Plate of Miserere: 'Jesus will be in Agony until the end of the world'.
GEORGES ROUAULT AS A SPIRITUAL ARTIST Iain McKillop
Georges Rouault (1871-1958) has fascinated me for five decades since I first encountered his work in an exhibition in Manchester City Art Gallery in 1974 when I was at university studying Art History. As someone newly committed to my faith I was drawn to his subject-matter as well as excited by his use of mark, colour and expressive textural paint. I am not sure that I then understood his work, or even that I still do comprehend fully what he was exploring in some of his works. Even the critic Gustav Coquilot, who knew him well and defended his work, wrote “(one) must be a monk to understand him.” Discovering William Dyrness’ writing on the artist soon afterwards helped to clarify my understanding and I am indebted to his research and ideas, as I am to several other scholars and Rouault’s own writings.
There are enigmas within Rouault’s imagery, which make one continue to look, think, meditate and contemplate. Rather like Orthodox icons, they convey a sense that, though one might recognise their subjects and something of the theology within them, they also hold mysteries and meanings for the artist that are not easily explicable. I am fortunate to own what I find the most expressive print among his Miserere cycle “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world”, a title derived from Pascal’s Pensées [553-5]. The image has a fascinating, hypnotic effect that draws me into the implications of Christ’s Passion. The torso of Christ appears more simple and smooth than the other three crucifixes in the series and seems to spontaneously convey emotion, expressing sadness, vulnerability, pain, empathy with the human condition, glory, triumph and love.
I recognise that Rouault worked for years to convey such feelings with apparent spontaneity in his prints and paintings. Rouault himself wrote: “I put the best of myself” into the Miserere series, and considered it his finest legacy. His daughter Isabelle wrote in her Preface to the series that Miserere was “the work to which he attached primary importance.” His Passion cycle of colour etchings and wood engravings is similarly technically masterful in rather different ways. His work has influenced my own attempts to try in my own different way to express spontaneity of emotion, considered spirituality, committed faith, and considered theological thought in my own paintings. Like him, I have found that discovering your personal voice and message does not come easily and requires intense commitment. I have found, like him, that I have made mistakes and gone down paths that do not always fulfil my aims or are not always understood or accepted by others of faith, let alone those who do not respond to spiritual imagery. If there is truth in the Christian faith as I, like Rouault, believe it is worth the struggle and conviction of exploring and conveying. Faith is the highest subject with which an artist could aspire to work.
ROUAULT’S PLACE WITHIN MODERNISM
The subject matter and spiritual content of Gorges Rouault’s art is unusual, amid the varied themes and largely secular preoccupations of modernism in the art of the first half of the 20th Century. In fact he was the only major modern artist, in France and probably in the west to gain a reputation through producing art that was so predominantly religious. Perhaps it was because of this religious preoccupation in his work, that he did not gain the height of reputation of his friend and fellow student Matisse or Matisse’s great rival Picasso. Their ideas on art was very different yet Matisse and Rouault shared a fruitful relationship as testified to in their correspondence over several years. Matisse’s few works on religious themes, like the Stations, glass and vestments for the Vence Chapel hardly had the intensity of religious commitment of the art of Rouault. Picasso also produced several works based on the crucifixion, particularly exploring surrealistically Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, yet this was for expression and innovation. not through personal conviction of faith Several modernist artists accepted commissions to produce artefacts for churches, but few had the commitment to faith that drove Rouault’s life and work from about the age of 24.
Rouault’s work remained fairly independent and insular within the genres and aims of the Parisian art community. However, he counted many artists and writers among his friends and in 1903 helped to found the Salon d’Automne, which was to become significant in promoting the work of many other modern artists. Among Christian artists he had similar interests to his exact contemporary painter Maurice Denis [1870-1945], who he knew, though their work was extremely different. But Rouault never became a permanent member of any ‘school’, ‘group’ or ‘ism’, so is not easily categorisable. He was quiet and rarely promoted himself, though his writings are more profoundly thought-through and practical than many modernist art manifestos. He seldom mixed in the cafes where artists discussed together or joined in the Bohemian life of Paris. He preferred the quieter circles of Catholic friends, or was supported by individual friendships like that with André Suarès, J.K. Huysmans or Jacques and Raïssa Maritain.
