Myfanwy Piper . on art . Henri Rousseau &apos;s art was born and formed on Sundays . free from work he could , with a cheerful heart , compose images while listening to the songs of the Faubourg . the little book by the Frenchman Roch Grey from which these simple words are taken was published in the early twenties : my copy was published and , I suspect , translated in Rome . 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 . 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 &apos;s studio , is an inextricable part of my knowledge of the Douanier . even today I can not believe that ugly , silent dogs played in the middle of the street &amp;hellip; is not the title of one of his pictures : 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 &amp;hellip; . I visualize in the dusty summer street another version of the footballers . it is obviously a book to be enjoyed at intervals . it came out this time because I had heard casually that there was to be an exhibition of Rousseau &apos;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 . one of them , the happy quartet , looks back in an odd way to Blake , not so much because of a nai&quot;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 . thinking about Rousseau leads one to ask why nai&quot;ve painting has such a hold upon our imagination today . 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 . 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 . but no one today knows what kind of vision , or belief , or intention even , lies in that region beyond the bounds of execution . 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 . now they are not . for the true nai&quot;ve painter , on the other hand , there is no margin between his intention and his result : he paints to the exact limit of his vision . it is exactly in his humble capacity to be satisfied with this that his nai&quot;vet&amp;eacute; or lack of sophistication lies . it is exactly in this that his appeal lies . Rousseau once wrote to the mayor of his home town Laval , offering to sell la Boh&amp;eacute;mienne endormie . he sent a description of the picture : a wandering negress , playing her mandolin , with her jar beside her ( a vase containing water ) , sleeps deeply , worn out by fatigue . a lion wanders by , detects her and does not devour her . there &apos;s an effect of moonlight , very poetic . the scene takes place in a completely arid desert . the gypsy is dressed in oriental fashion . the simple exactitude of his words matches the clarity and finality of the picture . the confidence and satisfaction of the painter shines out , as it does in these words from a biographical note that he wrote upon himself : 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 . 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 . 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 . the blessing of an unassailable , because unquestioned , calm . Myfanwy Piper . on art . things that are over are not always done with too , according to timetable . pictures and personalities that ought to be tidied away after their airing occupy one &apos;s mind with images and questions and memories . Toulouse-Lautrec is a particular sticker . partly because he can never finally be pinned down . 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 en masse at the Museum at Albi some years ago , I felt as if he was an artist I had never seen before . reading Henri Perruchot &apos;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 . 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 . it was good to be able to see many of the works again at the Tate Gallery last month . the most persistent question raised by M Perruchot &apos;s book is how far the artist Lautrec was the product of his crippled state . 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 . someone at a restaurant described how Lautrec &apos;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 ( &amp;pound;800 today ) and handed it to her with a flourish . and they accuse me of extravagance , said Lautrec . a young man , who was Proust , said that such gestures were not stupid , they even had a certain usefulness for they asserted caste . whereupon Lautrec muttered something about middle-class stupidity , which was always prepared to admire an absurd gesture or a sunset . Proust and Lautrec belonged to different worlds and it was precisely the difference in their worlds that made Proust what he was . he was the woman outside the window , able by the intensity of his desire and his curiosity to possess the ring . 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 &apos;s cutting comment , all epitomized in one little glittering symbol . and something he could not possess except by being outside it . 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 . if he had not been ill he would have had to invent illness so as to keep himself outside the window . not so Toulouse-Lautrec : 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 . he loved it , and had he been strong he would have embraced that life naturally and violently . he would have drawn , as the rest of his family did , for relaxation . the Counts of Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa had another characteristic : absolute unselfconscious belief in themselves and , therefore , a complete detachment . 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 . this energy , coupled with an inherited talent , the accident of Lautrec &apos;s deformity and weakness left him free to use for art . but that does not explain why he was moved to tears by a word of praise from D&amp;eacute;gas . Myfanwy Piper . on art . the artist in Rome . intellectual clarity and the pure , forward-looking passions aroused by it are always being betrayed by memory . nowhere does this show itself more clearly than in art . 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 : 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 . Marinetti &apos;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 : painted angels , prophets , heroes , philosophers and holy ones . 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 . 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 . Rome has no such violent centre of activity . as a capital city it offers what capital cities do : 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 &apos;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 . 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 . 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 . certain things become very clear . 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 . 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 : they are isolated for notice , a poetic conception . 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 &apos;s convictions must express . then there is a collection of abstract-concrete work : the fashionable all black canvas : or a Fontana slit into slithers of darkness like a medieval castle . 