The mighty jungle
Today: David Moore, co-founder of Sludge.
Issue No. 456
The World of Pure Imagination
David Moore
The World of Pure Imagination
by David Moore
The painter Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) famously never left France; he concocted his fantastical jungles from visits to the botanical gardens in Paris, images in books and taxidermized specimens in natural history museums, and a teeming visual imagination. The results are on view in a mesmerizing exhibition, “Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets,” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia until Feb. 22.
These works haven’t been assembled stateside in decades. The Barnes has gathered a remarkable 56 works from the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, museums in New York, and collections in Chicago, London, New York, Switzerland, and Tokyo. The exhibition is accompanied by a technical study of the process behind these uncanny, glowing paintings. Though Rousseau has often been dismissed, during and after his lifetime, as a naïve artist—his nickname, le Douanier, referred to his day job as a customs clerk—this exhibition resituates him in the modernist milieu of the French avant-garde that would come to champion him, after a fashion, in the years before and after his death.
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