LES
JOUEURS DE RUGBY
par le “douanier” Henri Rousseau
1908, 80 x 100 cm
Henri Rousseau
endured the art-historical misfortune of being a working-class late bloomer—he
was a Sunday painter who only began to paint seriously in his 40s—with what seemed
to his critics little natural talent. His unsentimental, haunting images nonetheless
drew the attention of a literary and artistic coterie hungry for fresh recruits.
How did Rousseau, whose style still commands belittling adjectives such as “naive”
and “simple,” escape relegation to the margins of art history? It was, as the
writer André Malraux has pointed out, the former toll clerk’s friendship with
a legion of well-established masters that has by and large guaranteed his place
in the history of Modern art. During his lifetime Rousseau became something of
a sensation within the relatively small Parisian art scene. His astonishing works
were celebrated by Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, and Pablo Picasso, and
he came to be considered a major force by artists such as Max Beckmann, Vasily
Kandinsky, and Fernand Léger only a few years after his pauper’s death. To the
extent that he had limited official success while he lived, Rousseau can be said
to have invented himself — he barged uninvited into exhibitions and dinner parties
alike, assuming the posture of an honored guest — just as he invented images unlike
anything around him. Canvases such as Artillerymen
and The Football Players have been interpreted as Rousseau’s quirky attempts
to depict modern times, whether with a dapper military company as in the former
example, or with the four natty enthusiasts of a new sport, rugby, in the latter.
It is to his credit that we still have no adequate words to describe a painting
in which rugby players look like pajama-clad twins, or one in which 14 identical
handlebar mustaches succeed in delivering a spirited image of an artillery battery.
