetime, simply did not exist for him. However, the transgression embodied in his own painting is much more far-reaching than the ways and means of those innovative artists who would bring about the concept of avant-garde. The fact is that their transgression was rationally worked out. Rousseau's violation, on the other hand, surged from the deepest recesses of the subconscious and, what is more, never ceased to be handicapped by his obsessive wish to be the peer of the academic artists. Hence the powerful tension in all his pictures, as if he were the living embodiment of the rift between avant-garde and academicism that bore the mark of his time. Hence also the thorough break which he inflicted on art history in forcefully exploding its conventional patterns.