Georges Rouault

French painter

• Born: May 27, 1871
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: February 13, 1958
• Place of death: Paris, France

One of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, Rouault combined an existential philosophy and a strong Roman Catholic faith with a prodigious artistic energy to amass a unique and distinctly identifiable body of work over fully seventy years of creativity.

Early Life

Georges Rouault (jawrzh rew-oh) was born during a bombardment of Paris during the “troubled days of the Commune,” his mother having taken shelter in the cellar of a house in the Belleville district. His cabinetmaker father worked at a piano factory; Rouault acquired much of his artistic taste from his maternal grandfather, Alexandre Champdavoine, a collector of the work of Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet, and Édouard Manet.

However oversimplified the observation may be, much of Rouault’s distinct painting style can be traced to his very early apprenticeship in the stained-glass ateliers of Georges Hirsch. In his mature work, the bright colors and clearly defined shapes, separated by dark areas, are suggestive of the traditional stained-glass techniques.

Formal training came from the famous art studios at the École des Beaux-Arts, briefly under Élie Delaunay, but quickly followed by the tutelage of Gustave Moreau, whose favorite pupil he became. Rouault began his career with traditional paintings in line with the principles of the Academy painters but was encouraged by Moreau to seek his own way. His desire to find his own style can be seen as the positive outcome of his failure to win first prize in several early competitions. In 1895, encouraged by Moreau, he left the École to paint a series of sacred and profane scenes set in fantastic landscapes. A series of notebooks that the student maintained during his school years, Souvenirs intimes (1926; intimate memories), attest the importance to Rouault’s whole aesthetic attitude of Moreau’s lectures and admonitions to paint the spiritual life.

The death of Moreau in 1898 left Rouault without his best friend and spiritual adviser. Yet, in his will, Moreau arranged for Rouault to manage the archives of the Musée Gustave Moreau, thereby freeing Rouault from financial difficulties and allowing him to concentrate on his painting. Scholars have listed as Rouault’s early influences the art of Daumier, Francisco de Goya, and Paul Cézanne, and the writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Léon Bloy, and Fyodor Dostoevski.

Life’s Work

Rouault’s career parallels the Fauvist movement, but he was not a part of it; the Fauvists’ descent into the primitive was contrary to Rouault’s ascent into the spiritual, although the use of color by both bears definite similarities, with its richness and purity. Influenced by the Catholic writer Bloy (who befriended him but loathed his paintings), Rouault’s work became more and more religious, sometimes in subject matter, as with his innumerable portraits of the Passion, but equally often in his approach to secular subjects. By 1905, figures such as clowns, prostitutes, and peasants, always shown in despair, never cartooned or ridiculed but depicted at a moment of deep philosophical grief, can be found in his paintings. This tendency to take seriously the angst of the common person has been connected with the existentialist philosophers of this and later periods, notably fellow Frenchmen Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and also the earlier philosophers S ren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger.

Rouault’s existential view, however, was a Christian one, in which suffering was humankind’s earthly fate and temptations of the flesh a universal shortcoming. Almost never dealing with inanimate objects or landscapes, Rouault sought to capture the deep tragedy of human existence, expressed most succinctly in the faces of clowns, lower-class subjects, and Christ figures, often on the cross. His obsession with the crucifixion came from his acute sensitivity to the fact of Christ the man, capable of experiencing human pain and death.

Marrying, in 1908, Marthe Le Sidaner, who bore him four children, he began to settle into his working habits, a meticulous reworking of every painting and engraving over a period of years. A period of residence in Versailles in 1911 brought friendship with Jacques Maritain, who was to influence his religious views profoundly. The years until the beginning of World War I were filled with work in watercolors of a particularly brilliant palette, as he examined the themes of circus and prostitution equally fully. An extremely private man, especially for the glittering world of Parisian modern art, Rouault needed to be sought out by his slowly growing admirers. Exhibits of his paintings were sparse on the calendars of the leading galleries, and those that did manage to acquire his work could only get hold of a few paintings at a time. In this sense, Rouault was truly an expressionist painter (another movement of this time, but centered in Germany), more concerned with putting his personal feelings onto canvas than with satisfying a commercial market.

Even though he was a prolific painter all of his life, there was a period from about 1910 to 1918 in which Rouault concentrated on other media, working in gouache, ink, and watercolor, only to return to oil painting occasionally; some years later, he again concentrated on oil, a slower, more contemplative medium.

Almost in passing, the established world of traditional art began to acknowledge Rouault’s genius. The Musée d’Unterlinden in Colmar purchased his early work Child Jesus Among the Doctors in 1919; other museum purchases of the kind that ensured a growing reputation followed, as Rouault was preparing for his first major show, a 1924 retrospective at Bruet’s Gallery in Paris, which brought together all of his scattered works from the past twenty years.

The year 1913 marked Rouault’s commercial success and his first artistic commitment to a major gallery; it was the year that Ambroise Vollard bought his entire studio’s output, including rights to subsequent paintings. By investing in the relatively unknown painter (Vollard had originally been attracted to some ceramic work of the artist), he made both a wise investment and a commitment to support the painter’s work for life. He had previously bought the studio of Maurice de Vlaminck, who was to become a major force in the Fauvist movement, paralleling Rouault’s career but separate from it.

