MYFANWY PIPER .sx on art .sx " Henri Rousseau's art was born and formed on Sundays .sx Free from work he could , with a cheerful heart , compose images while listening to the songs of the Faubourg .sx " The little book by the Frenchman Roch Grey from which these simple words are taken was published in the early twenties :sx my copy was published and , I suspect , translated in Rome .sx Written in a mixture of intellectual sententiousness and poetic sentimentalism peculiar to some French writing about art , it is more often than not reduced to fantasy by the literal translation- " product of the tendencies of nature working outside every heritage on the part of some paradisical superfluity treating of universal harmony , Henri lived a life without malice .sx " And yet , its earnest appreciation of his spirit , mingled with the absurdity of its phrases , especially those used to describe a visit to the deceased painter's studio , is an inextricable part of my knowledge of the Douanier .sx Even today I cannot believe that " ugly , silent dogs played in the middle of the street .sx . " is not the title of one of his pictures :sx and when , describing the climax of his hostile reception in the Rue Perrel , M. Grey says , " another person was visibly preparing to take part in the fray ; striped like a mattress he cried .sx . " I visualize in the dusty summer street another version of The Footballers .sx It is obviously a book to be enjoyed at intervals .sx It came out this time because I had heard casually that there was to be an exhibition of Rousseau's pictures in Paris , at the Gallerie Charpentier in March and because I had recently seen the two fine ones in the Hay Whitney collection .sx One of them , The Happy Quartet , looks back in an odd way to Blake , not so much because of a " ve belief in felicity as because Rousseau obviously derived inspiration for the poses and for the cherubic child from looking , as Blake did , at engravings of old masters .sx Thinking about Rousseau leads one to ask why " ve painting has such a hold upon our imagination today .sx In the painting of a sophisticated artist there is always a discrepancy , a margin of unattainable perfection , of rapture , between the intention and the result .sx Although it is true to say that the greater the artist the smaller that discrepancy- indeed , it often seems non-existent to the spectator- it is also true that the greater the painter , the greater , inevitably , the discrepancy , because of the soaring quality of his vision .sx But no one today knows what kind of vision , or belief , or intention even , lies in that region beyond the bounds of execution .sx When artists painted for the church , or when they painted man the perfectible being , the nature of the paradise they had lost , but could through grace regain , was imaginable ; at least its spiritual values were known .sx Now they are not .sx For the true " ve painter , on the other hand , there is no margin between his intention and his result :sx he paints to the exact limit of his vision .sx It is exactly in his humble capacity to be satisfied with this that his " vete@2 or lack of sophistication lies .sx It is exactly in this that his appeal lies .sx Rousseau once wrote to the mayor of his home town Laval , offering to sell La Bohe@2mienne Endormie .sx He sent a description of the picture :sx " A wandering negress , playing her mandolin , with her jar beside her ( a vase containing water ) , sleeps deeply , worn out by fatigue .sx A lion wanders by , detects her and does not devour her .sx There's an effect of moonlight , very poetic .sx The scene takes place in a completely arid desert .sx The gypsy is dressed in oriental fashion .sx " The simple exactitude of his words matches the clarity and finality of the picture .sx The confidence and satisfaction of the painter shines out , as it does in these words from a biographical note that he wrote upon himself :sx " He perfected himself more and more in the original manner which he has adopted and he is in the process of becoming one of the best realist painters .sx " This absence of anxiety in a person who is simple enough for it not to be a fault is a source of repose and strength .sx Picasso , Braque , Max Jacob , Appollinaire and many others in his lifetime were entertained by his absurdities , took advantage of his susceptibility to hoaxes , loved his good temper and dogged persistence in his work- and accepted his paintings as manna .sx The blessing of an unassailable , because unquestioned , calm .sx MYFANWY PIPER .sx on art .sx Things that are over are not always done with too , according to timetable .sx Pictures and personalities that ought to be tidied away after their airing occupy one's mind with images and questions and memories .sx Toulouse-Lautrec is a particular sticker .sx Partly because he can never finally be pinned down .sx Confronted with the variety and the vitality of the subjects , the daring and the ingenuity of the colour , the boldness and the total take-it-or-leave-it quality of the compositions for the first time 6en masse at the Museum at Albi some years ago , I felt as if he was an artist I had never seen before .sx Reading Henri Perruchot's thorough and imaginative biography ( out last year ) I feel , in spite of the picture books and the Moulin Rouge film and the legends and the lithographs , that here is a man that I have never known before .sx And then the memory of Albi , rosy but fierce , dominating a countryside that can have changed very little since medieval times and of that extraordinary collection of pictures by a son of one of its most medieval minded families , took on a marvellous new sharpness .sx It was good to be able to see many of the works again at the Tate Gallery last month .sx The most persistent question raised by M. Perruchot's book is how far the artist Lautrec was the product of his crippled state .sx There is only one record of a meeting between him and that other classic example of the invalid whose disability turned him into an artist , Marcel Proust .sx Someone at a restaurant described