His work is still ‘revolutionary in that it remained expressively figurative and realist when so many other successful artists were moving towards abstraction of form. His religious faith became enhanced and important to him when many other artists and intellectuals were deserting the Church. Religious subjects as a source for art diminished as artists’ training altered and subjects moved away from the themes of academic art, which had included biblical subjects. Though he was definitely a ‘modernist’ Rouault is therefore not an obvious representative of 20th Century modernism. Even museums that hold significant works by him within their collections rarely exhibit them on their walls today. Yet in his time his work was exhibited in major Paris galleries and later in New York, Chicago, London, and Tokyo. Rouault gained worldwide recognition through an exhibition of forty-two paintings at the Paris World Fair in 1937. He was promoted in New York by Pierre Matisse, son of the artist, whose gallery staged three solo exhibitions of Rouault’s work between 1933 and 1947.
Rouault’s art did not appeal universally to critics and collectors who did not always recognise his importance in developing the expressive use of colour and texture. Yet his work was as significant as that of the r Fauves with whom he exhibited in influencing the German and Frencb Expressionists, whose emotional energy he reflected. He was not always valued by churches or the collectors of religious art either. Sseveral religious writers especially denigrated his early attempts at integrating his Christian and social beliefs into his work. For all his difference from the secular themes of most art of the first half of the 20th Century he remains an important innovator in modernism and highly significant in the development of ideas and forms in modern religious art. He is not easily placed in a category as ‘Fauvist’, ‘Expressionist’, ‘Modernist’ or even ‘Christian Artist’. Like all great art his work is unpredictable and challenging, as well as formally delighting the eye. Yet, as he was to claim: “Everything about my art is religious”… “All my art is religious for those who know how to look at it.” [Correspendance. p.19].
EARLY YEARS
Georges Rouault did not begin his career with religious convictions; his early upbringing was primarily secular. He grew to be proud of having had humble origins and artisan roots, partly because his faith, which developed later gave him a social and ethical consciousness, and he recognised that Christ identified with the downtrodden. Even when he was rising in fame, and as a mature artist, he is described as “cutting a poor, solitary figure.” He saw parallels with the background of Jesus, who had emerged from artisan roots, his father being a carpenter (or ‘tekton’, probably a ‘general workman’). Rouault’s father was a cabinetmaker who worked for the distinguished manufacturer Pleyel varnishing of pianos, though this was not a well-paid job and his family lived in relative poverty. Vollard recalled artist later expressing pride in his father’s integrity as workman, (an ‘ouvrier’/’worker’ was Rouault’s term), saying that the integrity of such a craftsman should be “honoured as Joseph the carpenter and his apprentice the infant Jesus” [Souvenirs 1957. p.162]. Of the false distinction between ‘artisan’ and ‘artist’ he was to write: “One starts as a craftsman and then one becomes an artist if he can. But is it not better to be a good craftsman then a mediocre artist? [Soliloques 1944 p.104]. He celebrated the anonymity of the mediaeval craftsmen who worked with what he called “the cathedral spirit” out of faith and love of what they were making for God, rather than personal fame or financial reward [Soliloques p.51]: Their modest humility, he believed led them to carve “Non nobis Domine, sed nomini tua da gloriam” / “Not to us, O Lord, but to your name be the glory” on their work [Ps.115:1 or Ps.113:9 in the Vulgate]. Rouault claimed to regard his own work and aims similarly, when he wrote about it between the late 1920s to 40s.
