Word: rousseau
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Perhaps one should take Rousseau more on his own terms. The Paris modernists --Jarry, Apollinaire, Picasso, Delaunay, Brancusi--hailed his work because of its fierce, astringent poetry, but also because it seemed to have predicted their own conscious concerns: the interest in popular art like the prints known as images d'Epinal, the invented exoticism, the mode of composition in flat planes, but above all the ideal of the untutored eye unobstructed by academic culture, registering the world with the clarity, as the cliche used to run, "of a child or a savage." Rousseau's innocence might have been invented...
...Rousseau was very conscious of style, and loved referring to other art. "I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of stubborn labor," he wrote to a critic shortly before his death. He wanted his work to be a homemade replica of the values enshrined in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, as manifested in the big French Salon painters: Jean-Leon Gerome, Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Felix-Auguste Clement. He loved their important subjects, their grasp of the colonial exotic, their professionalism and high finish. So when artists 40 years his junior like Picasso...
Like many sweet old buffers, he admired authority. He painted the artists lining up for the Salon des Independants as an army of black-clad troops, carrying paintings of identical size; it was a parody of the military metaphor of the avant-garde. Rousseau wanted honors, like his heroes. When the French government sent him a decoration by mistake he would not send it back, and obstinately wore its violet rosette for the rest of his life. It was the Palmes Academiques--a serendipitous fluke, in view of his obsession with exotic scenes of distant jungles...
Among their leaves, he remained fixated on images of "natural" authority. Rousseau was less of a sweet fabulist than one is apt to suppose. His hero was Leo, king of the beasts, with vassals arranged in order of domination in their palm court. Some emblems of ferocity gave him trouble. The hero of The Hungry Lion, 1905, has a crescent of human dentures, and might be biting into a watermelon; the unhappy antelope, because of Rousseau's difficulty in drawing its head twisted at such an angle, is duckbilled; the eagle and owl, with their strips of meat, look stuffed...
Facts merely impeded Rousseau. He needed fictions. Desperately poor most of his life, he could not travel. He had plenty of sources to draw on, untraceable today because ephemeral then. He used almanacs and magazines, engravings and photographs. He visited the exotic pavilions at the 1889 Exposition in Paris. He could walk in the Jardin des Plantes and hear the big cats roaring and coughing a few hundred yards away in their iron cages, jungle sounds floating to him through a screen of lush foliage. He "knew" what the Nile looked like, and the Niger, and the Amazon: muddier...