Georges Rouault

Georges Rouault (born May 27, 1871, Paris, France—died February 13, 1958, Paris) was a French painter, printmaker, ceramicist, and maker of stained glass who, drawing inspiration from French medieval masters, united religious and secular traditions divorced since the Renaissance.

Rouault was born in a cellar in Paris during a bombardment of the city by the forces opposed to the Commune. His father was a cabinetmaker. A grandfather took an interest in art and owned a collection of Honoré Daumier’s lithographs; Rouault said later that he “went first to school with Daumier.” In 1885 he enrolled in an evening course at the Paris École des Arts Décoratifs. From 1885 to 1890 he was apprenticed in a glazier’s workshop; his mature style as a painter was undoubtedly influenced by his work on the restoration of medieval stained-glass windows, including those of Chartres cathedral. In 1891 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts, where he soon became one of the favourite pupils of the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, in a class that also included the young Henri Matisse and Albert Marquet. After the death of Moreau in 1898, a small Paris museum was created for his pictures, and Rouault became the curator.

Rouault’s early style was academic. But around 1898 he went through a psychological crisis, and, subsequently, partly under the influence of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne, he evolved in a direction that made him, by the 1905 Paris Salon d’Automne, a fellow traveller of the Fauves (Wild Beasts), who favoured the arbitrary use of strong colour. Until the beginning of World War I, his most effective medium was watercolour or oil on paper, with dominant blues, dramatic lighting, emphatic forms, and an expressive scribble.

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Artists, Painters, & Architects

Rouault’s artistic evolution was accompanied by a religious one, for he had become, about 1895, an ardent Roman Catholic. He became a friend of the Catholic intellectuals Joris-Karl Huysmans and Léon Bloy. Through another friend, a deputy public prosecutor, he began to frequent, as had Daumier, the Paris law courts, where he had a close view of humanity apparently fallen from the grace of God. His favourite subjects became prostitutes, tragic clowns, and pitiless judges.

Without completely abandoning watercolour, after 1914 Rouault turned more and more toward the oil medium. His paint layers became thick, rich, and sensuous, his forms simplified and monumental, and his colours and heavy black lines reminiscent of stained-glass windows. His subject matter became more specifically religious, with a greater emphasis on the possibility of redemption than he had put into his pre-1914 work. In the 1930s he produced a particularly splendid series of paintings on the Passion of Christ; typical examples are Christ Mocked by Soldiers, The Holy Face, and Christ and the High Priest. During these years he got into the habit of reworking his earlier pictures; The Old King, for instance, is dated 1916–36.

Between World Wars I and II, at the instigation of the Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard, Rouault devoted much time to engravings, illustrating Les Réincarnations du Père Ubu by Vollard, Le Cirque de l’étoile filante by Rouault himself, Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, and Miserere (his masterpiece in the genre), with captions by Rouault. Some of this work was left unfinished for a time and published later. In 1929 he designed the sets and costumes for a production by Serge Diaghilev of Sergey Prokofiev’s ballet The Prodigal Son. In 1937 he also did the cartoons for a series of tapestries.

During and after World War II, he painted an impressive collection of clowns, most of them virtual self-portraits. He also executed some still lifes with flowers; these are exceptional, for three-quarters of his lifetime output is devoted to the human figure. In 1947 he sued the heirs of Vollard to recover a large number of works left in their possession after the death of the art dealer in 1939. Winning the suit, he established the right of an artist to things never offered for sale, and afterward he publicly burned 315 canvases that he felt were not representative of his best work. During the last 10 years of his life, he renewed his palette, adding greens and yellows, and painted some almost mystical landscapes: a good example is Christian Nocturne.

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Among the major artists of the 20th-century school of Paris, Rouault was an isolated figure in at least two respects: he practiced Expressionism, a style that has never found much favour in France, and he was chiefly a religious painter—one of the most convincing in recent centuries. Both statements, however, need qualification. Rouault was not as fiercely Expressionistic as some of his Scandinavian and German contemporaries; in some ways his work is a late flowering of 19th-century Realism and Romanticism. And he was not an official church artist; his concern with sin and redemption was deeply personal.