Word: douanier
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...shape and color, especially the dead black of ravens, horse and drooping leaves, in an abstract way that was admired by painter Paul Gauguin. Eventually, Rousseau was adopted by an avant-garde circle that also included the young painter Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire. They nicknamed him Le Douanier (the customs man), and traded untrustworthy anecdotes about his gullibility. "These were artists chucking the rule book away," says Morris. "They saw in him an artist who couldn't subscribe to the rule book." In Rousseau's own tall tales, he was a military hero who had visited the jungles...
...Museum of Modern Art (through June 4) alters one's view of his work, as retrospectives are meant to--but downward. It is, however, a delight to visit. One could write a little dictionary of received ideas about this engaging "primitive." It would begin with his nickname, the Douanier. (He was not, as MOMA's excellent catalog stresses, a customs inspector, but a much lowlier form of bureaucratic life, a gabelou, or toll collector.) The dictionary would go through a whole list of legendary things that Rousseau did not do or see or say, things he cooked up himself (such...
...leaves little pockets with elves like me in them. The urban primitive has no style--or rather he has one that consists of absences: no correct drawing, no perspective, no knowledge of art history or cultural politics. He sings like a bird, without learning a score. Hence the Douanier, God's simpleton...
...rats' aid to save her family from imminent death; she falls down a hole and into a world of effulgent psychedelia. The Bluth artists boast that more than 600 colors were used in the 1.5 million drawings that compose this 82-min. adventure. The eye of a Douanier Rousseau might discern each hue; others can simply open their eyes, and their mouths, in appreciative pleasure...
...with stylized hills that suggest haste rather than observation. But his candid style has an impact on the modern viewer that Remington's hyped-up romanticism no longer does. His so-called ineptness of drawing has been re-evaluated in the wake of the incisive simplicities of a Douanier Rousseau or even a John Kane. He relied on a plain clarity of eye in an age in which this virtue ranked rather...