Rousseau, Lord of the Jungle

Somewhere around 1895, for instance, Rousseau set out to copy a fancy painting of an exotic tiger-hunting scene by the salon painter Rodolphe Ernst. What he managed to produce was about as crude as anything could be -- about as crude as you'd imagine coming from an absolutely untrained brush. But you have to think he'd have preferred to make a copy that was closer to the slick original.

"Boy on the Rocks" (detail) is on view at the National Gallery.

Rousseau's 1897 "Boy on the Rocks" gives his sitter a strangely adult head, rag-doll torso and absurdly stubby hands. It shows him standing on a range of miniature mountain peaks. The picture looks like the work of some much later sophisticate, someone who has absorbed all the angstful distortions of Picasso and his followers. You wonder, though, if Rousseau wasn't aiming for something more like Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" and missing the mark. It's easy to see why so many early critics felt safe dismissing him as a grotesque failure and why crowds gathered just to laugh at what he did.

But then there are the ambitious jungle pictures, which throw that wary view of Rousseau into doubt.

For one thing, they're hard to read as being simply crude. It's clear that when he was working toward one of the annual Paris Salon shows -- luckily for Rousseau and posterity, a new one launched in 1884 that was open to all comers -- he could take the very greatest care and achieve great things.

"Surprised!," Rousseau's first jungle scene and the first work that won him any kind of praise, looks like it was made by a hugely skilled, experienced decorative artist -- some kind of pioneer of art nouveau textiles, maybe, or someone who has studied Asian and medieval art in great detail. Its composition, coloring and surface patternings are as successful and coherent as any art you'll ever see. If Rousseau's later jungle pictures aren't ever quite as tight as this, their extravagant flora often comes close. (Their fauna is where they sometimes fall apart.)

Unlike Rousseau's more traditional pictures, his jungle pictures also have a novel take on the subjects they show, as scholar Christopher Green lays out in his important catalogue essay.

During the years that Rousseau worked, French notions of the exotic wilderness didn't leave much room for romantic fantasy. Africa's exotica had become dreary and pedestrian: The Paris zoo was decrepit, and museum displays on botany and zoology were ruthlessly pedantic; the African "villages" imported and set up in Paris parks were plenty exotic, but they were too tawdry to have much romance left in them. Actual foreign jungles were conceived either as hideously dank and dangerous places where great explorers disappeared, or as a potential source of wealth just waiting to be harnessed by the French Republic.

Rousseau, however, turns the jungle into something else: It becomes a charming site of bourgeois fantasy, more like an exotic floral wallpaper than a real wilderness. Painting "tropical forests for Northern imaginations," as Green puts it, Rousseau put a dose of homey magic back into the wild.

Rousseau's jungles are heavy with the deliciously exotic fruit just then landing on European tables and the gloriously flashy blossoms creeping into their bouquets. His foliage is decorative, legibly ornate rather than the impenetrable mass explorers described when they ventured into real rainforests -- more like a Victorian aspidistra or a tended hothouse scene than like somewhere Stanley could have searched for Livingston. And though there's often violence going on -- a lion devouring an antelope, a gorilla grappling with a Native American (in the rain forests or North Dakota?)-- it's described with more dispassion than dramatic force, and it's subdued by its tidy setting. Rousseau's violence is safe violence, too remote to worry about as you take in the jungle's peace from your side of the greenhouse glass. It's almost taxidermic. (Amazingly, the actual stuffed animals that were the basis for Rousseau's antelope-eating lion survived in the vaults of the Museum of Natural History in Paris; the National Gallery has put them on show in front of the painting.)

More, maybe, than any other artist of his day, as the catalogue points out, Rousseau captures the benevolent stability that France's petite bourgeoisie was counting on to make its way, which had been in short supply for most of the century. Rousseau's jungle pictures manage a very special mix of complacency and vulnerability. They show how even exotic dangers can be turned into a charming weekend thrill. Their down-home, decorative style must have helped them do that job -- who could be afraid of anything painted by the cheery little douanier next door?

Rousseau's vision is in many ways conservative; it has none of the aggression that was the trademark of the avant-garde that took him up.

Paradoxically, maybe that can help explain Rousseau's adoption by those radicals. As a homegrown "primitive," he's like the African carvers Picasso cribbed from -- but, as a bourgeois retiree, he was also easier to take to heart than any true exotic was.

In his best jungle pictures, Rousseau is developing and perfecting a very personal, coherent aesthetic, and he has his own peculiar reasons for building the imaginary world he does -- as Picasso's carvers evidently did also. But Rousseau's supporters didn't really care about those reasons, or about the man behind them and his aesthetic goals. They treated Rousseau with the same condescension and highhandedness they used in talking about African artists: Their little Douanier -- the term was coined by radical author Alfred Jarry and helped to mark the painter's lower social status -- was more quaint than anything, and his pictures were seen as giving access to a childish naivete that the radicals imagined pulling into their own sophisticated art.

Rousseau's work, that is, was treated more like useful raw material. When Picasso feted Rousseau in 1908, two years before Rousseau's death, the party came closer to a cruel roast than to a genuine show of respect. For the leaders of the Parisian avant-garde who claimed to be Rousseau's "discoverers" (shades of European explorers "discovering" tribal lands), he was their very own, personal primitive -- less threatening, in his persona and his art, than exotica that really came from far away, and thus all the more appealing.

Rousseau's "betters" felt they owned his art. They weren't stealing when they used it to their ends, as they must have felt to be somehow the case with objects out of Africa. That was stuff the Europeans knew they'd never truly understand; with Rousseau's jungles, they were consuming something primitive that was already theirs.

One of the virtues of this Rousseau show is that it gives these pictures, good and bad, back to their creator.