The naïf of Montparnasse, the Surrealist mascot, the perennial Sunday painter: Henri Rousseau has been the subject of pejorative labels since he was lionized by the early 20th-century vanguard, acquiring his own mythology in the popular consciousness along the way.

A landmark symposium on Saturday, organized by Menil Collection scholars in residence, Katrina Bartlett and Caitlin Haskell, is poised to change these preconceptions, effectively altering the course of art historical practice surrounding one of modern painting's most prominent figures. A host of international scholars will convene at University of St. Thomas' Jones Auditorium from 2-6:30 p.m. Saturday for the symposium, which is free and open to the public, allowing Houston audiences to witness this critical discourse during Rousseau's centennial year.

"We're uncovering some really tantalizing information and starting to connect some dots," Haskell tells CultureMap. "There are some tendencies and habits we've unearthed, and we're getting a grasp on how this artist thought about the world and how he wanted to make a picture."

This weekend's event represents the culmination of a year of research by Bartlett, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Paintings Conservation and Haskell, the Vivian L. Smith Foundation Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. At the symposium, the pair's symbiotic research will be on full display, as Bartlett sheds light on the conservation science surrounding Rousseau, and Haskell details new art historical insights on the artist's body of work.

For a year, Bartlett has delved into works by Rousseau for the first time via X-ray, infrared reading and pigment analysis as Haskell explored the Menil's archives in preparation for both the symposium and her doctoral dissertation. And while their individual pursuits, whether scientific or art historical, should fascinate symposium attendees, the pair's outreach to other institutions distinguishes this symposium.

In their search to clarify Rousseau's methods, both scholars have scoured museum collections throughout the United States and Europe, forging partnerships with curators and analyzing some of the artist's most obscure, yet most telling, works.

Rousseau became ingratiated within the intellectual milieu of early 20th-century Paris, acting as a grandfather to the circle dominated by such minds as Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon, and acting as the inspiration to Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp and Robert Delaunay. Similarly, Bartlett and Haskell have immersed themselves among contemporary Rousseau scholars, many of whom will descend upon Houston in the coming days.

Sponsored by the Vivian L. Smith Foundation, the symposium will count among its luminaries Art Institute of Chicago modern art curator, Stephanie D'Alessandro, London's Courtald Gallery curator Nancy Ireson, senior conservator of modern paintings at the National Gallery of Art Jay Kreuger and Yvonne Szafran, department head of paintings conservation at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The far-afield scholars will be accompanied by local luminaries, Rice University art history professor Gordon Hughes and Richard Shiff of the University of Texas.

"It's pretty amazing what these scholars are doing," Bartlett says. "Kreuger from the National Gallery is using XRF — X-ray florescence spectroscopy — to analyze pigments. By combining XRF with a method of imaging, he's able to look deeper into the painting and determine what pigments are being mixed. Viewing the different phases in a single painting is groundbreaking for understanding Rousseau, because for years, it was accepted that his paintings were something straight out of a tube."

Now, it's become apparent that the artist employed conscious decisions in manipulating color and composition.

Among the central works to be analyzed this weekend is Bonne Fête, a small painting on remarkably thin cardboard that has since been mounted on wood. Despite its tiny scale, Bonne Fête struck Bartlett and Haskell with a stream of questions regarding for whom it was originally painted, and how he manipulated his paint to create an image that is at once frontal and pedestrian, yet enchanting for its subtle communication of a gift and a styling that foreshadows the works in the Menil's Surrealist galleries.

Acquired in 1980, the painting has been the subject of the scholars' scrutiny, undergoing scientific examination and a rewriting of its associated fictions.

"Some of our research involved figuring out who this was for, this gift," Haskell says. "We think we've determined the recipient of it, a friend of his he was making paintings for around 1892."

What makes the research at the Menil unique is that Bartlett and Haskell are deeply reconsidering a seemingly ephemeral object as fine art. Haskell elaborates, "It has a really distinguished pedigree for being something so occasional, an object of exchange between close friends." But Haskell has applied an historiographical investigation to Bonne Fête of unprecedented rigor.

"Nobody has been looking at this paintings in this way," she says.

Although Bartlett and Haskell have thrived from partnerships with Rousseau-holding institutions, the researchers exude an affinity for their home base of the Menil Collection.

"As soon as I set foot in the Menil," Haskell recalls, "it was a place that I fell in love with. It's one of my favorite spaces to see art in the world."

As the museum's archives have provided her with the tools necessary to complete her doctoral dissertation, Bartlett has benefited from the Menil's well-equipped conservation lab. When Dominique de Menil collaborated with Renzo Piano on the museum's design, she allotted a generous space for the physical study and conservation of artwork. In the lab, Bartlett relishes getting in touch with the "materiality" of Rousseau's work.

Although conservation of 20th-century painting had yet to become a priority for museums in the 1980s, de Menil arranged for a palace of conservatoin, awash with natural light. Over the year, Bartlett has utilized the lab's equipment to learn that the seemingly straightforward artist laid myriad layers of paint and possible compositions before arriving at a finished product.

Meanwhile, Haskell has thrived amid the Menil's permanent collection. The circle of artists who adopted and advocated Rousseau — Braque and Léger, for example — are are among the museum's holdings. The artist's work, particularly a painting held by the museum of the Holy Family, exudes a spirituality that complements the Catholic family's patronage of religious art and architecture, from the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum and Rothko Chapel, to the Menil Collection's current exhibition, Objects of Devotion.

The Menil's collection of African and Oceanic art is also aligned with Rousseau's aesthetic, as his paintings are rife with jungle imagery; the artist's Paris dealer was not incidentally a dealer of "primitive art." On a holistic level, the de Menils' facilitated a cultural exchange by bringing what American audiences deemed the most accessible French artist of the day to a Houston museum.

In the same manner that "primitive art" has been reconsidered by art historians in recent years, Haskell has also clarified the lore surrounding Rousseau.

"From poems to songs, there's just a really wonderful and diverse literary record that surrounds him," she says. "But we never really achieve a point where there's something that you would pick up and think, this is some really serious interpretative art criticism, or this is really serious art history."

She appreciates the fanciful rumors of Rousseau's eccentricities, from seeing ghosts to absconding to Mexico, but has also dedicated herself to telling the true story of the artist's method: "There's this sense that Rousseau's paintings just sort of came into existence out of thin air, that he just painted as a bird sings. Our work is saying, 'No, this is a person who is trying in really specific ways to make an image.' "

Rousseau exchanged his paintings as gifts and even bartered his artwork. Because the works weren't necessarily considered precious until the 1920s, many had remained hidden from view, stored in private homes, cellars and basements rather than regal museum collections. Those attending the Saturday symposium at University of St. Thomas will have the rare opportunity to view Bartlett, Haskell and their contemporary conservators, curators and historians fully expose, at last, the layers hidden within Rousseau's paintings.