QUOTES AND ANALYSIS FROM JUNGLES IN PARIS BY TATE
Souvenirs of the Jardin des Plantes: Making the Exotic Strange Again - Christopher Green
For Apollinaire and many others who chose to believe in Rousseau's 'revolutionary' contribution, the exotic in Rousseau's painting was more than merely strange; it was authentic too. The story was that his Jungles were memory paintings: the irresistable resurfacing of his experiences of tropical forests in Mexico as a soldier with Napoleon III's extraordinary force against the Emperor Maximilian in the 1860's. Rousseau's own storytelling was the source for this, and Apollinair a major reason why it gained currency before it was exposed as the fable that t was: Rousseau served as a soldier, but he never left France. Robert Delaunay, the closest of his avant-garde artist friends, also believed him, and so did his first biographer, another close friend, Wilhelm Uhde. And yet Rousseau himself, when pressed, was happy to confess that his Mexican stories were confabulation. In one extensive interview published during his lifetime, the critic Arsene Alexandre writes that he obtained, 'without difficulty', confirmation that Rousseau had never 'travelled further than the glass houses of the Jardin des Plantes.30
Although Rousseau told many he had been within the Mexican jungles as a solider, he was more than happy to admit when questioned that this was all in fact fabrication. I think this shows the 'dreamlike' nature of his insertion into these exotic habitats, and the idealistic way he interprets these environments.
Rousseau's Jungles not only have nothing to do with Mexico, but also were profoundly unlike the exotica on offer in the zoos and Zoological Galleries of Paris.
The zoo of the Jardin des Plantes was hugely popular through the entire period from the 1880s to 1910. Rousseau's Sunday visits were part of a mass phenomenon. Yet throug the entire period, the zoo was under sever budgetary constraints, which meant that many of its animals, especially the biggest draws, survived in scandalously deprived conditions. Some atleast of the exotic birds of Rousseau's paintings had been given a spacious new aviary in 1888. Snakes, including the two impressive pythons on the scale of the serpents bewitched by Rousseau's snake charmed, inhabited recycled hospital cabinets in a reatively new reptile house (completed in 1874) outside which stood a bronze sculpture of a snake charmer by the highly regarded Charles Arthur Borgeois. But the animals that were given most of the lead parts in Rousseau's Jungle pictures, the big cats, the apes and monkeys, were consigned to cages considered totally inedequate even in the 1850s. 32
To see apes, monkeys and big cats outside cages, giving an impression of behaving naturally in their own habitats, it was necessary that they be dead; the best opportunity offered was the stuffed animal displays in the Museum's Zoology Gallleries, and from these at least Rousseau certainly drew direct inspiration. 33
...but the later Jungles especially [...] becomes, as Soffici saw in the case of The Dream, heterogeneous collections of plants, many impossibly enlarged, others more associated with deserts or even with temperate climates than tropical forests. Collage-like imagnative processes are often the underpinning of Rousseau's inauthenticity-effects, as Le Pichon has shown. The jaguar in the trees above the lion and the antelope in The Hungry Lion is lifted from another stuffed animal display while, in The Snake Charmer, zoo birds with spatula-like beaks, lifted from a photograph in Betes Savages, join a flute-playing figure loosely related to a Salon des artistes francais success of 1899, reproduced in the popular souvenir album, Panorama-Salon. 37
By the period 1904-10, when Rousseau painted almost all his exotic pictures, jungles and 'wild' animals were so familiar in Paris that, in Segalen's terms, they had been effectively de-exoticised. [...] The incoherence, the inauthenticity of Rousseau's jungles in Paris proofed them against both the analysing scientific eye and the growing monotony of the familiar. They are spaces that cannot be controlled or tamed, which are opened up to imagination, as if they were the product not of 'authentic' spectacles at all but of dreams. When he confessed to Alexandre that he had never gone further than the Jardin de Plantes, the journalist recalled Rousseau's depth of feeling as he said: 'I don't know if you're like me... but when I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream. I feel that I'm somebody else completely.' 40
So, if we return to Segalen's definition of the exotic, it becomes possible to say that Rousseau's Jungles re-exoticised a popular imagery of the exotic: he made it impossibly idyllic, excessively horrifying. And he took it away, far away, by making it different again, yet gave it an immediacy that could connect with the desires and fears of his European viewers. With the question posed earlier still in his mind - what could the inauthenticity of his jungles do for their spectators? - it is worht taking a closer, final look at the character and functioning of the exotic as he re-invented it.
