5/31/2023 0 Comments Sleeping gpsyPurchased from Henri Bing in 1926 - 1939 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rockstuhl (Ruckstuhl-Siegwart collection), Kussnacht-am-Rigi (near Lucerne), Switzerland. Purchased from Kahnweiler (through Henri-Pierre Roché), Februuntil his death, on JEstate of John Quinn, 1924 - 1926 Sold at auction, Collection John Quinn sale, Paris, Hotel Drouot, OctoHenri Bing, Paris. Early 1924 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler/Galerie Simon, Paris. Until early 1924 Louis Vauxcelles, Paris. The artist (after Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 1897) Private collection (charcoal merchant), Paris. This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection. Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019) Denied the official acceptance he craved, he later became a hero, although somewhat unwittingly, to the early-twentieth-century avant-garde painters, who claimed him as one of their own. Rousseau, a toll collector for the city of Paris (thus known also as Le Douanier), was largely self-taught, although he had grand ambitions of entering the Académie Française. With its flat planes of pure color, simple geometric forms, dreamlike atmosphere, and exotic subject, The Sleeping Gypsy at once conjures a desire for a preindustrial past and asserts its status as a new kind of modern art the details of the lion’s unnerving eye and the figure’s zipperlike teeth evidence the artist’s singular pictorial imagination. French writers and artists had historically linked the Romany to Egypt as well as Bohemia, which may explain Rousseau’s depiction of a dark-skinned woman sleeping calmly-despite the large lion sniffing at her shoulder-in an arid landscape. “As long as you’re not afraid of large animals coming up in the night.Rousseau and his Parisian contemporaries were fascinated by wandering gypsies, the Romany people known in France as bohémiens: men and women exiled to the fringes of society during the dramatic changes of the mid-nineteenth century. “It’s a magical environment you could picture yourself in,” Michael ruminated when asked about his months spent working on the storied painting. He scoured the archives for records of past treatments, X-rayed the painting for the first time to uncover unexpected compositions hidden beneath the surface, and removed nearly a century’s worth of discolored varnish layers to reveal Rousseau’s original colors. It had been on view, nearly continually, for 80 years.ĭuring the first major treatment of The Sleeping Gypsy in decades, paintings conservator Michael Duffy assumed the varied roles of detective, scientist, and artist. Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy came to the conservation studio for inspection when the Museum closed its doors to prepare for its 2019 reopening. By the time MoMA acquired it in the 1930s, art dealers and previous owners had cleaned, repaired, and varnished the canvas. It was not until 1924, 14 years after the artist’s death, that the work was rediscovered in a charcoal merchant’s shop in Paris-a less than ideal place to store an oil painting. When he completed The Sleeping Gypsy in 1897, Henri Rousseau offered to sell the painting to his hometown of Laval, 200 miles southwest of Paris. One of MoMA’s most iconic paintings went missing for decades before it was first hung on the Museum’s walls in 1939.
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