Henri Rousseau: ‘Surprise!’, 1891
Henri Rousseau: ‘Carnival Night’, 1886
Henri Rousseau at the Foundation Beyeler
The art of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) transcended traditional borderlines and entered untrodden territory. A customs official, Rousseau had no formal art training and initially painted in his free time. Many years passed before his art, non-academic and long considered merely naive, found recognition in the Paris salons. It was poets like Apollinaire and artists like Picasso, Léger, Delaunay, and later Kandinsky, who were the first to appreciate Rousseau’s outstanding significance
February 7 – May 9, 2010
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Source: Foundation Beyeler
On the centenary of his death, the Fondation Beyeler is devoting an exhibition to this pioneer of Classical Modern art, comprising about 40 masterworks. Viewers will discover Rousseau’s unusual portraits and the poetic paintings of French cities and landscapes in which he made visible the transition from the mundane to the mysterious. The exhibition culminates in a significant group of the artist’s famous jungle paintings. Although he had never actually seen a jungle, he created his own highly imaginative and colorful vision of it and its exotic denizens in his paintings. With his wonderful, often dreamlike compositions, Rousseau stood for the rediscovery of fantasy at the inception of modernism. He succeeded in opening new worlds for art, which influenced the Cubists and Surrealists and continue to excite art lovers young and old to this day.
Many renowned museums and collections in Europe and America have contributed to the success of the exhibition by their generous provision of loans, such as the National Gallery, London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
A great number of pictures come from the Musée national de l’Orangerie, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée national Picasso in Paris.
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