how Lautrec's father , Count Alphonse , had watched an unknown woman admiring a ring in a shop window , had marched into the shop , bought it for 5,000 francs ( +800 today ) and handed it to her with a flourish .sx " And they accuse me of extravagance , " said Lautrec .sx A young man , who was Proust , said that such gestures were not stupid , they even had a certain usefulness for they asserted caste .sx Whereupon Lautrec muttered something about middle-class stupidity , which was always prepared to " admire an absurd gesture or a sunset .sx " Proust and Lautrec belonged to different worlds and it was precisely the difference in their worlds that made Proust what he was .sx He was the woman outside the window , able by the intensity of his desire and his curiosity to possess the ring .sx To Count Alphonse it was a jewel worth 5,000 francs , to Proust it was the history of the Crusades , the Jockey Club , eccentricity of the nobility , himself watching it , even Lautrec's cutting comment , all epitomized in one little glittering symbol .sx And something he could not possess except by being outside it .sx For him the practice of observing and writing was not a substitute for life and truth , it was the only life and truth he could know .sx If he had not been ill he would have had to invent illness so as to keep himself outside the window .sx Not so Toulouse-Lautrec :sx he was a man of action , a French aristocrat with a taste , developed in his family to the extent of mania , for hunting , shooting , riding , falconry , racing .sx He loved it , and had he been strong he would have embraced that life naturally and violently .sx He would have drawn , as the rest of his family did , for relaxation .sx The Counts of Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa had another characteristic :sx absolute unselfconscious belief in themselves and , therefore , a complete detachment .sx The energy that in so many people is used up in doubt and insecurity was free in them to do exactly what they wanted , how they wanted .sx This energy , coupled with an inherited talent , the accident of Lautrec's deformity and weakness left him free to use for art .sx But that does not explain why he was moved to tears by a word of praise from De@2gas .sx MYFANWY PIPER .sx on art .sx THE ARTIST IN ROME .sx INTELLECTUAL clarity and the pure , forward-looking passions aroused by it are always being betrayed by memory .sx Nowhere does this show itself more clearly than in art .sx And nowhere more than in Italy were artists more vociferous in their fierce desire to cut themselves off from the past , to get rid of it :sx not merely to tease it with incongruities like the moustache on the Mona Lisa , but to destroy it and to reject it and so to free themselves from the insinuations of memory and of association .sx Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto was more than an anarchist lark , it was a serious bid by the artists for freedom , a serious proposal to blow up the sun-warmed golden prison of walls and towers that threatened to be a barrier between them and living , and to escape forever its benign warders :sx painted angels , prophets , heroes , philosophers and Holy ones .sx This pious act of rejection , though like a bloodless sacrifice it destroyed nothing , did , by magic and belief set them free to participate in all the modern movements of Europe , and later of America .sx The most consistent centre of this freedom has always been Milan where a group of artists has continued expanding and experimenting , looking to an imagined future , which , faster and faster has become a material present , leaving less and less than one foot on the ground , soaring into space , moving or static , enveloping or enveloped , carved up , pierced , martyred in four dimensions like modern art everywhere .sx Rome has no such violent centre of activity .sx As a capital city it offers what capital cities do :sx a temporary collection of Picassos , the Henry Moore show that is travelling Europe , an exhibition of French 18th and 19th century landscapes , luring one with its poster of Corot's urn and view from the Pincio to abandon once and for all our fragmentary age and to dwell in that arch of pellucid golden light where a column is not a symbol of destruction , but of eternity .sx Then , in the small commercial galleries , a desultory collection , out of the tourist season , of Roman and other Italian artists fighting their battle against what is expected of them or giving themselves up to an illusory affair with some faded beauty-spot , and coming out of it rather worse than such ill-advised lovers elsewhere .sx What is instructive is to see the three aspects of modern art- realist , abstract , and that curious cabalistic art of symbolism and fantasy mixed that has no tidy name- in a new setting and a new light .sx Certain things become very clear .sx The realism of Guttuso and his followers , who have found their way out of the past by a different route from the inheritors of futurism , bears much more directly on the collective habits , needs and passions of the Italian people than the idea of realistic painting produced by artists in other countries ever could .sx In England , for instance , the dustpan , the baby or the workman portrayed have a tendency to get confused with The Solitary Reaper or The Idiot Boy :sx they are isolated for notice , a poetic conception .sx But to watch those black Sunday suits converging into a tight passionate black shadow on the warm cobbled square while the high vertical lines of the buildings slice down into them , to see a bar shaken by its frenzied customers or an old woman on the steps of a church , taking upon herself , in her overwhelming exhaustion , the motherhood of the whole working world , is to realise how Italy is possessed by those swarming people and to see what it is that an artist of Guttuso's convictions must express .sx Then there is a collection of " abstract-concrete " work :sx the fashionable all black canvas :sx or a Fontana slit into slithers of darkness like a medieval castle .sx