Sunday — the last lazy summer Sunday before school begins and political campaigns get serious and the Redskins start to lose real games — the family and I went to the National Gallery to see the most entertaining art show of the season: “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris.”
Rousseau’s paintings have always captured my imagination, with their wide-eyed lions and tigers and apes peering from the depths of a forest or jungle that Rousseau has depicted with precision, each leaf etched in oil, every blade of grass luminous with light from a red sun or a yellow moon.
But Rousseau, a French government clerk who didn’t come into his own until he retired, never seemed to get the hang of the basics, like perspective. His scenes are flat and unreal. They unleash the mind. His pictures are at once playful and light, disturbing and dark. Read into them what you wish.
I read a political wish list into “A Carnival Evening,” a night scene that Rousseau painted in 1886. It shows two figures, arm in arm, walking from darkened trees in silhouette against white clouds. The man in white suit wears a jaunty pointed cap; the female figure sports a white skirt, blue tunic and dancing shoes. They seem to be floating. Their feet do not touch the earth.
The floating figures made me think of Linda Cropp and Adrian Fenty about to hit the ground after a summer of campaigning beyond the media glare. That is about to change. Each has more than a million bucks to drop into radio and television ads or political phone banks or caravans across the city. In the last three weeks before the Sept. 12 election, we will pay attention and bring them into focus.
Here’s what I hope for them and for another essential element of D.C. life, as summer turns to fall, and we have to get serious:
» In the mayor’s campaign, let’s have a furious race to the finish. Fenty has lived in a carnival atmosphere for most of the summer, working hard to get votes with one-on-one pleas to residents. It’s time for Cropp to test the young politician in the heat of battle. Flush him from the forest. Challenge him on his plans to govern. Force him to think on his feet.
» In education, stick to the basics. Rousseau’s “Football Players” depicts four figures floating down a Paris lane, bordered by trees. We’re not sure if the ball is for soccer or rugby. Again, their feet don’t make contact with the ground. Likewise, the school bureaucrats and board members don’t seem to have contact with the students and the classrooms. The good news is that DCPS says it has hired enough teachers to replace the ones who it fired for lack of credentials. The bad news is that these 300 souls will have to try to teach under a system of shifting tests and changing curricula. Back to basics: Get textbooks to students.
Henri Rousseau never left Paris to paint his jungle scenes, which include summer fun and brutal violence. He could have painted them from Washington, too.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
