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HENRI "LE DOUANIER" ROUSSEAU

Currency:EUR Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:40,000.00 - 60,000.00 EUR
HENRI  LE DOUANIER  ROUSSEAU
(Laval 1844-1910 Paris) Landscape with red lighthouse, oil on cardboard, 22 x 27 cm, with frame, (PM). Certificate: Henri Certigny, Paris, 20 March 1995. The avant-garde artists on the threshold of modernity, especially Picasso, Delaunay, and Kandinsky, were fascinated by the terseness of Rousseau's paintings, the compact rhythms of his lines and planes, and the great density of form and colour attained, a fascination which maintains its hold even today. They found themselves confronted with a method of unique immediacy that presented itself as natural rather than naturalistic, popular rather than elitist. At the same time, part of the reason why his anachronistic paintings proved to have such a lasting future lay in their unexpected appearance in the present from a distant past... Seemingly without origin, they revealed unapproachable and inscrutable scenarios that did not rely on a central perspective to convey their urgency. The paintings still exert a peculiar attraction, despite Rousseau's efforts - in his portrayal of the truly alien and his representation of the familiar as alien - to prevent the viewer from becoming overly intimate with them. (in: "Henri Rousseau, der Zöllner-Grenzgänger zur Moderne", Kunsthalle Tübingen, 2001).