Georg Baselitz: Akademie Rousseau: Exhibition Catalogue Cfa Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

There is a remarkable painting in the Picasso room at Kunstmuseum in Basel: a full-length portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire with his muse, Marie Laurencin. It was Henri Rousseau who painted this wonderful picture. Only I had remembered it as a self-portrait of Rousseau with Madame Rousseau. Marie Laurencin was Apollinaire’s muse, and Clemence Rousseau was Rousseau’s muse. As it happens, Franz Marc painted a portrait of Rousseau for Der Blaue Reiter, and Picasso also had a self-portrait by Henri. There’s a quite intimate photograph, taken by Andre Gomes, of Picasso holding Rousseau’s self-portrait in his right hand and the portrait of Rousseau’s wife in his left hand. Picasso, that constructor of novel objects and audacious paintings, loved Rousseau, the painter of things in rigidified grace. Even Rousseau’s gaze in his self-portrait is stiff, directed at his own work, in which objects that we ourselves are familiar with look different–Gothic, Byzantine, somehow not the way we are used to seeing them. (…) –Georg Baselitz