Master of the Green Machine Moma's

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Henri Rousseau show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (through June 4) alters one's view of his work, as retrospectives are meant to--but downward. It is, however, a delight to visit. One could write a little dictionary of received ideas about this engaging "primitive." It would begin with his nickname, the Douanier. (He was not, as MOMA's excellent catalog stresses, a customs inspector, but a much lowlier form of bureaucratic life, a gabelou, or toll collector.) The dictionary would go through a whole list of legendary things that Rousseau did not do or see or say, things he cooked up himself (such as the innocent fiction that he had been to Mexico in the army of Napoleon III and had seen real jungles) or that were invented by friends (like the playwright Alfred Jarry's absurd story that he, like Pygmalion, taught the old boy to paint). And it would finish with the belief that Rousseau (1844-1910) was one of the greatest protomodern artists.

This reputation rests, for Americans, almost wholly on one painting. It was no slight thing to have painted The Sleeping Gypsy, by now perhaps the most famous dream image in Western art. The silhouette of a sniffing lion, with one unwinking yellow eye and a tail stiffly outstretched, its tip erect as though charged with static electricity, quivering like Rousseau's own paintbrush; the swollen, white Melies moon; the black nomad like a toppled statue, her feet with their pink toenails gravely sticking up; the djellaba, with its rippling stripes of coral, Naples yellow, cerulean; and the lute, like a pale lunar egg, hanging on the brown sand as the moon hangs in the blue night. Reproduced a millionfold, this oneiric image became the Guernica of the tots, the standard decor of upper-middle-class childhood. Such fame, decanted on a single picture, can distort an artist's entire reputation.

What we see in this wholly enjoyable show is a painter whose high moments (two owned by Paris' Musee d'Orsay, War and The Snake Charmer; two by MOMA, The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream; and one by a private collector, The Hungry Lion) must be weighed against a good deal of medium-rate work and potboiling. Enjoyment of the lesser Rousseaus is usually tinged with condescension, though at least they are not cute or kitschy, like the truckloads of pseudonaive painting that would sprout from Montmartre to Haiti after his death. They have their period charm; you have to love his dirigibles and Wright biplanes creakily copied from postcards. But most of his city and country scenes are as platitudinous as Utrillo's.

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 to refresh the culturally burdened. There you are, it declared: late industrialism isn't so bad, it leaves little pockets with elves like me in them. The urban primitive has no style--or rather he has one that consists of absences: no correct drawing, no perspective, no knowledge of art history or cultural politics. He sings like a bird, without learning a score. Hence the Douanier, God's simpleton.

But 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 and Delaunay paid him their semireverent homages, he took them as his due without interesting himself much in their paintings. He patted the Young Turks on the head, telling Picasso, for instance, that the two of them were the greatest artists of their time, "You in the Egyptian style, I in the modern." This gnomic utterance can only mean that Rousseau identified "modernity" with the salons: it was official speech, like the Eiffel Tower.

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. And yet the jungle--that lattice of leaves and fronds, each carefully turned toward the eye to display its full shape--is a majestic, formal green machine that fills its animal signs with utter conviction.

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 and steamier than the Seine, and lined with a frieze of swollen aspidistras. Out of this, on occasion, he could distill incantation. The Snake Charmer, 1907, condenses a huge popular imagery of the noble savage and the mysterious East. Its wonderful flora--the light ocher blooms like hydrangeas or brains, the green, yellow-fringed leaf spears, the oversize blue foxgloves--look forward to Paul Klee. But the black woman with her glittering eyes, wreathed in obedient snakes, has to be the purest evocation of the colonial sublime in French painting--like a great Gauguin without the sex appeal. It makes one realize what distances separate the routine from the inspired, even among "innocent" visionaries.