At the center of the Vollard-Rouault relationship were two controversies. The first was artistic: Vollard commissioned a publication of a major engraving project, one hundred works originally to be called Miserere et guerre but later reduced by almost half and changed to Miserere , consisting of fifty-eight works. The project combined the energies of the two men for a period of thirty years. The project was impeded by Rouault’s insistence on reworking the smallest detail of each engraving and Vollard’s insistence on perfection. A similar attention to detail by both men accounts for the overlayering of paint on the canvases, resulting from the reworking of entire canvases sometimes over a period of twenty years. Other features of Rouault’s style were the intense coloration of discrete segments, the outlining of areas, a frontal presentation of the subjects accompanied by a two-dimensionality common to icons, and a pronounced elongation of forms. The stained-glass windows of his youth were more than passingly instrumental in their effect on Rouault’s perceptions.

The second controversy involved the right of the artist to change his work after its purchase by another party. On the death of Vollard in 1939, Rouault sued the estate for the return of some eight hundred paintings in Vollard’s possession, claiming that they were unfinished and that his reputation as a painter would be jeopardized by their sale in the unfinished state. He won his case in 1947 and one year later, in front of horrified witnesses whose attitude was as though a wake were taking place, destroyed more than three hundred paintings, believing that he would never have a chance in his lifetime to complete them properly.

The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 finally brought to Rouault the world recognition he long deserved. Entitled Masters of Independent Art, the exhibit came just in time, as World War II was to endanger all Paris galleries and artists alike. His popularity in the United States came rather late in life, with a traveling exhibit in 1940-1941 to Washington, Boston, and San Francisco and major exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (a print exhibit in 1938 and a comprehensive show in 1945) and the Cleveland Art Museum, 1953.

Rouault’s last works, to which he refers as the “dawn” after a lifetime of painting “twilights,” were iconographic landscapes of ancient Eastern lands, with Christ and other religious figures now distantly on the horizon, receding from individuality, blending into the pastoral landscape. He died in 1958, at the age of eighty-six.

Significance

The megalomania and egotism of the stereotypical artist were entirely absent in Georges Rouault, replaced by an intensity of commitment to perfection in everything he did. The act of painting was for Rouault an act of prayer, an intimate cry of anguish into the ontological void. Where other painters kept one eye on their commercial value, Rouault’s attention to his public image was less selfish; it came from a desire to unify his artistic voice into one symphony for the eye, a kind of supplication before his Master.

That the modern art public has accepted his work as the masterpieces they are does not automatically mean it understands the man who created them. More than one art critic has noted that Rouault’s life paralleled Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso; the artist lived long enough to find peace in his art. Rouault is too often loved as the great religious essayists are loved: for the beauty of the form rather than the zeal of the content. It is not too much to say that Rouault prayed with his brush, or that his prayers were all one prayer: the Miserere.

Bibliography

Flora, Holly, and Soo Yun Kang. George Rouault’s Miserere et guerre: This Anguished World of Shadows. London: D. Giles, 2006. This accompaniment to an exhibit includes three scholarly essays, an extensive bibliography, and reproductions of all fifty-eight prints in Rouault’s series Miserere et guerre.

Fowlie, Wallace. Jacob’s Night: The Religious Renascence in France. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1947. Chapter 2, “Rouault: The Art of a Painter,” is a discussion of Rouault’s distinctly Catholic view of Sartre’s existentialism, manifested in the anguished generic portraits of prostitutes, clowns, and peasants. A study of Rouault’s religion, the chapter fits into Fowlie’s larger discussion of the renaissance of Catholicism in early twentieth century France, indebted to the writings of Charles Péguy and Jacques Maritain. Index of last names.

Georges Rouault. New York: Crown, 1983. This collection illustrates the variety and intensity of Rouault’s work, with representatives of all styles and subjects. One reproduction, Pierrot (1920), is tipped in for optimum clarity. Text follows Rouault’s life through the years of apprenticeship, “days of anger,” during the “school of stoicism,” and “en route to peace.” Biographical chronicle, strong bibliography, and table of main exhibits.

Getlein, Dorothy, and Frank Getlein. Georges Rouault’s Miserere. Milwaukee, Wis.: Bruce, 1964. A presentation of the final fifty-eight monochrome prints, with subjective and poetic commentaries by the Getleins. The long preface traces Rouault’s life and concentrates on the techniques and the history of the production of the Miserere collection. This project took up a large part of the center of Rouault’s career; the Getlein study is particularly valuable for an analysis of Rouault’s Catholicism, the light shed on the Vollard-Rouault relationship, and the details of the multiple engraving techniques of this important print series, spanning thirty-five years from conception to birth.

Rouault, Georges. G. Rouault, 1871-1958. Text by Bernard Dorival. Translated by P. S. Falla. Manchester, England: Manchester City Art Galleries and the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974. Dorival’s introduction is a poetic recapitulation of Rouault’s qualities. Detailed descriptions of paintings, with provenance and identifications, prove valuable to understanding his slow, meticulous processes.

Steinfels, Peter. “Beliefs.” The New York Times, April 1, 2006, p. A13. Discusses the controversies surrounding Rouault.

Venturi, Lionelle. Rouault: A Biographical and Critical Study. Translated by James Emmons. New York: Skira, 1959. An appreciation by one of the first Rouault scholars, whose catalog of the 1940 exhibit still stands as the definitive Rouault biography. An introductory essay accompanies fifty-eight magnificent color reproductions, tipped in and therefore of a superior quality, but disappointingly small in size. Includes an exhaustive chronological survey with parallel artistic events, text references, bibliography, list of exhibitions, index of names, and list of color plates, all definitive and comprehensive.