>> Here we are in the fabulous galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in front of two of the most

powerful and influential pictures of early modernism.

Painted by the outsider artist Henri Rousseau, also known as Le Douanier. He spoke profoundly to
the generation of the Surrealists.
Born in 1844 in the French town of Laval, Rousseau died relatively young and impoverished in
1910. Barbara Creed, Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne will tell us how
these extraordinary pictures continue to shed light on the representation of sex and eroticism by
drawing on theories of psychoanalysis and surrealism.
Henri Rousseau's, The Dream is a beautiful, strange, and enigmatic painting. It depicts the dream of
Yadwigha, thought to be a Polish woman with whom Rousseau had had a relationship years
before. Naked, she reclines on a red couch. Her arm outstretched in a regal manor. She recalls the
nude of art history but she's clearly moving outside that tradition. Yadwigha is depicted on a couch
or sofa, which is oddly situated in the midst of a jungle surrounded by exotic plants and
animals. What is Yadwigha doing in a tropical jungle, and why does she point with her left hand
across the top of the sofa towards the plants and animals? A musician playing a flute stands to the
right of the centre of the composition. He or she is almost hidden in the foliage. Only the instrument
and the player's striped clothing are clearly visible. In his 1910 review, Apollinaire, considered one
of the most important literary figures of the 20th century, wrote in this painting, we find beauty that
is indisputable. The painters, they are unanimous. They admire it, believe me, even that Louis
Philippe sofa lost in the virgin forest and they are right.
Let's think then about sexuality and the erotic. Here we have a sexual image of a naked woman but
is it erotic? The painting evoked feelings of fertility, pleasure and desire. The jungle is abundant
with life, the plants are lush and the animals are strange and beautiful.
The painting's not conventionally sexual but yes, it is erotic, gently erotic. Here we're using erotic to
mean a combinational quality of things designed to arouse sexual desire. The erotic concerns the
aesthetics of sexual desire and can be found in different art forms, particularly, in painting.
In The Dream, the abundant, fertile vegetation, ripe fruit, the threat of animality and the suggestion
of hidden depths, all of these combine to create an erotically charged, poetic appeal.
When Rousseau exhibited the painting in 1910, the year he died, he also wrote a poem to
accompany the painting to explain the jungle setting and strange juxtapositioning of objects.
Yadwigha in a beautiful dream, having fallen asleep peacefully, was hearing the sounds of a reed
upon which a well meaning charmer was playing.
While the moon cast a reflection of the greening trees on the rivers, the savage serpents lend their
ears to the gay tunes of the instrument. The strange thing is that the poem speaks of a woman
dreaming but in the painting, Yadwigha is actually not asleep. This is because we enter her dream
directly. We see she's awake in her own dream. This puzzled Rousseau's contemporaries. He offered
this explanation to the critic, Andre DuPont. He said, I am writing in response to your friendly
letter to explain to you the reason the couch in question is where it is. The woman asleep on the
couch is dreaming, she has been transported into the forest, listening to the sounds from the
instrument of the enchanter.
Thus, the woman is both having the dream, the dream we see on the canvas and is also present in
the dream. She is, in fact, the author of her own dream.
This is also the couch that inspired the American poet Sylvia Plath to write a poem called
Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lillies, in which she takes Rousseau's critics with their prosaic
eye to task for demanding an explanation as to why the naked woman sits on a couch in a
forest. Yadwigha's dream is an excuse. Plath argues that it was the couch in the jungle that
possessed Rousseau's imagination. Simply put, she says, he was consumed by the colour, the
moon, and the lilies, Plath wrote.
But, to a friend in private, Rousseau confessed his eyes, so possessed by the glowing red of the
couch which you, Yadwigha, pose on that he put you on a couch to feed his eye with red. Such red,
under the moon, in the midst of all that green and those great lilies.
The Dream raises so many questions which may have no answers.
Why is Yadwigha having such a strange dream? And what does the dream mean?
Why does she imagine herself naked?
Why does she place herself in an exotic jungle?
Why are the animals so companionable? Even the lions and serpents.
Who is the musician?
Why are dreams so important to us? Artists have always used their dreams and inner worlds as an
inspiration for their art. At the turn of the 20th century, the period known as the fin de siècle, The
Dream took on new meaning, particularly because of the influence of the ideas of Sigmund Freud
and a group of emerging avant garde artists. Edvard Munch painted the dark side of the dream in his
famous work of 1893, The Scream, which explores a sense of alienation and inner terror. In the
early 20th century, Giorgio de Chirico, the famous Surrealist, he set his painting in strange
dreamscapes that seemed to resist interpretation.
