Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [94]
Munch, “The Scream,” 1893, National Gallery, Oslo. Munch is known for his emotionally charged images of fear, isolation, and anxiety that greatly influenced the German Expressionists.
An important precursor of Expressionism was German-born Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), who, working in isolation, developed a completely modern style. Searching for, as she said, “great simplicity of form, ” she concentrated on single figures: wide-eyed, often nude, self-portraits and portraits of peasants. In a brief career, cut short by her death from childbirth, she executed groundbreaking images of great intensity.
Modersohn-Becker, “Self-Portrait,” 1906, Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, Basel.
SYMBOLISM
The forerunner of Surrealism, Symbolism was an artistic and literary movement that thrived in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Poets like Mallarmé and Rimbaud and painters like Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau discarded the visible world of surface appearances for the inner world of fantasy. Rimbaud even advocated that the artist ought to be deranged to penetrate to the deeper truth beneath surface feelings.
Rousseau, “The Sleeping Gypsy,” 1897, MoMA, NY. Rousseau was a self-taught painter of primitive, haunting landscapes, who was considered a forerunner of Surrealism.
PARTY ANIMAL
Although the public derided his work, Parisian painters recognized Rousseau as a true, if somewhat dull-witted, original. Picasso hosted a banquet in his honor, decorating his studio with vines to make it look like one of Rousseau’s jungles. He even set up a “throne” for Rousseau, consisting of a choir on a packing crate surrounded by flogs, lanterns, and a banner proclaiming “Homage to Rousseau.”
Rousseau, ensconced on the dais, stoically endured a lantern dripping wax on his head until it formed a pyramid like a dunce’s cap. When the lantern caught fire, the artists easily convinced the gullible Rousseau it was a sign of divine favor. While the party swirled about him, Rousseau - who accepted the “tribute” with straight-faced gravity, even writing Picasso a thank you note - dozed off, snoring gently.
ROUSSEAU: JUNGLES OF THE IMAGINATION. When an admirer told Henri Rousseau (1844- 1910) his work was as beautiful as Giotto’s, he asked, “Who’s Giotto?” Rousseau, also known as Le Douanier because he had been a toll collector, was as naïve as his paintings.
This French Grandma Moses was an untrained hobby painter when, confident of his ability, he quit his job at age 40 to paint full-time. “We are the two great painters of the age,” he told Picasso. “You paint in the ‘Egyptian’ style, I in the modern.” Picasso and the French avant-garde circle hailed Rousseau as “the godfather of twentieth-century painting,” but one cannot be sure of Picasso’s sincerity, since the professional artists who took up with Rousseau delighted in playing practical jokes on their vain, gullible colleague.
Actually, Rousseau believed his fantastic, childlike landscapes — full of strange, lurking animals and tree-sized flowers — were realistic paintings in the academic style. He studied plants and animals at the Paris zoo, but his technical limitations were clear. He minutely detailed the lush, stylized foliage and meticulously finished the painting’s surface so that no brushstrokes were visible. Still, his figures were flat and the scale, proportion, and perspective were skewed. Despite — or perhaps because of — these “flaws,” his stiff jungle scenes have an air of mystery and otherwordliness to them.
A simple man, Rousseau sang loudly while he worked to keep his spirits up, but sometimes frightened himself with his bizarre imaginings. Once he had to open a window and stop work until he regained his composure.