There is a tendency to over-romanticise his life, art and ideas in some of Rouault’s sayings, which contrast with the artist’s ‘Realist’ aims. This romanticism may also account for the seeming ‘sweetness’; in some of his mature subjects like clowns, dancers, saints, Mary, heads of Christ /Veronica veils and Biblical landscapes. He intended them to seem more raw that they appear today. He was aiming to express realism about the vicissitudes of human life and faith, yet they sometimes cross the border into sentimentalism. This was also the case with some other modernist artists like Derain, Utrillo, Bonnard, Buffet, Maurice Denis, Franz Marc, Ewald Mataré, even Arp and Brancusi. Rouault’s occasional romantic or sentimental parallels between the life of Christ and his own may be influenced by some particular brands of Catholicism which influenced him, though other spiritual influences rooted him in the realism of the hard life experienced by many who he saw around him.
Georges later repeatedly referred to the almost-legend-like story of his birth. He was born on 27th May 1871in a poor area of Paris in a cellar under bombardment during the insurrection at the end of the Paris Commune, which came to be known as ‘Bloody Week’. His family home had been destroyed during the attack. Later this, rather over-romantically, encouraged parallels with Jesus’ birth in a stable, away from home and his marginalised status in Egypt as a refugee. Georges was baptised a month later on 25th June 1871 in the parish church of Saint-Leu, but neither his upbringing and education were religious.
He grew up as a frail child. Until his mid-20s, his priorities were primarily secular, spending his childhood in the challenging social environment in Belleville. .As his father was a partisan, opposed to the current papacy, he refused to send his son to a Catholic school, and enrolled him in a Protestant one, from which he soon removed him due to their over strict regime of punishment. Belleville was one of several poor and dismal working-class ‘faubourgs’/‘suburbs’ of Paris, to which Rouault later referred in the Miserere and elsewhere as the “district of long-suffering” or ‘rue des solitaires /-street of the lonely).. In these areas for the poor and manual workers, many lived in crowded tenements or rundown smaller homes near the factories where they worked. People had said of Jesus ‘Could anything good come out of Nazareth’ [Jn.1:46], a poor district of Israel, known more for its rebels than for harmonious religious teaching and peace-making spiritual leadership. It is probable that during Georges’ childhood time few inhabitants of Belleville aspired to political, social or cultural greatness, or to be fine artists. However, he remembered his future tutor Gustave Moreau saying that ‘a painter should be grateful if he was poor, for it is difficult for a person to sense the wonder and horror where all the world lives, if he has never been down with them’ [quoted by W. Dyrness 1971 p.61].
Rouault he called himself one of the “labouring classes”, an ‘ouvrier’, like his father who would actually have been called an ‘ebeniste’ or ‘skilled craftsman’. Part of his inherited ethic was hard work with integrity, which he later formed into his Christian ethic as an artist. An intense feeling for morality is seen in the subjects of his art. Doing what was ethically right was also largely his reason for later persisting with a prolonged legal battle with the heirs of his dealer Ambrose Vollard over the ownership of his own work. From Georges’ father Alexander he learned to appreciate quality and beauty in materials and workmanship, which contributed to the meticulous technical way in which he later approached his own art. His mother encouraged him in his appreciation of arts, as did his maternal grandfather, who owned and introduced him to a wide variety of reproductions of works of art, particularly a large collection of lithographs by Daumier and prints of paintings by Rembrabndt, COUrbet and Manet. His grandfather, with whom he often stayed as a child, frequent took him on walks along the quays of the Seine to book stalls where he collected prints. or prints. Rouault later claimed that his ‘first schooling was with Daumier’, an influence which can be seen in many of his own figures. He was influenced not just the forms of Daumier but also the concept of creating moral images which commented on the society of his day. He was encouraged to draw in chalk. drawings on the floor, or at his grandparents and through his aunts, who painted porcelain. Despite their background the family were particularly artistically and culturally aware. They were interested in creating and self-educating rather than simply collecting for decoration. Rouault saw this as part of his artisan heritage and contrasted it to what he considered as a bourgeois passion for buying, collecting and ownership. However, the latter culture was how his career was supported.
