These works presented on the occasion of this exhibition highlight how the artist deserves a prominent place in the history of art and landscape, but also in the extent to which his work can guide our relationship with nature today.
Admired by the young impressionists as well as by the photographers who follow Rousseau, he shows him his traces in the forest all alone, the vitality of the landscape school, in the middle of a century marked by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Life Sciences. True environmentalist before his time, has an artistic look on the Fontainebleau forest and raises its voice to warn of the fragility of the entire ecosystem.
100 works on display at the Petit Palais in Paris
The exhibition brings together almost a hundred works from the main French museums such as the Louvre and the Orsay Museum, European ones such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery in London, the Mesdag Collection in The Hague, the Kunsthalle from Hamburg among the others, as well as from private collections. These works show how the artist deserves a prominent place in the history of art and landscape, but also to what extent his work can guide our thinking today. relationship with nature. The exhibition follows the career of this singular artist who has always been positioned in opposition to his contemporaries. The first section discusses his renunciation of his academic path, particularly through his refusal to make the traditional trip to Italy to further his learning. Rousseau in fact wants to paint nature for itself and not as such decorations for mythological scenes. He prefers to travel throughout France, as evidenced by his first works: Landscape of the Auvergne, 1830 (Louvre Museum); Village in Normandy, 1833 (Custodiadia Foundation, Frits Lugt Collection); Mont Blanc seen from La Faucille. Storm Effect, 1834 (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen). He reports numerous studies from his travels which show his careful observation of the visible: studies of trunks, rocks, undergrowth, swamps.
The exhibition shows all the singularity of Rousseau's work, of which the work as close as possible to the motif is an integral part of his creative process. The painter needs to immerse himself in nature. He abandons every geometric perspective and places the viewer without neglecting the landscape but in the heart of this ecosystem. Then he retouches his paintings in the studio sometimes for several years. His very personal technique, which contrasts with that of other artists of his time, made him refuse Saloni several years in a row before choosing for himself to stop sending anything, discouraged.
Rousseau the “great reject”
Paradoxically, this refusal, which earned him the nickname "the great reject", allowed him to acquire notoriety and real critical and commercial success in France and abroad. The route then highlights his pictorial works in the forest of Fontainebleau and his decisive role played by artists and photographers who, like him, frequented the village of Barbizon where he settled in 1847. Painters such as Narciso Diaz de la gathered around him. Peña, Charles Jacques, Jean-François Millet who would become his closest friend but also photographers such as Eugène Cuvelier, Charles Bodmer and Gustave Le Gray. They tirelessly walk the forest of Fontainebleau and paint real portraits of the trees that will become Rousseau's signature. The artist examines their organic structure, the line of their branches, the shape of their nodes. He identifies them and precisely locates his paintings: Le Pavé de Chailly, around 1840 (Departmental Museum of Barbizon Painters), or even Le Vieux Dormoir du Bas-Bréau, 1836-1837 (deposit of the Louvre Museum at the Orsay).
The exhibition is organized with the exceptional support of the Louvre Museum and the Orsay Museum
At the same time, a strong awareness of the threat to forests is developing among artists,
critics and writers in a context of growing industrialization. The painters witness the massive cutting of trees and echo it. Rousseau wants to denounce these "crimes" through his works. In particular, he chooses a title that strikes the mind by taking up the biblical episode of the Massacre of the Innocents, 1847 (Mesdag Collection, Netherlands) which represents a scene of felling of trees in the forest. In 1852 Rousseau became the voice of the forest in the name of all the artists who painted him and wrote to the Comte de Morny, then Minister of the Interior. His struggle found a solution in the creation, in 1853, of the first nature reserve in the world, under the name of "artistic reserve", formalized in 1861. At the end of the route, a frieze chronologically traces the history of the Fontainebleau forest and its conservation starting from the beginning of the XNUMXth century until today, recalling Rousseau's decisive contribution, in the name of art, to the emergence of an ecological conscience.