On one level, certainly, Rousseau's Jungle pictures are like the 'authentic' displays of the exotic that he knew in Paris, for those displays were inevitably inauthentic too: in a real sense, they were themselves, after all, assemblages much as the souvenir postcards of the Jardin des Plantes and Rousseau's Jungles are collages. A claustrophobic density characterises Rousseau's tropical forests, the echo of the dense accumulations of plant and animal species crowded together in the Jardin des Plantes. As Tristan Tzara pointed out, Rousseau's pictoral composing was not simply a matter of construction, it was a matter of accumulation too. 42
From the 1880's to 1910, images of the untamed wild were actually rare in the popular illustrated travel press from which Rousseau made his collection of cuttings. What dominated were images of the impact of colonisation, especially in tropical Africa: the penetration of the wild by explorers, the coming of modern construction, violent military triumph, and the dangers encountered on the way to it. Perhaps Rousseau's most 'revolutionary act' as a painter of the exotic was to almost completely ignore these images of colonial mastery, just as he ignored the mastery of nature in the wild represented by science. What he offered instead were exotic images that could work against or at least remain outside the current mythology of mastery, including the racist dream of white European mastery of 'other' peoples. 43
If the 'natives' of Rousseau's Jungles do not positively encourage stereotyping, his wild animals do the opposite, and they do so because animals never function as neutral screens for empathetic projection in his Jungle pictures but, instead, as symbols, as images in which very particular constellations of ideas are condensed. Rousseau might ignore the actual habits of many of the animals he paints, he might be shockingly imprecise in his treatment of their colouring and their markings, he might place them in impossible forests, but the expressive forms and the roles he gives them in his Jungle pictures suggest an exacting grasp of their characters in the popular imagination. 45
Illusion of Sources - Sources of Illusion: Rousseau Through the Images of His Time - Vincent Gille
His Jungles similarly partook of the collective fantasies of his era. In addition to the exoticism of being transported 'elsewhere', there was also that of watching animals fighting or being slain. Scanning the images in the illustrated supplement of Le Petit Journal, for example, reveals an abundance of wild animals in such situations: zoo visitors being attacked; organised fights between animals; pictures of children, explorers, soldiers and settlers being massacared by wild beats.
The 'savagery' of the 'natural' world was a constant theme in this period, and one that applied as much to humans as animals. 58
(speaking of the Mirage Casino in Las Vegas where magicians Siegfried and Roy performed their famous tiger act)
In the middle of a massive cage, in which the beasts were kept during the day, hung a giant reproduction of one of Rousseau's exotic canvases. In such a way, a number of magnificent lions, Asian tigers, and white tigers finally came to live at the heart of Le Douanier's jungle.
'It has been said', reported Uhde, 'that when Rousseau was painting he was so moved by the power of his own visions that, seized by anguish and feelings of suffocation, he had to open the widows to catch his breath.
Hence the exoticisim of Rousseau, the stationary traveller, was born of a magic trick: a desire for enchantment that was widely pursued by his era, made manifest in panoramas, World Fairs, popular shows and a whole wealth of other imagery. Rousseau the illusionist, whose own jungles scared him, no doubt made reference to the explorer-colonisers Louis Gustave Binger and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, from whom he 'borrowed' the exotic pretext and argument of his paintings. But above all he echoed the words of Novalis: "The greatest magician is he who can enchant himself at the same time, in such a way that the results of his own tricks appear to him like alien phenomena, with a force all of their own. 63
The Peaceful Exotic
As in his early portrait-landscapes, Rousseau had awarded his subjects with attributes, so too, in his images of the trangquil forest, he painted his animals with oranges. The 1910 Exotic Landscapes, Two Monkeys in the Jungle and Monkeys in the Jungle are all constructed in this way and, as a device, these playthings emphasise the quasi-human appearance of these animals. Rousseau's monkeys here are not 'wild' beasts and, if they are, they are no more 'savage' than Rousseau's depictions of them as children with toys. 113
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