研究期間：10108~10207;This two-year project will study the nearly thirty jungle paintings created by Henri Rousseau. In a “naïve” and artificial style, these works embody the modern man’s aspirations toward the primitive nature and suggest visual experiences accumulated from the popular books and visits to the Jardin des Plantes and Exposition universelle. The research on Rousseau and the concepts and imagery of the primitive and the exotic shaped by colonialism will help us understand the modern art’s adoption and transformation of natural history. This project is entitled “The Spectacle of Nature” to underline the fact that nature is used by the artist to construct a striking spectacle, and that nature is employed as a decorative motif and visual language. The composition of artificial nature serves as a stimulus for imagining a distant exotic land. Therefore, the process of picturing nature undergoes layers of mediation. This project will address the following issues: 1. Laying aside the label of “a naïve artist”, what is Rousseau’s aesthetic and how does he create an alternative realism? 2. What are the 19th-century artistic tendencies toward primal and naïve expressions? 3. How do Rousseau’s strongly decorative jungle paintings bring the viewer visual pleasure and elicit psychological responses? 4. As modern life is estranged from nature yet in need of nature, how does Rousseau reduce the sense of threat of the wildlife and encourages a metropolitan gaze? 5. In the context of colonial display of nature, does art inevitably become the object of cultural consumption and entertainment? 6. Henri Bergson’s thesis of “creative evolution” proposes a major revision of Darwin’s “the survival the fittest” and “natural selection”. Can Bergson’s philosophy of life give insights to the interpretation of Rousseau’s art?