And Henri Rousseau, who had never had a painting lesson in his life, visited the tropical plants and
animals of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris for the inspiration of his imaginary landscapes. He
recreated his dreams and desires, much to the delight of his admirers, and members of the surrealist
avant garde.
The topics of dreaming, sexuality, and desire were very much on everyone's lips. This was the new
era of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud published his famous Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. It
exerted a profound influence on the Surrealists in the 20s. Freud argued that we express our
innermost desires in our art, dreams, and even in unconscious slips of the tongue. Everything we
repress, he said, will return. Freud, we know, had his clients lay on how famous couch draped with
a red Persian rug, so they would relax and talk more freely about their dreams and innermost
desires. Perhaps, Rousseau's mysterious painting was inspired by this new turn of the century
interest and desire, the couch and dreams. After all the dreamer is sitting on a red couch in an eerie,
perhaps uncanny space, where the familiar is rendered unfamiliar as in The Dream.
Is The Dream perhaps a painting about Eve without Adam? Rousseau was clearly interested in the
figure of Eve. In his picture entitled Eve of 1906-7, he depicted a woman that looks very much like
Yadwigha and a serpent. Like Yadwigha, Eve has two long plaits or braids, she stands naked in a
jungle and holds out her hand to a serpent coiled around a tree. The foliage and tree bearing fruit,
oranges rather than apples, are also very similar in design and colour to those in The Dream. Here
to, there is a sense of harmony in nature.
In The Dream, Rousseau imagines the first woman, Eve, creating nature. She's located in a garden
of paradise, a lush, entangled Darwinian jungle, which suggests the unconscious mind of the
dreamer. There are many animals, two long sinuous snakes, an elephant almost hidden by foliage,
two lions with puzzled expressions, monkeys, an exotic bird of paradise. Then there is a mysterious
figure of the black musician, the piper. Is this Orpheus? In myth and legend, the musician Orpheus
played such beautiful music, he tamed even the wild beasts of the jungle. Creating life, Yadwigha
holds out her arm gesturing towards the jungle and its inhabitants. Her gesture reminds us of
Adam's outstretched arm in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam from the Sistine ceiling. In
Michelangelo's painting, God creates man. Here, in Rousseau's The Dream, a woman stretches out
her arm and creates a tropical forest teeming with life, a Garden of Eden before the Fall. She's the
original womb that gives forth life. Her naked form draws the eye but not because she's sexually
objectified but rather, she's the source of creativity. There's no sense that Yadwigha is performing
for a male gaze. She's an active female figure. Rousseau has not painted an idealised nude who is
posing passively for a male viewer as in much traditional painting. Yadwigha is self-assured,
peaceful and in harmony with life. Her body is erotic, rounded, voluptuous, but not sexualised in a
gratuitous manner. Rousseau's painting is a waking dream. The woman, the tigers, the musician, all
have their eyes wide open. They're active participants in Yadwigha's dream.
Why is the painting so captivating? If we look more closely, we can see the painting has a strange
symmetry to its shapes and forms. At first, the jungle seems impenetrable but gradually, we make
out the various shapes of the creatures hidden within its depths. The jungle itself seems to glow
from within. Yadwigha and the orange snake are turned towards each other and the curve of the
snake's body rhymes visually with the curve of her leg. Yadwigha's rounded breast echoes the
roundness of the full moon. The musician and the lion, however, look out from the canvas facing
the spectator. The hypnotic expression in the eyes of the lions suggests they, too, are under the spell
of the piper. Perhaps, Rousseau intended the musician to refer to the black servant who often
accompanied the female nude of classical painting. But in The Dream, the flute player is an active
figure, not a servant. Again, Rousseau breaks with tradition.
Some saw Rousseau as a primitive painter. He saw himself as a Modernist. Rousseau's paintings
paid no attention to conventional ideas about photographic likeness, perspective, and depth. He
created meaning through intricately designed flat planes of colour and distortions of scale. In their
discussion of Rousseau's style, art historians, Caroline Launcher and William Rubin, point to his
use of flattened space and an absence of the complex devices of illusionist lighting and perspective
that characterise the official art of the day.
As a result, his work was ridiculed by conventional art critics. Rousseau found himself increasingly
on the side of the avant garde, and mixing with avant garde artists such as Picasso. Who
enthusiastically appreciated his work and understood he was also a Modernist and a forerunner of
new approaches to art.
