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    Henri Rousseau, 1908 and after : the corpus, criticism, and history of a painter without a problem

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    HASKELL-DISSERTATION.pdf (1.343Mb)
    Date
    2012-05
    Author
    Haskell, Caitlin Welsh
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    Abstract
    This dissertation considers Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) as a painter and as a figure of discourse. It addresses the longstanding concern of Rousseau’s resistance to interpretation and proposes that this derives from Rousseau’s incomplete fulfillment of the professional obligations of the artist, specifically, from his failure to motivate his work through the pursuit of what modern art critics commonly called “a problem.” Rousseau did not practice painting as artists of his day did, and because of this difference—first articulated by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1908 as an absence of artistic inquiétude—he entered the discourse of art with unprecedented susceptibility to reinvention. The Rousseau we know today, the Rousseau who was a miraculous modernist in the interwar period, and the Rousseau who emerged in the context of the avant-garde in the earliest years of the twentieth century share little besides a name, and this frustrates any effort to write a coherent history of the painter and his pictures. Rather than propose once again Rousseau’s recuperation into a traditional art-historical narrative, this dissertation tells the history of a maker who produced admirable images but fulfilled few other author-functions, and it tells the history of writers who, compensating for Rousseau’s authorial deficits, produced a new artist, a new body of work, and widespread puzzlement about the place of each in the history of modern art.
    Department
    Art History
    Description
    text
    Subject
    Henri Rousseau
    Douanier Rousseau
    Le Douaunier Rousseau
    Modern art
    Modern painting
    Twentieth-century art
    Twentieth-century painting
    Art criticism
    Painter without a problem
    Just painting
    Daniel Catton Rich
    Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
    Andre Salmon
    Guillaume Apollinaire
    Clive Bell
    Roger Fry
    The Sleeping Gypsy
    Jungle paintings
    Bonne fete
    The Holy Family
    Intention deficit disorder
    Tree of modern art
    Professionalism
    Critical resistance
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2012-05-5135
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    • facebook
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    © The University of Texas at Austin