Amateur Week

Greatest amateur painter who ever lived, a retired French customs inspector named Henri Rousseau, had his biggest U.S. exhibition ever, at the Chicago Art Institute last fortnight. In Manhattan, 30 men & women who painted for fun in their spare time will have their works elaborately hung this week at the Marie Harriman Gallery. A connoisseur of amateur painting named Sidney Janis has written a solemn 236-page book about them.* All these amateurs had one thing in common: they had learned painting the hard way, by laboriously teaching themselves.

Rousseau, pioneer of modern amateurs, died 31 years ago. In the years since his death, collectors have rummaged through attics, farmhouses, junk shops, looking for work of other self-taught geniuses. For amateur artists (sometimes called "self-taught," "primitives," "popular painters"), working without benefit of formal art-school rules, often, like untrained folk musicians, create quaint pictorial myths that outshine the work of educated artists. Inexpert at perspective and anatomy, they paint awkward, stiff figures, flat shadowless backgrounds. But although they have the technique of children they have the patience of adults, so that their laborious work has the charm of finely detailed craftsmanship.

Rousseau's Jungle. An ex-army sergeant who fought with the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico and in the Franco-Prussian War, Henri Rousseau retired at 41 from his job inspecting baggage and decided to devote the rest of his life to becoming a painter. That was in 1885. He had never been near an art school, and his diminutive pension would not stretch far enough to pay for instruction. So he set out, with enormous patience, to teach himself.

Completely uninfluenced by highbrow, esthetic theories and by the splashy Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles that then dominated French art, Painter Rousseau painted things he enjoyed: exotic, tropical jungles full of childishly round-eyed animals, portraits of his friends, wistful nudes reclining in imaginary, saladlike forest scenes.

The carefully painted leaves of his jungle trees he copied from sprigs and grass-blades that he picked up in his walks around Paris. His jungle animals were painted after trips to the Paris zoo. For years he worked away in a drab little studio above a plasterer's shop, taking his paintings very seriously, lavishing the utmost care on each geometrically exact landscape. When he started sending his pictures each year to the Salon des Independants to be hung alongside the works of painters like Redon (TIME, Aug. 25), Seurat and Signac, critics and fellow artists suppressed smiles.

But Rousseau persisted. By 1907 the world had begun to acclaim him as one of the most important of modern French artists, and painters who had once laughed at him were trying to forget their education and paint like Rousseau. At this tribute Customs Inspector Rousseau, who always considered himself a realistic painter, was not the least bit surprised. Remarked he, demurely, to famed Modern Artist Pablo Picasso: "We two are the greatest painters of our time; you in the Egyptian style, myself in the modern."

While Chicagoans last week gaped with sincere admiration at Painter Rousseau's creations, Manhattan gallery-goers did their best to find a U.S. Rousseau among their crop of self-taught U.S. artists. And though they failed, they found that U.S. primitives had turned out some quaint and naively appealing canvases. Of the 30 U.S. primitive artists selected by Collector Janis to be shown at the Marie Harriman Gallery the best are:

The late Joseph Pickett, a New Hope, Pa. country-fair concessionaire and shooting-gallery impresario, who specialized in toylike rural landscapes.

The late John Kane (TIME, Nov. 7, 1938), a Pittsburgh carpenter and day laborer, whose meticulous Pittsburgh scenes already rub elbows with Cezannes and Renoirs in U.S. museums.

Morris Hirshfield, a retired Brooklyn cloak & suit manufacturer, whose skies and mountains look as though they were made of herringbone or tweed, and whose quizzical lions have feminine-looking fur collars. After seeing Rousseau's painting of The Dream he was inspired to try a nude of his own.

Patrick J. Sullivan, a Wheeling, W.Va. house painter, who does weird symbolic pictures naively depicting everything from contemporary politics to the vagaries of the human soul.

Anna Mary Robertson ("Grandma") Moses (TIME, Oct. 21, 1940), a farmer's widow, who does little postcardy landscapes of upstate New York farms and pastures.

Horace Pippin (TIME, Jan. 29, 1940), a disabled Negro war veteran who paints gaily colorful flower pieces and rustic scenes in his native Pennsylvania.

The late Henry Church, a Chagrin Falls, Ohio blacksmith, musician and spiritualist preacher, who not only painted, but carved himself a colossal sandstone lion for a tombstone and recorded his own funeral sermon on a gramophone cylinder.

*They Taught Themselves (Dial; $3.50).

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