In his focus on dreaming, Rousseau is certainly a forerunner to the Surrealist movement. Rousseau
was befriended by Apollinaire, one of the most influential writers of the early 20th century, who in
1917, invented the term surrealism, meaning beyond realism. The Surrealists were fascinated by
Freud's theories of sex, desire, and repression. To the surrealists, life was a mystery. Human beings
imposed order and rationality where there was none. In the company of avant garde
artists, Rousseau was influenced by the many new ideas inspired by the writings of Freud about the
importance of sex, desire, dreaming, and the unconscious. Rousseau created an imaginary world of
jungles, people and savage creatures who he envisioned in many paintings as living in
harmony. Although Rousseau never left Paris, he was a regular visitor to the Jardin des
Plantes, where he found inspiration from the vast array of exotic plants and animals. The avant
garde were drawn to his surrealist vision, his unusual, juxtapositioning of objects and interesting
dreams and desires. In discussing Rousseau, Andrea Breton, and Andre Masson, two leading
surrealist artists, state of his work that beyond all the obstacles civilisation puts in the way, a
mysterious second communication is still possible. Breton and Masson saw him as a repository of
dreams and ancient desires. Do you agree?

Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy of 1897 is a fantastic and deeply mysterious work. In both
The Dream and The Sleeping Gypsy, Rousseau explores similar themes. A recumbent female figure
occupies the focal point. She's part of an exotic landscape. She exists in harmony with the animal
world, and the full moon rises high in the sky. In both paintings, there is a dark-skinned musician.
The themes of the two paintings are similar but the images and their relationship to each other are
very different. How do they differ? The gypsy is a wanderer. She carries a staff, a pitcher of water, a
musical instrument. The original title in French, the Sleeping Bohemian, suggests she's an artist
and an outsider, one who is set apart from conventional society. She is perhaps an outsider like
Rousseau himself, who was not accepted by the conventional art world, though many artists from
the Avant-Garde period recognised the importance of Rousseau's work, including Gauguin and
Picasso. It's said that when Gauguin visited the exhibition where Rousseau's self portrait was hung,
he exclaimed, ‘now that is a painting! It is the only thing that can be looked at here.’
Why did Rousseau say this about his own painting? In the hope of trying to sell The Sleeping
Gypsy, Rousseau wrote a letter to the mayor of his hometown Laval, in which he offered the
following description of his now famous masterpiece. He said, a wandering Negress, a mandolin
player, sleeps in deep exhaustion, her jug beside her. A lion happens to pass that way, and sniffs at
her, but does not devour her. The scene takes place in a completely dry desert. The gypsy is dressed
in oriental fashion.
The Sleeping Gypsy reveals Rousseau's unique style. His use of brushwork to create a smooth
finish rather than a textured look, his flat surfaces and his brilliant, arresting colours.
What do we actually make of the sleeping gypsy herself? Perhaps she's dreaming of the lion and the
river as the French poet, writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau suggested. Indeed, perhaps, the lion
and the river are the sleeping gypsy's dreams. What peace. The mystery believes in itself alone and
stands quite naked. The gypsy sleeps. Her eyes barely closed can depict this motionless, flowing
face, this river of forgetfulness. The Sleeping Gypsy is deeply enigmatic, mysterious,
puzzling. Who is she? Where has the lion come from in this still desert? Why doesn't the beast
attack its prey? The various motifs in the painting draw on classical myth. Perhaps, she's a female
Oedipus. She's wandering, she carries a staff. Oedipus had a lame foot. She encounters a
lion. Oedipus encountered the woman lion, that is the Sphinx. Perhaps, she's also a Sphinx, a keeper
of mysteries. There's certainly a sense of enigma. Like Orpheus, she is a musician. Orpheus is said
to have played such beautiful music he even tamed wild beasts. Is it important that the painting
should have a rational meaning?
If we study the painting carefully, we can see the various images rhyme with each other. The
circular base of the mandolin evokes the moon.
Light falls on both. The lion's tail, held erect, suggests her wooden staff or stick lying by her
side. The wavy lines of the beast's mane evoke the lines of the woman's hair.
The very bare foreground is mirrored by the bare background. The two plains divided by softly
drawn mountains and a strip of water.
Is this the River of Lethe, or forgetfulness? Both the woman and lion are separated from the
mountains by the river. The gypsy's brightly coloured striped robe enhances the beauty of the
scene. The painting's rich colours and rhyming shapes and forms, as well as it's bare landscape, give
it a strange beauty and sense of stillness.
