Artillerymen (Rousseau)

A regiment of artillerymen pose stiffly in two rows around their cannon, every mustachioed face turned solemnly toward us as if for a group photograph that has gone charmingly, rigidly wrong. Henri Rousseau, the self-taught customs officer who painted in his spare time, renders them with flat, deadpan, faux-naive precision. Now in the Guggenheim, Artillerymen shows the qualities that fascinated the avant-garde - the directness, the awkward charm, the dreamlike stillness of his untrained vision, which Picasso and others would celebrate as a fresh, instinctive alternative to academic skill.