Henri Rousseau
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau, called " Le douanier " ( born May 21, 1844 in Laval ( Mayenne ), † September 2, 1910 in Paris) was a self-taught French painter whose style is associated with Post-Impressionism and the naïve art. He is considered one of the forerunners of surrealism.
Life
Henri Rousseau was born as the son of the master plumber and ironmonger Julien Rousseau and his wife Eleanor. Early on, he began to be interested in poetry and music. After leaving school he served as a clarinetist in an infantry regiment. After his military service, he managed to be hired at customs. Hence his name " Le douanier " ( the tax collector ).
In 1869, he married the 18 -year-old seamstress Clémence Boitard, with whom he had nine children. Of these, only daughter Julia survived the father. Rousseau's granddaughter Jeanne was a piano teacher later in Cherbourg. After the death of his wife Clémence in 1888 Rousseau had in 1893 frühpensionieren. But He had already begun to paint.
The first to recognize the importance of his pictures was the young Alfred Jarry. Through him he met Paul Gauguin know. In Gauguin's studio he met Mallarmé, Strindberg and Degas. He soon gave themselves at the Salon des Independants.
Important was the friendship with Guillaume Apollinaire, by which he was able to build relationships with the artistic avant-garde. Rousseau was now violin lessons to supplement his meager pension. He met Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, Braque, Max Jacob, Vlaminck, Brancusi, Marie Laurencin, Philippe Soupault and more.
Occasionally Rousseau came into conflict with the law. When the judge convicted him of check fraud to two years in prison, but those exposed to probation, he promised the judge, to paint the portrait of his wife.
Henri Rousseau died on September 2, 1910 at the Hospital Necker in Paris to blood poisoning. Seven people were present at his funeral: Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Terk, the painters Paul Signac and Julio Ortiz de Zárate, the Romanian sculptor Brancusi, Rousseau's landlord Armand Queval and the writer Guillaume Apollinaire.
Apollinaire wrote the epitaph, whose lines Constantin Brancusi carved into the grave stone:
Work
The reality is not liable imaging in Rousseau, rather it is a dream. The individual elements of his paintings are idealized, yet simplified. They occur unconnected and surprising side by side. The background is seen as sharp and clearly marked as the foreground. The figures appear in frontal view or in strict profile. Rousseau loved clear outlines, sharp contrasts without transitions. He used bright colors contact without shadows, but it was his palette rich in color shades. In his painting The Dream ( the Yadwiga ) shimmers the jungle in more than fifty shades of green.
Finally, there was another moment of coloring Rousseau both Neue Sachlichkeit as of surrealist painting of Magritte or Tanguy important: the thrifty, deliberate, almost anonymous inking, the carefully hid the brush marks and no handwriting betrayed. Each vanity of making Rousseau was strange. He did not care about the production scenic textures, but its objects.
Reception
Apollinaire has called the " Uccello our century " Henri Rousseau. He saw in him the primitives of a new age ( to be the way, had also taken Cézanne claim for themselves ), in the pictures with her poetic ciphers at the same time much seemed anticipated naive and in great clarity of what modern art - as located approximately unfolded to Apollinaire - was applied to afford. For the same reason he was fascinated by Kandinsky. His essay "On the Question of Form " in the " Almanac of the Blue Rider " from 1912, illustrated with no less than seven reproductions of paintings of Rousseau, contains the often recorded distinguishing the " the spirit of the pantries of matter torn forms of embodiment " after two poles, the great abstraction and realism large. "These two poles open two pathways, which ultimately lead to a goal." While Kandinsky felt called to follow the first path, he saw as his counterpart Rousseau the way of major new realism go, both revolutionaries at the beginning of each new path.
Tristan Tzara in Rousseau homage to an artist who had not only established a new style of painting, but also has its own lifestyle. The lived by the naivety in his unflinching and non- viable Rousseau unity of art and life had to impress the naive as little Dadaists straight.
The Surrealist André Breton summed up, " Rousseau we could for the first time, Magic Realism ' speak'.
Philippe Soupault wrote in 1927 a monograph on Rousseau, in which he talks lovingly about his experiences with the customs officer.
Lise and Oto Bihalji - Merin write about him: "From the perspective of his world poverty disabled projected Rousseau childish daydreams full of beauty and glory. For all the graphic and intense, he felt his dream world that he crossed the boundaries of reality in the twilight of confidence and idea and himself was convinced that invited him, the President of the Republic to a soirée, the gross Portier had, however, refused him his poor due to wear. " and Apollinaire: " Few painters have been ridiculed during her lifetime as the tax collector, and few people were against the mockeries, the rudeness with which they showered him with smoother brow. "
Otto Pankok created the painting Henri Rousseau, painter, and publican. In the background, hanging on the wall, two small and one large-sized Rousseau works are duplicated.
Exhibitions
- Documenta 1 1955: The exhibition concept of the documenta 1 1955 in Kassel works of naive painting were included so that there also pictures of Henri Rousseau ( and Louis Vivin and Séraphine Louis) were shown.
- 1911: Wilhelm Uhde, a German art dealer living in Paris, organized a year after the death of Rousseau, a memorial exhibition at the Salon des Independants. He also published the first biography of the artist.
- Herwarth Walden presented in Berlin in 1913 at the First German Autumn Salon 20 images - not for sale, primarily from the estate of Robert Delaunay - from.
- 2010: Henri Rousseau, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen