Exotic Landscape

Monkeys peer out from among giant leaves, blossoms, and hanging fruit in a dense, imagined jungle of lush, patterned greenery. Henri Rousseau, who never left France, assembled such scenes from visits to the Paris botanical gardens, the zoo, and illustrated books, transforming hothouse plants into a primeval wilderness. Now in the Norton Simon Museum, Exotic Landscape is among his last great jungle pictures - flat, meticulous, and strangely still, the foliage built up leaf by leaf into a decorative paradise, the work of a self-taught visionary whose dreamed nature enchanted the modern avant-garde.