Le Douanier Rousseau's A Painter's Secrets at the Barnes.
Rousseau is a charming painter, whose early and late work reaches a calibrated equilibrium through judicious and flattened placement of elements, like a puzzle.
Roger Shattuck's account The Banquet Years recounts a comment Rousseau made to Picasso in 1908: ""We are the two greatest painters of our day, you in the Egyptian manner, I in the modern manner". In his 1981 lectures, Deleuze describes Egyptian style as all layers in space taking place across the same plane. Makes me wonder if Rousseau considered his work illusionistic while at the same time flat. If so, I agree.
Still early Rousseau, this particularly a beauty showing his tendency to pattern, which of course I love. The shapes are static, predictably painted, yet the relationship between modeled form (Deleuze: modulation) and rhythm transcends our expectation. It seems like an early version of dematerialzing forms while building them (thank you Tom McGlynn for this articulation in another context).
Equally modern, the co-existence of dual applications.
This quotidian composition pits a fabulous chromium oxide green against a baby blue. Delicous!
Introducing many before-now unforeseen jungle scenes. I thought Rousseau hung out in Le Jardin du Plantes drawing, but the didactic panels in this exhibition don't mention it. He comes second to Burchfield in his sense of invention.
Others below FYI.
Such elegant color! A very late one. Love the illuminated plant lower right.
Closing with my favorite--because of the leaves lower quadrant.
These plants take me somewhere I want to be. The figures, less so. I imagine it's to do with wallpaper.

