Art is the Solution

The Repast of the Lion Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Today is my birthday, and, in honor of the event, I wanted to share a painting that relates to my astrological sign: Leo. Leos are generally renowned for stability, loyalty, and consistency, and are represented by the lion. As such, I wanted to take some time today to chat about The Repast of the Lion , one of Henri Rousseau’s many masterpieces. Rousseau is an interesting figure in the history of French painting. He was a naïve artist, meaning that he didn’t have formal artistic training. Although Rousseau’s work was not widely recognized during his lifetime, artists like Pablo Picasso realized the true value of his art. Today, Rousseau is known as one of the pioneering artists of the Modernist movements. The Repast of the Lion is one of his famous jungle paintings, based off of his visits to the botanical gardens of Paris and contemporary illustrations of wild animals. The piece depicts a forest brimming with stran...

Carnival Evening Source: Philadelphia Museum of Art I’ve written several times about my affection for Henri Rousseau’s work. Rousseau, a Frenchman, was a self-taught artist. His lack of formal education resulted in a highly original and recognizable style that I find very intriguing. Although Rousseau was most famous for his jungle scenes, Carnival Evening is a great example of his work. As the name suggests, it is a night scene. A man and woman emerge from the woods, dressed in festival costumes. The trees tower skeletally behind them, and a strange hut stands in the background, adorned with a streetlamp and a somewhat randomly placed face. As the Philadelphia Museum of Art notes, “an air of mystery pervades this wintry forest landscape.” This ambiguity is a feature of Rousseau’s work (and modern art in general). As the history of art progresses, art tends to become more ambiguous and less driven by narrative. Carnival Evening gives the viewer a great deal of freedom of interpre...

The Dream Source: Google Cultural Institute To me, this painting is a poem in visual form. What I mean by that is that The Dream is an object of great beauty, but it doesn’t make much sense from a narrative perspective. If you ask me, the painting exists for the sake of beauty alone. It doesn’t necessarily have a message; instead, the painting is exactly what its title suggests: an extravagant, otherworldly dream. Henri Rousseau, the painter, is an interesting figure in the history of French painting. He was a naïve artist, meaning that he didn’t have formal artistic training. Perhaps as a consequence of this, his work has a very specific look, characterized by a lack of shading or definition, the use of bright colors, and an absence of three dimensional space. To twenty first century viewers, his work probably feels very modern. There is an element of directness and candor to his work that feels fresh and original. The Dream is one of his famous jungle paintings, based off of ...

The Sleeping Gypsy Source: MoMA Today, I want to talk about a rather odd—but charming—painting, The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau. Rousseau is an interesting figure in the history of French painting. He was a naïve artist, meaning that he didn’t have formal artistic training. Perhaps as a consequence of this, his work has a very specific look, characterized by a lack of shading or definition, the use of bright colors, and an absence of three dimensional space. To twenty first century viewers, his work probably feels very modern. There is an element of directness and candor to his work that feels fresh and original. The Sleeping Gypsy is one of his most famous paintings. It depicts a lion, stalking through the desert past a sleeping woman. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which owns the painting, describes interprets it as an otherworldly, somewhat surreal piece that taps into some aspect of humanity’s collective psyche. The MoMA notes, “With its flat planes of pure color, s...