Recollections of Henri Rousseau

About the book

The paintings of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), particularly his astonishing jungle dreams, are now so popular that it is difficult to realize how they were originally greeted with ridicule and incomprehension. It was not until Rousseau was championed by the young avant-garde-Picasso, Delaunay, and Kandinsky, among others-that he came to be recognised at his true worth. One of the most significant of these early admirers was the dealer and art-historian Wilhelm Uhde. It was Uhde who put on the first one-man show of Rousseau's work, and the catalogue he wrote for the occasion is the basis of these Recollections. Much of what we know about Rousseau comes from these pages, which present a portrayal of a man of naivety, humor, gentleness and total artistic commitment. Uhde returned to his text again and again, refining it and filling out telling details. An introduction by Nancy Ireson sets the Recollections in context, with an overview of Rousseau's career, the ebb and flow of his reputation, and the part that this polemic and elegiac text played in the creation of a new kind of art.

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Wilhelm Uhde Biography

Wilhelm Uhde (28 October 1874, Friedeberg, Province of Brandenburg (now Poland) – 17 August 1947, Paris) was a German art collector, dealer, author and critic, an early collector of modernist painting, and a significant figure in the career of Henri Rousseau.

Biography

Born into a Jewish family, Uhde studied law in Dresden but switched to art history, studying in Munich and Florence before moving to Paris in 1904. He purchased his first Picasso in 1905, and was one of the first collectors of the Cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. He met Robert Delaunay, Sonia Terk and Henri Rousseau in 1907, and opened his art gallery in 1908, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs (Paris) where he exhibited Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Sonia Delaunay, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Auguste Herbin, Jules Pascin and Pablo Picasso. Uhde commissioned Picasso to paint his portrait (1910) and produced the first monograph on Rousseau in 1911. Uhde and Sonia Terk married in 1908 (London), reportedly a marriage of convenience which masked his homosexuality. They divorced 1910 and Terk married Robert Delaunay.At the outbreak of World War I, many German nationals living in France had their possessions sequestered by the French state. As a result, Uhde's collection (including works by Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Juan Gris, Auguste Herbin, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Puy and Henri Rousseau) was confiscated in 1914 and sold by the government in a series of auctions at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921.From 1919–1920, Uhde worked with Helmut Kolle and lived with him in Chantilly, France. Uhde became active as a pacifist in Weimar Germany, but returned to France in 1924, moving back to Chantilly in 1927. A Jew, he spent the Second World War in hiding in southern France, at one point helped by the art critic and resistance leader Jean Cassou.

The Sacred Heart painters

Uhde is also known as the principal organiser of the first Naive Art exhibition, which took place in Paris in 1928. The participants were Henri Rousseau, André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis and Louis Vivin, known collectively as the Sacred Heart painters. Séraphine Louis had been Uhde's housecleaner, whose work he had discovered and sponsored from 1912 to 1930.

Writings

Picasso et la tradition française, Paris : Les Quatre Chemins, 1928 Cinq maîtres primitifs, Paris, 1949 Von Bismarck bis Picasso: Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse (1938) recent editions: Uhde, Wilhelm (2010). Von Bismarck bis Picasso: Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse. Römerhof Verlag. ISBN 978-3-905894-06-6. Uhde, Wilhelm (2002). De Bismarck à Picasso. ISBN 2-910342-22-0.

Legacy

A significant part of Uhde's life story is told in the 2008 French film Séraphine by director Martin Provost, focusing on the encounter and subsequent role of Séraphine Louis in his life and he in hers. The film won seven César Awards, including Best Film.

Works from the collection ... Read full biography