Rather than follow his father into furniture manufacture, in 1885 at the age of fourteen, Georges left home and began an apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer under the mediaeval glass restorer Georges Hirsch. This continued for five years until 1890. Rouault later attributed his love of intense colour and the moods it could evoke to this experience: After all the destruction in Paris of the previous decades, and the rise of the arts and crafts in interior design this must have felt to be a secure career. Rightly or wrongly, his experience in glass painting has often been linked to Rouault’s later use of black lines surrounding luminous colours in his later painting. This has sometimes been over-stressed, though Rouault also pointed to it. At the same time, to advance his painterly skills for his work Rouault also augmented his apprenticeship by copying art on Sundays in the Louvre and attending evening classes at the School of Decorative Arts, then in 1890 at the School of Fine Arts.
EARLY CAREER AS A PAINTER & HIS TUTOR GUSTAVE MOREAU
This experience in art led Rouault’s career towards a new direction. In December 1890, at the age of 18 he became a full-time student at the École des Beaux-Arts, then France’s most prestigious official training school for artists. After his first year his tutor Jules-Élie Delaunay died and Gustave Moreau was appointed to succeed him in teaching in the studio where Rouault studies alongside Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin and Charles Camoin. Moreau’s teaching was less didactic and dogmatic than many academic artists. He discouraging his pupils from simply imitating the conventional academic art and theories of the time. He encouraged them to explore freer methods and ideas that would help them to find their particular individual enthusiasms and follow personal creative directions at an earlier stage in their training than most teachers allowed. In effect, he guided Rouault to find himself as an artist and to feel free creatively. Moreau also took interest in him personally, helping and advising him in his private and emotional life. Morea did not just introduce Georges to the artistic ideas and techniques of his own field of Symbolism; he encouraged him to look wider and explore as many directions in art as appealed to him. .These included the subject matter and techniques of late 19th Century Realism and by contrast Mediaeval religious art, which influenced the iconic nature of his later images. Rouault developed a rather different aesthetic, aims and ideas to those of his teacher. Whereas Moreau often represented what was technically and culturally termed ‘le beau ideal’, Rouault’s work became more rooted in social realism. But Moreau had the integrity not to allow this difference to impair their relationship, as both were aiming to convey truth in art. Rouault recalled Moreau teaching “The harmony and secret rhythm of life, there is our certainty” [Souvenirs Intimes 1927: p.20].
Moreau’s attitude towards religion was more that of a Symbolist than the committed Catholicism of the Christianity which Rouault was later to develop. Moreau was a Catholic but he claimed to distrust dogmatism and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had a deep attachment to the aesthetics of the Christian faith, which Rouault grew to share. Moreau expressed a love of the sacramental aspects of Catholic liturgy and tradition. He used their symbols in his art – the elements of the Mass, baptismal water, candles, oil, fire, ashes, palms, incense,all fascinated him for their symbolic content. He drew on the Bible and Catholic traditions for much of his iconography. Like Odilon Redon or Gauguin’s later works Moreau sought to express spiritual ideas often through representing exotic or unreal mystical scenes. Maurice Denis or Puvis de Chavannes represented the spiritual through idealising figures and settings. Jules Breton and Millet used naturalistic realism to convey a sense of the Christian spirit found in the simple aspects of everyday life. Their realism became closer to Rouault’s faith and aims. However Moreau’s mystical attitude to spirituality had a profound effect on Rouault’s exploration of how to represent the transcendence and mysteries of faith and the inner world of his subjects. He recalled Moreau’s teaching that the artist’s role was : “defending the rights of the imagination and the inner vision over against visible reality” [Rouault Souvenires Intimes p.44] Georges later defined Moreau’s creed as: “Do you believe in God? I am asked. I believe only in God. In fact I do not believe in what I touch nor in what I see, I only believe in what I cannot see; solely in what I sense. My mind and my reason seem to me ephemeral and of a dubious reality. My inner consciousness alone appears eternal and unquestionably certain” [Rouault and Suarès’ article ‘Moreau’ in L’Art et les Artistes. April 1926 p.240]. Primarily Moreau’s lasting influence on Rouault was his insistence on the freedom of artists to go in the direction in which their inspiration directed them. He encouraged Rouault to search for the ‘inner’ in the subjects that attracted his imagination and find ways to express the ‘inner voice’ of the artist’s response.
