ANIMAL ATTRACTION.(Henri Rousseau, Tate Modern, exhibition)(Critical Essay)

"The hungry lion throws itself on the antelope, devours him. . . . Birds of prey have each torn a strip of flesh from the poor animal that is shedding a tear! The sun sets." So wrote Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) of his large painting "The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope" (1905), which appears in a terrific, unexpectedly challenging retrospective of the beloved customs clerk's art, subtitled "Jungles in Paris," at the Tate Modern, in London. (The show will travel to Paris and Washington.) The said sun, an enormous orange ball, peeks through fantastic but fastidiously tidy foliage. The sorrowful antelope has a head like a duck. The lion's biting teeth are as pearly and uniform as Park Avenue orthodontia. Calmly perched birds, including a polka-dotted owl, already dangle scraps of meat, though the lion's attack has just begun. In a tree, a spotted panther "awaits the moment that he too can claim his share," staring out with frantic eyes. That's plain enough. But a big black hairy beast skulking in the bush--a bird-beaked gorilla?--tilts the scene into numbing preposterousness, garnished with the artist's signature in outsized, galumphing script. Then you may notice how lovely the painting is, with its loamy greens and sturdy blacks against a winking, inexplicable ground of whites and baby blue, topped off with roseate puffs of cloud. The dark-over-light layering, which visually pushes back what's in front and pulls forward what's behind, generates rough decorative unity, suggesting rumpled, seething wallpaper.

Rousseau is strange again, for reasons old and new. The Tate show spruces up familiar conundrums of a very good very bad painter whose achievements are canonical in most histories of modern art. It is no longer much wonder, though it is still significant, that art's lurches into scientific-minded innovation, at the start of the twentieth century, were attended by simultaneous plunges into the "primitive," variously conceived. The double focus evinced a preference for extremes over anything middling. "Bourgeois," as a studio slur, targeted the latter predilection more than an economic or a political class. One despised banality was showy manual skill. The Paris avant-garde's only partly facetious embrace of Rousseau, backed by Picasso and promoted by Guillaume Apollinaire, was the climax of its trashing of academic qualifications which had begun in the eighteen-eighties, when Paul Gauguin, in his thirties, abandoned a job in the stock market to devote himself to painting. Unlike the sophisticate Gauguin, the man-of-the-people Rousseau, who became an artist in his early forties, had next to no grasp of conventional pictorial craft; he didn't know the rules well enough to break them. For the avant-gardists, his clumsiness lent hilarious glory to his passionate ambition to rival Salon stars like Gerome and Bouguereau at their own games of history painting, exotic landscape, and swanky portraiture. As it turned out, the more grandiose and pretentious Rousseau's paintings get, the stronger and more delightful they are. His more modest efforts merely charm. (Dauby, twee little Paris views soon wear out their welcome in the show.) Greatness and a travesty of greatness are one thing, in the case of Rousseau. Imagination has less to do with his talent than is generally supposed, as the Tate proves by abundantly documenting the painter's sources in popular mediums of the time, including magazine illustration and taxidermy. Overly associated with the later rise of Surrealism, Rousseau now emerges as more a virtual collagist of existing images than a visionary, and even as a proto-Pop artist.

Rousseau was the fairly well-educated son of an ironmonger in Laval. An act of petty theft in 1863, when he was nineteen, lost him his job as an attorney's scribe and cost him a month in jail. He then spent several years in the Army, never leaving France. His claim, made much of by Apollinaire, to have served in Mexico was false (as he would admit when pressed); the greenhouses of Paris's Jardin des Plantes, with its well-stocked, squalid zoo, were the closest he came to an actual jungle. In 1871, he became a customs clerk, stationed on the outskirts of Paris. He married twice. Both wives died, as did eight of his nine children before reaching adulthood, without appreciable effect on his unsinkably ebullient self-absorption. He began ...