World's Most Famous Toll Booth Worker
April 10, 2023
Traumgarten Tiger, Riding Ukelele Man
Today’s artist of the month is Henri Rousseau. His style is called “Primitive” because he had no training and, in the 1890’s, it showed. Rousseau, born 1844, had been painting in his spare time for decades when, at the age of 49, he decided to give up his employment as a toll collector and pursue his high-flown and ironclad belief that he was a great artist in the making
Once he was noticed at all by the Parisian arts community he was regarded as a man of vastly and more ambition than talent. His self confidence was laughable but unbreakable. Apparently this came not from any personal conceit but just simple ignorance, in the way a small boy might brag that he has the world’s fastest flying Nikes. Rousseau, it is thought, just didn’t have the knowledge or the sense to know the difference between good art and bad. His inflated self-perception combined with his naivete made him the continuous butt of jokes and mockery among his contemporaries, even those who came to admire his artistic vision.
There is a story, mostly true I think, that when Picasso salvaged a work of Rousseau’s that was about to be painted over by a clueless artist, he was so impressed by its untutored artistry he tracked him down and invited him to a party at his studio with other members of the emerging Paris avante garde. The “banquet” was decidedly low-end (all were still struggling at the time) but you have to wonder if the oversized cardboard medal presented to him by Picasso for “World’s Best Artist” was actually a gesture of unmitigated esteem.
Still it’s hardly surprising that Picasso, Juan Gris, and their company of sophisticates were quite blown away by the altogether unschooled yet supremely self-assured power of Rouseau's gifts. After all, they had now been years at trying to find viable alternatives to the mainstream pictorial arts. They made fun of him but they embraced him as one of their own and when he died they moved him from his pauper’s grave to a respectable cemetery with an impressive headstone bearing a tribute by his friend the poet Apollinaire.
When we compare his paintings to those of popular academy trained artists of the time, we can appreciate all the more the mad genius of his self confidence.
Rosa Bonhuer
Jules Bastien Lepage
What inspired Rousseau’s artistic drive and faith that his paintings would, in time, be ranked with the world’s greats? There probably will be no end to the volumes of guess-work written on that subject. In the end all we can do is thank God for him and delight forever in his gifts.
Alexandre Cabanel