Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier Rousseau (1844-1910)
The Dream, 1910, oil on canvas, 204,5 x 298,5 cm
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 252.1954
© 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence

An eminently singular painter, Henri Rousseau is a unique case in the history of European art. His work is nevertheless part of its time, at the turn of the XNUMXth century.

Far from being yet another celebration of the naivety of Douanier Rousseau, the exhibition aims to demonstrate how much his work belongs to a trend in Western art which, from America to Europe, from the sixteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century, adopted a stylistic model of the archaic type, opposing - unconsciously or consciously - an "anticlassical" painting to painting

"Official" of the different eras. By confronting his painting with some of his sources of inspiration, which count academicism as the new painting, and with the works of avant-garde artists who inducted him as father of modernity, the exhibition aims to a critical highlight of his art around a reflection on the notion of archaism.

Works by Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Carlo Carrà, Diego Rivera, Max Ernst, but also anonymous works or works by artists who are sometimes overlooked allow us to evoke the richness of the links that are woven around the Douanier Rousseau, a crucible of a path original in the exploration of modernity.

Emphasis is placed on the essential role of Douanier Rousseau in the affirmation of the Parisian and international avant-garde: Picasso, Delaunay, and the artists of the German avant-garde, at the forefront of which Kandinsky, have not only admired Rousseau's work, making it a source of inspiration for their own work, but also collected it.

Myself, portrait-landscape (1889-1890, Prague, Narodni Galerie) and the Portrait of Monsieur X (known as Pierre Loti) (1906, Kunsthaus Zürich) announce, at the start of the journey, the singularity of the work of the artist who claims to be the inventor of the genre of “landscape portrait”: he actually finds his antecedents in the portrait of old masters, illustrated by the Portrait of a man in a red cap by Vittore Carpaccio (Venice, Correr museum) ; this work will in turn influence several generations of artists, such as Fernand Léger who is inspired by the Portrait of Pierre Loti for Le Mécanicien (Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts).

Designed around this dialogue between echoes of the past and anticipations of the future, the exhibition is organized around recurrent themes of the painter's work: still landscapes, populated by anonymous figurines and “tributes” to the new modernity planes and airships, or still lifes or portraits of lonely and often disturbing children (Pour Fête bébé!, 1903, Wintherthur, Kunstmuseum), which have left deep traces on Picasso and Carrà in particular.

This “familiar” dimension of his art develops in parallel with his dreamlike images of the world in the wild: masterpieces such as Le Rêve (1910, New York, MoMA), a fantastic vision that heralds surreal atmospheres, will be presented alongside the Jungles (The hungry lion throws himself on the antelope, Basel, Beyeler Foundation). "Immense compositions, where the grotesque is associated with the tender, the absurd and the magnificent", as Ardengo Soffici wrote in 1910, they remain the testimony of this visionary artist, to "the innocent eye of the child ".

General Commission: Guy Cogeval, President of the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie
Gabriella Belli, director of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
Commissioner: Beatrice Avanzi and Claire Bernardi, curators at the Musée d'Orsay
Scenography: Daniela Ferretti

Pratical information

• Duration: daily, except Monday, from 9:30 a.m. to 18 p.m., Thursday until 21:45 p.m.
• Pricing / entrance fee to the exhibition and the museum: single rate: € 12 / reduced rate: € 9 / free for those under 26 who are residents or nationals of one of the countries of the European Union
• access: entrance from the square, 1, rue de la Légion d'Honneur, 75007 Paris
• Information and standard: www.musee-orsay.fr - +33 (0) 1 40 49 48 14