Georg Baselitz: Akademie Rousseau

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Rousseau s Academy by Georg Baselitz There is a remarkable painting in the Picasso room at the 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, Clémence 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 André Gomés, 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. It wasn t just the Egyptian Picasso, other image constructors - Kandinsky, for instance - also had pictures of Rousseau. Vasily had the little canvas The Painter and His Wife (1899). De Chirico drew Picasso and friends sitting beneath Rousseau s self-portrait with palette. And didn t Beckmann paint Rousseau s hot-air balloon and his street? I myself have Rousseau s red lithograph The War (c. 1895), which was also done by Ensor and by Uccello; there s something similar by Böcklin and also by Stefano della Bella. I have painted a lot of portraits of my wife and myself in recent years, many showing us dressed as others - sometimes as my parents, sometimes as Lenin and Stalin, but mostly as Otto Dix s parents. That double portrait of Dix s parents is also in the Basel Kunstmuseum, with another version in Hanover. So it was to be that kind of double portrait of E