Galeries
Nationales du Grand Palais, Square Jean
Perrin, 75008.
01.44.13.17.17. Until 19 june 2006.
Henri
Rousseau (1844-1910) is an unclassable and atypical painter par
excellence. Belonging to no school, no major intellectual
movement, it is however the natural and spontaneous fruit of its time,
end of the XIXth century.
Absolute Master of a certain realistic naivety, it knew the reward only
tardily. This modest employee of the customs is an absolute
autodidact, guided by the only pleasure of the eye and the brush, by a
wild imagination, a hunger of exoticism. Phantasmagoric paradox,
although it never left Paris, Rousseau became famous due to its
portraits of African and tropical jungles. Fascinated by the
Botanical garden which it attended regularly, by the "Petit
Journal"newspaper which brought back the accounts of the adventurous
explorers, by the
World Fairs which planted in the heart of Paris colonial forwarding, it
imagined its own tropics, drawn such of the decorations of opera,
inhabited by mysterious, dangerous faunas and smiling at the same time,
papered generous plants, flattened like Japanese papers. At the
beginning, the public of the Salon des Independants took Rousseau for
an
illustrator amusing, simply decorative. From 1905, its large
tropical frescos draw the attention of the contemporary painters who
understood the symbolic and poetic value of the artist,
fruit of the shock of the new worlds. One could almost suppose
that its deer contributed at the origin of the current "fauvist".
After being presented in London, this exhibition in le Grand Palais
gathers a dozen prettiest jungles of the customs artist among fifty
works presented.
