EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
Sexing the Canvas: Art and Gender
Jeanette Hoorn, The University of Melbourne
 |
C O U R S E L E C T U R E The Dream by Henri Rousseau Notes taken on September 18, 2017 by Edward Tanguay |
•
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)
•
an outsider artist
•
spoke to the generation of the surrealists
•
died impoverished
•
1910 The Dream
•
strange and enigmatic painting
•
a dream of a Polish woman with whom Rousseau had had a relationship
•
naked, she reclines on a red couch, her arm outstretched in a regal manner
•
she is in a tropical jungle
•
a musician playing the flute is hidden in the foliage
•
in this painting, we find beauty that is indisputable, a Louis Philippe sofa lost in the forest
•
eroticism
•
the painting evokes feelings of fertility, pleasure, and desire
•
the plants are lush and the animals strange and beautiful
•
it's not conventionally sexual but it is gently erotic
•
the erotic concerns the aesthetic of sexual desire
•
ripe fruit, the threat of animality, and the suggestion of hidden depths, all of these combine to create an erotically charged poetic appeal
•
Rousseau wrote a poem to explain the painting and the odd juxtaposition of objects
•
original poem:
•
Yadwigha dans un beau rêve
•
S'étant endormie doucement
•
Entendait les sons d'une musette
•
Dont jouait un charmeur bien pensant.
•
Pendant que la lune reflète
•
Sur les fleurs, les arbres verdoyants,
•
Les fauves serpents prêtent l'oreille
•
Aux airs gais de l'instrument.
•
the poem speaks of a woman dreaming, but in the painting, the women is not asleep
•
we enter her dream directly
•
we see she is awake in her own dream
•
"he was consumed by the color, the moon, and the lilies"
•
"his eyes were so possessed by the glowing red of the couch on which Yadwigha was regally reclined under the moon in the dark jungle among those over-sized lilies"
•
the painting has many questions with few answers
•
why is Yadwigha having such a strange dream
•
what does the dream mean
•
why does she imagine herself naked
•
why does she place herself in an exotic jungle
•
why are the animals so companiable, even the lions and serpants
•
who is the hidden flute player
•
dreams in paintings
•
artists often use their dreams and inner worlds as an inspiration for their art
•
in the fin-de-siècle era, the dream took on new meaning particularly because of the ideas of Sigmund Freud and the avant garde artists
•
Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
•
painted the dark side of the dream in his famous work of 1893, The Scream
•
explores a sense of alienation and inner terror
•
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)
•
Italian artist and writer
•
founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists
•
set his paintings in strange dreamscapes which resisted interpretation
•
1900 Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
•
profound influence on the surrealists in the 1920's
•
everything we repress will return
•
perhaps Rousseau's painting was inspired by Freud's couch
•
she is on a red couch in an uncanny place where the familiar is rendered unfamiliar
•
topics of dreams, sexuality and desires were common in the 20th century
•
the era of psychoanalysis
•
Eve without Adam theme
•
painting: 1906 Eve
•
Eve stands naked in a jungle
•
holds out her hand out to a serpent
•
oranges instead of apples
•
also a sense of harmony in nature
•
Rousseau's Dream
•
Yadwigha is like Eve in a lush, entangled Darwinian jungle
•
jungle suggests the unconscious mind of the dreamer
•
many animals
•
an elephant almost hidden by foliage
•
the piper who has tamed the wild beasts of the jungle
•
her outreached arm reminds us Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
•
but here a woman reaches out her hand and creates a tropical forest teeming with life
•
she is the original womb which brings forth life
•
her naked form draws the eye not so much because she is sexually objectified but she is the source of creativity
•
there is no sense that Yadwigha is performing for a male gaze
•
she is self-assured, peaceful and in harmony with life
•
her body is erotic, rounded, voluptuous, but not sexualized in a gratuitous manner
•
it's a waking dream, all characters have the eyes wide open
•
painting is captivating
•
strange symmetry to it shapes and forms
•
at first the jungle seems impenetrable
•
the jungle seems to glow from within
•
the curve of the serpent's body rhymes visually with the curve of her leg
•
her rounded breast echoes the roundness of the full moon
•
the wide-eyes looking of the lions looking out at the viewer suggest they are under the spell of the piper
•
perhaps the black flute player represents the black servant who often accompanied the female nude of classical painting
•
but the flute player is an &active& person, and less of a servant
•
some saw Rousseau as a primitive painter
•
he saw himself as a modernist
•
pays little attention to photographic likeness, perspective and depth
•
created meaning through intricately designed flat planes of color and distortions of scale
•
he uses flattened space
•
an absence of illusionist lighting
•
his work was ridiculed by conventional art critics
•
he found himself increasingly on the side of the avant garde
•
mixed with avant garde artists such as Picasso
•
Picasso knew he was a forerunner to new approaches of art
•
in his focus on dreaming, he is certainly a forerunner to the surrealist movement
•
surrealists were fascinated with sex, desire and repression
•
for surrealists, life was a mystery
•
humans imposed order where there was none
•
Rousseau painted many paintings in which animals and humans live in harmony
•
a regular visitor to the Jardin de Plantes
•
never left Paris
•
unusual juxtaposing of objects
•
Rousseau's works were often seen as the repository of dreams and ancient desires