Scierie aux environs de Paris

“Rousseau takes his place alongside the masters who are the harbingers of modern art and sometimes overshadows them,” wrote Robert Delaunay, an early advocate of Rousseau, his elder and as yet unheralded friend, in the opening years of the 20th century. “For him the picture was a primal surface with which he had to deal physically to project his thought” (quoted in Henri Rousseau, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 44). Within Henri ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau’s oeuvre, few paintings are as presciently, prophetically modern as the present Scierie aux environs de Paris, which depicts a sawmill on the outskirts of Paris. The geometrically reductive rendering of the low-slung building and sawn boards anticipates the radical, structural simplifications of cubism. More broadly, the image embodies the self-taught Rousseau’s forthright, conceptual manner, which served a catalytic role for Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and others as they sought to liberate their art from illusionistic tradition and to forge a new, modernist mode of picture-making based upon the primacy of fundamental, plastic elements.
Rousseau painted Scierie aux environs de Paris no earlier than 1889, the year that the Eiffel Tower—visible behind the sawmill—was constructed on the Champs de Mars as the grand entrance to the Exposition Universelle. Although the structure attracted outrage in literary and artistic circles at the time, Rousseau was an immediate admirer and, along with Georges Seurat, the first artist to take up the controversial monument and proclaim it as a signal, contemporaneous motif. In the present canvas, he juxtaposed the soaring, wrought-iron tower, an emblem of technological progress, with the traditional building craft represented by the sawmill, which nestles harmoniously into the surrounding landscape. “In Rousseau’s world,” Carolyn Lanchner has written, “there is no nostalgia for a prelapsarian paradise; the Paris Sunday of petit bourgeois leisure is both the dream and the reality of a modernized Golden Age” (ibid., p. 220).
In 1889, Rousseau was still working as a government customs inspector in and around Paris, as he had since the early 1870s—hence the sobriquet “Le Douanier,” as he was often known. His position took him to the quays along the Seine, the city gates, and the working-class suburbs on the immediate outskirts of the capital, where he found no shortage of motifs to paint on his days off. He began to exhibit annually at the Salon des Indépendants in 1886, after which his superiors increasingly assigned him to quiet posts where he could set up his easel while on duty. The Art Institute of Chicago, which houses a preliminary version of the same motif (Certigny, op. cit., no. 51), has proposed that Rousseau painted Scierie aux environs de Paris around 1893-1895, shortly after he took early retirement at age 49 to live on his meager pension and paint full-time. The site, according to Henry Certigny, may be Clamart, some five miles southwest of the city center (op. cit., p. 94).
The landscapes that Rousseau created of commonplace suburban motifs near Paris, which constitute by far the largest number of his pictures, form a poetic contrast to the idiosyncratic, imaginary jungle scenes for which he is most popularly remembered. Whereas the jungles present a dense, impenetrable world in which half-hidden and mysterious conflicts roil, Rousseau’s suburban vistas are meticulously ordered and crisscrossed with streets, paths, bridges, and quays that suggest unfettered movement through the terrain. At the same time, the intensely felt literalness of Rousseau’s manner—his very frankness of vision—lends even the most prosaic of his suburban geographies an unexpected and most agreeable air of pastoral enchantment. “Painting helped him to step out of an almost unseen existence, to make the inconspicuous worth seeing and to obtain the remote from the familiar,” Götz Adriani has written. “As an artist, he was able to convert the everyday into the unusual, to bring fantasy and extreme precision together in a dialectic tension” (Rousseau, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen, 2001, p. 14).
It was this instinctive magic that Picasso sought to harness in his own art during the period preceding his full realization of analytic cubism, as he was actively testing out every received idea of painting. By 1907, after years of working largely in isolation, Rousseau had started to travel in decidedly vanguard circles. The poet and art critic Apollinaire was a keen admirer; the forward-thinking dealers Ambroise Vollard, Joseph Brummer, and Wilhem Uhde were buying his work; and his own weekly soirées at his studio in Paris attracted an exciting coterie of young artists and writers. In 1908, having exhaustively probed the signifying potential of African and Iberian art, Picasso turned to Rousseau’s contemporary form of primitivism as a source of ideas and imagery. Scierie aux environs de Paris—with its simplified drawing, predominantly green palette, and distortions of perspective and scale—provides a model for the transformative landscapes that Picasso painted at rural La Rue-des-Bois in late summer of 1908, a full year after ceasing work on Les demoiselles d’Avignon, as he was recovering from yet another particularly grueling phase of work in the capital.
“Picasso was beguiled by the intensity of the Douanier’s sense of reality,” John Richardson explained. “He was also useful to Picasso as an antidote to Cézanne’s sway; he represented the opposite end of the pictorial spectrum. Whereas Rousseau was totally conceptual in approach, Cézanne was totally perceptual. Picasso’s aim was not to reconcile the examples of Cézanne and Rousseau in his work so much as to have them collide and profit from the consequences of their miscegenation” (A Life of Picasso, New York, 1996, vol. II, p. 96).