Naive Art. Nathalia Brodskaya

were various guests whom Alarcon portrayed in the style of Picasso’s Gertrude Stein and Henri Rousseau’s Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin.

      Marie Laurencin, The Italian, 1925.

      Oil on canvas.

      Former collection of Albert Flamert.

      Henri Rousseau, also called the Douanier Rousseau, Myself, Portrait-Landscape, 1890.

      Oil on canvas, 143 × 110 cm.

      Národní Galerie, Prague.

      Henri Rousseau, also called the Douanier Rousseau, Guillaume Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin, 1909.

      Oil on canvas, 200 × 389 cm.

      The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

      Henri Rousseau, also called the Douanier Rousseau, Horse Attacked by a Jaguar, 1910.

      Oil on canvas, 89 × 116 cm.

      The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

      Ivan Rabuzin, Flower on the Hill, 1988.

      Watercolour on paper, 76 × 56 cm.

      Rabuzin Collection, Kljuc.

      Elena A. Volkova, Young Girl from Sibera.

      Private collection.

      At the banquet all those years previously, the elderly ex-Douanier Rousseau (then aged sixty-four, having retired from his customs post at the age of forty-one in order to concentrate on art) found himself surrounded mainly by vivacious young people intent on having a good time but in a cultural sort of way. Poems were being recited even as supper was being eaten. There was dancing to the music of George Braque on the accordian and Rousseau on the violin – in fact, Rousseau played a waltz that he had composed himself. The party was still going strong at dawn the next day when Rousseau, emotional and more than half-asleep, was finally put into a fiacre to take him home. (When he got out of the fiacre, he left in it all the copies of the poems written for him by Apollinaire and given to him solicitously as a celebratory present.) Even after he had departed, the young people carried straight on with the revels. Only later in the memories of the people who had been there did this ‘banquet’ stand out in their minds as a truly remarkable occasion. Only then did individual anecdotes about what happened there take on the aspect of the mythical and the magical. Quite a few were to remember a drunken Marie Laurencin falling over on to a selection of scones and pastries. Others indelibly recalled Rousseau’s declaration to Picasso that “We two are the greatest artists of our time – you in the Egyptian genre and me in the modern!”[8]

      Mihai Dascalu, The Broken Bridge.

      Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm.

      Private collection.

      This statement, arrogant as it might have seemed at the time to those who heard it, was by no means as ridiculous as some of those present might have supposed. As the story of the ‘Rousseau banquet’ spread around the city of Paris and beyond, the people who had been there began in their minds to edit what they had seen and heard in order to present their own versions when asked. Six years later, in 1914, Maurice Raynal narrated his recollections of it in Apollinaire’s magazine Soirées de Paris. Later still, Fernanda Olivier and Gertrude Stein wrote it up in their respective memoirs. In his Souvenirs sans fin, André Salmon went to considerable pains to point out that the ‘banquet’ was in no way intended as a practical joke at Rousseau’s expense, and that – despite suggestions to the contrary – the party was meant utterly sincerely as a celebration of Rousseau’s art. Why else, he insisted, would intellectuals like Picasso, Apollinaire and he himself, André Salmon, have gone to the trouble of setting up the banquet in the first place? This was too much for the French artist and sculptor André Derain who publicly riposted to Salmon, “What is this? A victory for con-artistry?”[9] Later, he was sorry for his outburst, particularly in view of the fact that he rather admired Rousseau’s work, and only quarrelled with Maurice de Vlaminck, one of his best friends, when Vlaminck was unwise enough to suggest in an interview with a journalist that Derain was dismissive of Rousseau’s work.

      Mihai Dascalu, Close to the Windmill.

      Oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm.

      Private collection.

      Only a few years later, and there was actually a squabble about who had ‘discovered’ Rousseau. The critic Gustave Coquiot in a book entitled Les Indépendants expressed his exasperation at hearing people say that it had been Wilhelm Uhde who had introduced Rousseau and his work to the world. How was it, he asked indignantly, that some German fellow could claim in 1908 to present for the first time to the Parisian public a Parisian artist whose work had been on show in Paris to those who wanted to see it ever since 1885 or earlier?[10]