Rousseau, Lord of the Jungle

"Surprised!," painted in 1891: A bug-eyed tiger caught off guard by a tropical storm, which lashes the most gorgeously exotic jungle. No other painting does as good a job conveying the "fearful symmetry" of William Blake's big cat "burning bright / In the forests of the night."

"Rendezvous in the Forest," from 1889: Two lovers on horseback, in fancy Louis XVI dress, almost lost behind a tangle of black branches that reach up to a luminous sky. The perfect painted evocation of ill-fated love -- of its impenetrable thickets and shining promise.

"The Dream," the famous masterpiece from 1910: The African jungle as bourgeois male hallucination, complete with native piper calling us into its depths, beasts of prey lying in wait and luscious fruits -- and a naked lady -- ripe for the picking.

Who could doubt that the best pictures from "Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris," opening today at the National Gallery of Art, are some of the most compelling, intriguing paintings to come out of the early days of modern art?

Many of the brightest lights of the Paris scene, circa 1900, fell in love with them: Apollinaire published Rousseau raves; Ambroise Vollard, the great dealer in modern art, kept Rousseaus in stock; and Picasso bought a number of his works and helped spread word of him. In 1926, a Rousseau jungle topped the prices paid for pictures by Picasso or Matisse, and one had been accepted by the Louvre the year before.

Rousseau's best paintings are undeniably great and very influential art. But that begs the question of whether the man who made them was also a great artist.

Until retiring at 49 in 1893, Rousseau was a minor civil servant and self-taught Sunday painter who manned the customs posts around Paris -- hence the nickname Le Douanier , "the customs officer." His retirement project was to become a major painter in the heroic, high-realist mode that was still the official style of the French establishment. (The impressionists and other radicals such as Gauguin and Cezanne -- whose unkempt style was disliked by Rousseau, who also found Matisse "horribly ugly" -- had barely started to make inroads in that world.)

Rousseau's project failed, dismally -- and luckily. He didn't have the chops to come close to the high-flown, finicky, suffocating style of his heroes Felix-Auguste Clement and Jean-Leon Gerome -- best-selling painters who were the Steven Spielberg and George Lucas of their day. Instead, he turned out a stream of strange-looking pictures that came straight from his own strange mind.

Rousseau's pictures break the rules and move in new directions. But it's not always clear that he had control over the course they took, that he really grasped the rules they broke or that he had intended to break them.

Rousseau's 1910 oil "The Dream" was championed by members of the avant-garde.

It is possible that the credit for Rousseau's pioneering work should go to the people who recognized the radical potential in his pictures, rather than to the thoroughly nonradical retiree who happened to have painted them. Maybe his pictures work like the tattered old movie posters taken down and framed by Italian artist Mimmo Rotella in the 1960s, or the tumbledown structures and distressed signage in classic American photographs by Walker Evans and William Christenberry -- whose objects' crucial qualities come about essentially by happenstance and only count as art once a trained eye draws our attention to them. For most of the 20th century, artists searched the world for the strangest of strange things -- sometimes man-made, sometimes not -- and then chose to hold them up to us for artistic contemplation. When certain modern pioneers discovered and promoted Rousseau's work, were they really the first artists working in that mode?

That might make sense of a good bit of Rousseau's work. When he paints a portrait or a landscape -- whenever he's trying to render something out there in the world in front of him -- his "bold" simplifications and stylizations seem to happen more or less by accident, because his skills don't give him the option of a higher realism. His many awkward moments and incoherent passages seem to be about the absence of a firm aesthetic sense. They don't plug for some deliberate view that awkwardness and incoherence are the new way for art to go.

Rousseau once cheerily referred to himself as "in the process of becoming one of our best realist painters." It's hard to see how he could even have that hope.