The sleeping gypsy
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| La Bohémienne endormie |
|---|
| Henri Rousseau , 1897 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 129.5 x 200.7 cm |
| Museum of Modern Art , New York |
The Sleeping Gypsy ( French La Bohémienne endormie ) is a painting by the French painter Henri Rousseau from the year 1897. In terms of art history, it can be assigned to both post-impressionism and naive painting . At the time of its creation it was not understood by the public and was rejected. Today it is a masterpiece in the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art .
description
The picture shows a desert-like landscape with a mountainous background when the moon is full. This mountain range is separated from the flat foreground by a river. On the floor in the foreground lies a barefoot, sleeping, dark-skinned woman in a colorful striped dress on a colorfully striped mat. She shows a smiling face, the white teeth form a strong contrast to her dark face. A lion, also painted in a dark shade, placed in the center of the picture in the composition, has approached and sniffs the woman attentively with bright, astonished eyes, but does nothing to her. In her hand she holds a walking stick, in the right foreground a mandolin and a water jug are realistically depicted. Henri Rousseau placed his signature directly below.
Interpretation and reception
The Yugoslav art historian Oto Bihalji-Merin sees something special in the picture and feels addressed by it. The reclining figure speaks to him: “You love me, but you don't quite understand me. It is very manly to be sensitive to grasping and blind to grasping. You have to open the ancient words, words of the Sinti . ”It is“ the wisdom of the diaspora , the vastness of the ways, clad in the colorful fabrics of hope and utopia. ”According to his understanding, the picture emerged from Rousseau's unconscious genius. The figure appears as a priestess of an unknown deity in union with nature. The painted objects on the right edge of the picture, such as the musical instrument and the water jug, are designed realistically and represent archaic symbols. In later phases of art history these objects reappear in Expressionism , Surrealism and Cubism . The musical instrument, for example, in Pablo Picasso , Juan Gris and Marc Chagall , the jug in pictures by Paul Klee and Paula Modersohn-Becker .
At the end of the 19th century, the public was not ready for this work. The audience did not understand Rousseau's dreamlike, poetic, exotic picture of a beautiful archaic world. Today some viewers also see an erotic component in this picture and refer to the tassel of the lion's tail pointing upwards. According to this interpretation, the walking stick, the mandolin and the water jug also represent sexual symbols. In addition, the scenery, a passive sleeping woman and an active wild animal, is also interpreted in such a context. In Rousseau's painting, lion and woman form two atmospheric areas that are enclosed in a primeval world with a full moon sky and star points, lunar lighting and the shadowy modeled landscape.
- Inspired by the picture, the poet Jean-Pierre Gautheur wrote a three-act play in 1995 with the title: La bohémienne endormie: trois moments de la vie du Douanier Rousseau ( ISBN 2-908924-82-X ).
- In 1963 the photographer Tony Vaccaro recreated Rousseau's picture with the singer and actress Leslie Uggams for a color photograph.
- In 2012 a surrealistic story by Hubert Haddad , inspired by Rousseau's picture, was published , which is about a sleeping woman with the name “Làvica” ( sauvage et libre ). Collection Ekphrasis, ISBN 978-2-918698-38-8
Provenance and exhibition
The painting was first exhibited in 1897 at the 13th Salon des Artistes Indépendants in Paris, but it could not be sold. Henri Rousseau wrote a letter to the mayor of his native Laval , in which he offered the painting for the relatively cheap price of 1,800 to 2,000 francs. But he was also ready to “give it cheaper” because he had the wish “that his hometown should have one of his new works”. Instead it came into the possession of a Paris coal merchant. The art critic Louis Vauxcelles discovered it there in 1924 and conveyed it to the gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler , although there were rumors that it might be a fake. Alfred Barr , the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, bought it for the New York Museum in the mid-1920s.
literature
- Wieland Schmied (Ed.): Harenberg Museum of Painting. 525 masterpieces from seven centuries. Harenberg Lexikon Verlag, Dortmund 1999, ISBN 3-611-00814-1 .
- Angela Wenzel: Henri Rousseau, La gitana dormida . Lóguez, Santa Marta de Tormes 2001, ISBN 84-89804-30-3 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Henri Rousseau. The Sleeping Gypsy. 1897. Description of the picture on the website of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- ↑ Description of the picture on the Encyclopédie Larousse page
- ↑ Oto Bihalji-Merin in: Zeit-Museum der 100 Bilder. Authors and artists about their favorite work of art. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-458-32913-7 , p. 66 ff.
- ^ R. Barletta: Le Douanier Rousseau. Les Illustrateurs de la Vie modern. In: Le Post-Impressionnisme. Paris 1981, ISBN 2-86535-023-1 , pp. 255 f.
- ^ Website of the Tony Vaccaro studio with the photo
- ^ Schmied (ed.): Harenberg Museum of Painting.
- ↑ Sybil Kantor: Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. MIT University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-262-61196-1 , p. 66.