Nicole Hackert

"There is a remarkable painting in the Picasso room at Kunstmuseum in Basel: a full-length portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire with his muse, Marie Laurencin. It was Henri Rousseau who ­painted this wonderful picture. Only I had remembered it as a self-portrait of Rousseau with ­Madame Rousseau. Marie Laurencin was Apollinaire's muse, and Cl mence Rousseau was Rousseau's muse. As it happens, Franz Marc painted a portrait of Rousseau for Der Blaue Reiter, and Picasso also had a self-portrait by Henri. There's a quite intimate photograph, taken by Andr Gom s, of Picasso holding Rousseau's self-portrait in his right hand and the portrait of Rousseau's wife in his left hand. Picasso, that constructor of novel objects and ­audacious paintings, loved Rousseau, the painter of things in rigidified grace. Even Rousseau's gaze in his self-portrait is stiff, directed at his own work, in which objects that we ourselves are familiar with look different--Gothic, Byzantine, somehow not the way we are used to seeing them. (...)" --Georg Baselitz