Vlaminck perceived what was the most valuable point of things ‘primitive’. ‘Black African art manages by the simplest of means to convey an impression of stateliness but also stillness.’[5] Nonetheless, having passed through the hands of Vlaminck, Derain and Matisse – all of them great artists – African sculpture directly affected only Pablo Picasso. Vlaminck dated this story to 1905, although most likely it actually happened a bit later. In any case, all the artists involved were by then in a mood to accept primitive art as a complete and entire phenomenon, not simply as a mass of individual and multifarious items.
Most significantly, Picasso gradually worked out how to reveal the primal nature of objects thanks to the expressivity of African sculpture. It was this discovery that provided the impetus for him to go on to develop Cubism.
Ivan Vecenaj, Dinner of the Night.
Gallery of Modern Art, Zagreb.
However primitive the sense of form presented by black African sculpture might seem to the European eye, it represented an aesthetic school that was centuries old and a tradition of craftsmanship inherited from remote ancestors. That a system exists means that it is possible to study it, to learn from it and to work to it. This is why the influence of African carving on European art has been so marked during the twentieth century.
Today, then, the art courses of many educational establishments focus on the interrelationship between twentieth-century painting and black African art, together with the influence of the art forms of native North America, Oceania and Arabic/Islamic Africa on European and North American artists from Gauguin up to the Surrealists. As art expert Jean Laude has said, the ‘discovery’ of black African art by Europeans ‘seems to be an integral part of the general process of renewing sources; it is certainly a contributory factor’.[6] It was at the peak of this wave of enthusiasm, at the very moment of ‘the decline of the West’, that the naive artists emerged. There was no need to go searching for them in Africa or in Oceania.
Discovery – the Banquet in Rousseau’s Honour
Impressionism actually had more of an effect upon art in general than it initially seemed to. The rebellion against the ‘tyranny’ of the old and traditional system of Classicism that it fomented – the establishing of the principle of freedom in content, form, style and context – led to a broadening of the whole concept of ‘art’ itself.
Janko Brašic, Dance in Circle next to the Church.
Private collection.
Towards the end of the Impressionist ‘period’ – so much so that they are forever labelled Post-Impressionist – Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh joined the Impressionists’ ranks. What they lacked in training they made up for in hard work. Indeed, only in the very early pictures of Gauguin is any deficiency of skill evident. And when Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886, no one expressed any doubts as to his worthiness to take his place among the international clique of artists in the community in Montmartre which by that time had existed there for nigh on a century. Perhaps inevitably, the pair did not, however, find acceptance in the salon dedicated to the most classical forms of contemporary art. They were nonetheless able to exhibit their works to the public, especially since Parisian art-dealers – marchands – were opening more and more galleries. In 1884 the Salon des indépendants was launched. This had no selection committee and was set up specifically to put on show the works of those artists who painted for a living but were yet unable or unwilling to meet the requirements of the official salons. Of course there were many such artists – and of course among the overwhelming multiplicity of their mostly talentless works it was not always easy to identify those pictures that were exceptional in merit.
Henri Rousseau served as a customs officer at the Gate of Vanves in Paris. In his free time he painted, sometimes on commission for his neighbours and sometimes in exchange for food. Year after year from 1886 to 1910 he brought his work to the Salon des indépendants for display, and year after year his work was exhibited with everybody else’s despite its total lack of professional worth. Nevertheless he was proud to be numbered among the city’s artists, and thoroughly enjoyed the right they all had to see their works shown to the public like the more accepted artists in the better salons.
Emma Stern, Self-Portrait, 1964.
Oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm.
Clemens-Sels-Museum, Neuss.
Sava Sekulic, Portrait of a Man with Moustache.
Mixed media on cardboard, 45 × 48 cm.
Galerie Charlotte, Munich.
Rousseau was among the first in his generation to perceive the dawn of a new era in art in which it was possible to grasp the notion of freedom – freedom to aspire to be described as an artist irrespective of a specific style of painting or the possession or lack of professional qualifications. His famous picture (now in the National Gallery, Prague), dated 1890 and entitled Myself, Portrait-Landscape. rather than the comparatively feeble self-portrait, reflected that selfsame ebullient self-confidence that was a characteristic of his, and established the image of the amateur artist taking his place in the ranks of the professionals. “His most characteristic feature is that he sports a bushy beard and has for some considerable time remained a member of the Society of the Indépendants in the belief that a creative personality whose ideas soar high above the rest should be granted the right to equally unlimited freedom of self-expression”,[7] was what Rousseau wrote about himself in his autobiographical notes.
It just so happened that Pablo Picasso visited a M. Soulier’s bric-a-brac shop in the Rue des Martyrs on a fairly regular basis: sometimes he managed to sell one of his pictures to M. Soulier. On one such occasion Picasso noticed a strange painting. It could have been mistaken for a pastiche on the type of ceremonial portraits produced by James Tissot or Charles-Emile-Auguste (Carolus-Duran) had it not been for its extraordinary air of seriousness. The face of a rather unattractive woman was depicted with unusually precise detail given to its individual features, yet with a sense of profound respect for the sitter. Somehow the female figure – clothed in an austere costume involving complex folds and creases and surrounded by an amazing panoply of pansies in pots on a balcony, observing a prominent bird flying across a clouded sky, and holding a large twig in one hand – looked for all the world like a photographer’s model as posed by an amateur photographer, but still was hauntingly realistic and arresting. The artist was Henri Rousseau. The price was five francs. Picasso bought it and hung it in his studio.
In point of fact, it was not only Picasso who was interested in Rousseau’s work at this time. The art-dealer Ambroise Vollard had already purchased some of Rousseau’s paintings, and the young artists Sonja and Robert Delaunay were friends of his, as was Wilhelm Uhde, the German art critic who organised Rousseau’s first solo exhibition in 1908 (on the premises of a Parisian furniture-dealer). But it was Picasso who, with his friends, decided in that same year to hold a party in Rousseau’s honour. It took place in Picasso’s studio in the Rue Ravignan at a house called the Bateau-Lavoir. Some thirty people turned up, many of them naturally Picasso’s friends and neighbours, but others present included the critic Maurice Raynal and the Americans Leo and Gertrude Stein.
Decades