fly in the soup of innocence

Henri Rousseau was fortunate enough to receive from established painters whom he admired the good advice to avoid formal training even when he was in a position to take advantage of it.

Emulating himself, Rousseau developed a style of great polish and assurance: he performed the unlikely feat of preserving the fly of his innocence in the amber of his technical sophistication. In pictures such as the well-known The Sleeping Gypsy, exotic subject matter intensifies and makes more obvious the otherworldliness inherent in all his work.

...but the sharp colors, fantastic imagery, and precise outlines in his workderived from the style and subject matter of popular print culturestruck a chord with a younger generation of avant-garde painters. Rousseau described the subject of The Sleeping Gypsy thus: "A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic."---MOMA

…but the sharp colors, fantastic imagery, and precise outlines in his workderived from the style and subject matter of popular print culturestruck a chord with a younger generation of avant-garde painters. Rousseau described the subject of The Sleeping Gypsy thus: “A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic.”—MOMA

The combination of innocence and sophistication in a single manner is often found in visionary or fantastic art, albeit seldom so neatly balanced and as quintessential as in the paintings of Rousseau. William Blake was an innocent as well, first and foremost, despite all his theories. The balance between Blake’s innocence and the renaissance forms he co-opted to express it is so precarious, fragile, that he often tested the limits of disharmony.

---Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. Exuberance is Beauty. - WILLIAM BLAKE -

—Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Exuberance is Beauty.
- WILLIAM BLAKE -

At another end of the range is Paul Klee, an innocent sophisticate, a fantast as well whose own painterly vocabulary is an adaptation of the art of children and wild and untamed primitive humans in the sense of being outside all contexts of Western convention. Whatever the level of comprehension in his art, it remains a mystery to be solved for most.

--- A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.  His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.  This is how one pictures the angel of history.  His face is turned toward the past.  Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed....Walter Benjamin

— A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed….Walter Benjamin

Klee was no formula painter, and hence no known formula can explain away his work. What is unsettling is that Klee was a well-trained painter of high technical skill and an esthetician of subtlety and complexity, even if his work appears to be slight and simplistic. That is, his technical level and intellectualism are but superficialities of his art, meaning the kernel of his work’s impact hinges on an ability to respond unanalytically.

 

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