What do you think the overall effect of the painting is in relation to the senses?
The lion evokes animal sensuality, the sleeping women with her mandolin evokes music and
pleasure. The full moon complements these motifs by creating an overall sense of the romantic. But
here, romanticism is edged with strangeness. All of these features combine to emphasise the poetic
quality of the work. The painting takes us back perhaps to a far distant, imaginary time, long before
the modern period, when human and animal lived in relative peace in the natural world and shared
common spaces.
In 1887, there was much discussion of Darwin's writings on human and animal. Particularly, his
argument that humans and animals have more in common than previously thought, that both
experience a similar range of feelings and emotions. Rousseau certainly gave a sense of communal
feeling between the women and animal in his paintings, as if they were connected by an invisible
bond.
You will have observed the stillness of the painting. The figures of the standing lion and sleeping
gypsy are almost sculptural. Nothing moves. There's a strange lack of motion in Rousseau's
paintings that makes us feel we are actually there, witnessing a moment captured in time. Or more
specifically a moment in the mind of the artist.
As we've seen in our discussion of The Dream, Rousseau again brings together images which are
very different in a bold and commanding manner. A sleeping gypsy, a wandering lion, a moonlit
desert. In this way, The Sleeping Gypsy anticipates the Surrealist's approach of juxtapositioning
unexpected objects, animals and people, in unfamiliar ways to create a sense of the
marvellous. They argued that this juxtaposition of the strange and unfamiliar would free up the
viewer's mind, release him or her from the everyday, and create a new space for imagining new and
different possibilities and relationships. In this way, Rousseau anticipated the Surrealist's interest in
the marvellous, something both strange and beautiful. The marvellous was also disorienting. It gave
the viewer a shock because it opened a new doorway into the normality and the real.
Breton, in the 1920s, described Rousseau's painting as before their time and as totally Surrealist in
inspiration.
Rosseau's paintings relate to the Orientalism of the period, invoking a fascination with otherness,
particularly in relation to the lands and peoples of the colonial empires, from North Africa and the
Middle East. Artists painted the palaces, harems, ornaments and colours of these lands. Focus was
often on erotic excess.
Rousseau, however, was not so interested in these themes. Rather, he was fascinated by the tropical
jungles, the fruits, flowers, plants, and animals. The Sleeping Gypsy is an Orientalist picture but of
it's own kind. It's not about harems and pashas. Rousseau has created a poetic Orientalist landscape
occupied by an Oriental figure. The Sleeping Gypsy is also a musician. Rousseau frequently
includes the mysterious dark figure of the musician in his paintings. He himself loved music and
played the violin.
What are we to make of the musician? Perhaps, this figure is Rousseau's alter ego, the musician he
might become if he were to appear in his own poetic dreamscapes.
Much has been said of Rousseau's poetic genius but perhaps, Cocteau has made the most
compelling statement.
Cocteau said of The Sleeping Gypsy that it was not poetic painting but rather painted poetry.
Henri Rousseau drew on many artistic styles including the sublime. The Sleeping Gypsy's sublime
in that there's a strong sense of boundlessness in relation to the landscape.
Boundlessness is a feature which Immanuel Kant said was a characteristic of the sublime.
There's a sense of an endless desert and deep stillness and solitude.
Yet, there's also a sense of great beauty in the overall composition. The beauty of a sublime
landscape.
The Sleeping Gypsy's also surreal. The painting represents a strange juxtaposition of objects, human
and animal. The image of the gypsy asleep in the desert is exceedingly strange. She lies in a deep
sleep, although her eyes are slightly open, as if she might also be in a trance or seeing in her sleep.
She wears a beautifully striped robe with a white frill around the collar. She's made this place her
own, set out her few possessions on the ground, her jug, mandolin, and blanket.
It is as if she's a pilgrim. The very bareness of the landscape itself suggests a dreamscape, a scene
that is central to Surrealist painting. The Surrealists placed a great deal of emphasis on the freedom
of the imagination and the importance of desire. In his ability to explore the imagination, to set his
imagination free, Rousseau anticipated a central feature of the Surrealist movement, which came
into its own in Paris in the 1920s.
In The Sleeping Gypsy, Rousseau not only sets his own imagination free but he also shows us a
woman, living and traveling freely according to her own desires.
The Surrealists believe desire was a very personal thing. It was the true voice of the inner self.
According to Andre Breton, considered the founder of the Surrealist movement, desire is the sole
motivating principle of the world.
The Surrealists also believed that in art, desire might be invoked in the beholder by the
juxtaposition of unusual objects. Strange things could arouse desire, a sense of arousal, or even
longing.
To me, The Sleeping Gypsy, the woman, the lion, the full moon, arouses a desire for a free life. The
freedom to wander, to find one's inner self.
I think that the unusual theme about the painting is that Rousseau creates this desire in a woman, a
black woman, an outsider, an artist. The painting has a strange beauty and evokes a desire to roam
free from the restrictions of contemporary urban life.
This woman lives in all of us. She represents an inner deep seated human longing to live a life that
is true to one's self.
What is most unusual is that while the gypsy is by definition an artist, a bohemian and an outsider,
in this painting, the gypsy is also female.
I can't think of another example in the history of art of a woman painted in such an unusual
context. She's independent, alone, traveling on her own terms. One might imagine a woman alone
might find herself the object of sexual threats but nothing of this nature is suggested. Rousseau does
not sexualise her at all in this way. Rather, she's simply beautiful in her own right. She's a wanderer,
living her own life, a strange exotic being. In this way, Rousseau certainly goes against the
grain. Traditionally, black women in the history of art are not represented as subjects in their own
right. The sleeping gypsy appears to live in harmony with nature. The lion looks as if it has
wandered into the scene and come across the gypsy unexpectedly. The great beast casts a glance in
her direction, as if not quite sure about her presence but also careful not to disturb her.
There is, however, a sense in which the painting is gendered. The lion, by virtue of its flowing
mane, is a male, the gypsy female.
If Rousseau had painted the gypsy as a man, it would have created a very different meaning. The
gypsy and the lion seem to share a communal bond. The male lion is not just present, it seems also
to be protecting her, so that she can have the freedom not just to sleep but also to dream.
Rousseau's mysterious painting also reminds me of aspects of the ancient story of Mary of
Egypt. We know that Rousseau sometimes absorbed religious figures into his works, as we saw
with Yadwigha who recalls Eve from the Garden of Eden. He also painted a work called Eve.
Mary of Egypt is the patron saint of penitents, particularly in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox
churches, as well as the Catholic church.
She was born in Egypt and lived by begging and spinning flax.
She also lived a sexually dissolute life.
After a religious conversion, Mary spent the rest of her life wandering the deserts and living as a
recluse.
She befriended a religious man on her journeys, Saint Zosimas whom she met a number of
times. It's said she experienced spiritual ecstasy with the saint. He gave her his mantle to cover her
naked body and she told him her life story.
On another occasion, she walked across the surface of the River Jordan to meet him.
He gave her communion, left, and she apparently died. He found her 20 days later in a different
place. She had been miraculously transported there and her body preserved.
He tried to bury her but the soil was too hard. Suddenly, he noticed a magnificent lion standing by
her body, licking her feet. The lion dug a deep grave in the hard ground and Saint Zosimas buried
her there. The lion then departed. Religious images of Mary represent her as an older woman with a
deeply tanned skin and accompanied by a lion. So it's possible that Rousseau absorbed elements of
the story of Mary of Egypt into his painting. A woman traveling alone in the desert, her dark skin,
the guardian lion, the river in the distance, possibly the River Jordan. She lies on the bare ground as
if asleep but her eyes are partly open, as if she's in a spiritual trance or perhaps she's experiencing
religious ecstasy, another important area of desire. Perhaps, this is the scene of her death.
These repeated images from the religious story are very powerful.
Is Rousseau's bohemian Mary of Egypt?
I believe so. The final persuasive reason is that Mary of Egypt is sometimes called, the dusky saint,
or gypsy Mary. Gypsy is derived from Egyptian.
What do you think?
So, in these two paintings, we can see that Rousseau has gone completely against the grain in his
depiction of these two women. The Yadwigha figure who refers to Eve is on her red couch in the
midst of the jungle in an act of creation.
The Sleeping Gypsy, who we now think is Mary of Egypt, is a lone figure. She's wandered for
many, many years across the deserts on her own, doing penance but she appears to be a very strong
figure. She sleeps, perhaps she's dreaming, there's almost a look of ecstasy on her face, which
suggests an inner strength and an inner depth. So she too has been transformed into an active figure
and the subject of her own painting. So what is remarkable about Rousseau's vision of these two
women is that he creates them as independent women, and this goes very much against the tradition
of the representation of women in art history.