Rouault thrived as a student, producing paintings derived mostly from the academic subjects of mythology and religion like ‘The Dead Christ’ and ‘Samson Turning the Millstone’. His ‘The Child Jesus among the Doctors’ [1894] reveals the influence of Rembrandt on his early work, which Moreau cautioned him not to over-play. At this time, it was probably the style and expression in Rembrandt that impressed and influenced Rouault rather than anything of the artist’s personal faith. At the age of twenty three in 1894, Georges won the Chenavard Prize for painting with ‘The Child Jesus among the Doctors’. In 1895, at only his second attempt, he was also in the running for the prestigious Prix de Rome, and was apparently agreed to have won, but this was vetoed by the academic painter Léon Bonnat. Gustave Moreau appears to have particularly provided comfort and encouragement to Rouault following this disappointment, which cemented their future friendship more deeply. Moreau’s advice was not to continue to follow the dry process of academic art but to move on from the school and develop his painting independently. Rouault’s close friend André Suarès was to write later to Rouaulr, of how he had developed through Moreau’s guidance: “You have studied the masters, you have followed them, and you have understood the great lesson which is to be yourself.” [Correspondance}
Beyond the Ecole des Beaux Arts Rouault’s art and ideas expanded further. He moved away from the subjects which were expected to win academic art competitions and moved towards greater realism. He became influenced by the works of Courbet, Manet, Daumier and Forain. He painted images of social tragedy like those in the literature of Zola, Balzac and Victor Hugo, which reflected the life of the community in which he had lived as a youth. Here I need to define ‘Realism’ and ‘Naturalism’... ‘Realism’ is the movement in French painting which sought to represent the everyday life, often of ordinary people, with a roughness, physicality and sometimes visceral painterliness that was very different form the idealism, smoothness and elegance of line and paint of academic art. ‘Naturalism’ in art is closer to creating a photographic likeness than ‘Realism’. However the term ‘Naturalism’ in French literature was the equivalent of ‘Realism’ in painting. Writers like Zola and the de Goncourts sought to represent the realities of the everyday life of ordinary people who were representative of the society of their day. Often the ‘rawness’ of their lives was in their behaviour, thinking, lack of bourgeois sophistication or the roughness of the situations in which they lived.
An aim at ‘realism’ was to flourish into the subjects and techniques of Rouault’s work in the first decade of the 20th Century. Realism in art and Naturalism in the literature he read particularly focused on tragic events, the challenges of life and sense of fate which dominated the lives of people from various communities or lifestyles, but particularly the downtrodden or marginalised. Rouault, as a young artist, sought to find subjects that reflected his own vision of reality and appealed to his personality and ideals. Gustave Moreau continued to support, advise and guide him after he left the art-school, but also introduced him to other members of the literary and artistic world who became influences. Moreau also encouraged him spiritually in his growing quest to explore what was true and meaningful in faith and helped him find ways to express his spirituality. This helped Rouault find an art style and subject-matter that suited his personal character.
The surviving early works by Rouault combine the heroic style and subject matter of academic art with an attitude towards colour, symbolism and pose that are clearly influenced closely by Moreau. In Rouault’s 'Souvenirs Intimes' Georges quoted his former teacher “You like serious art, and sober and, in its essence, religious, and everything you do will be stamped with that seal.” Whether the prophetic aspect of this was recollected romantically in hindsight we cannot be sure, but Rouault later regarded it as a key to the direction which his future career would take.
In developing as an independent artist Rouault began to send work annually to the Salon des Artistes Française. He became influenced by artists like Cezanne and Gauguin whose works he saw in the Ambroise Vollard Gallery. From 1910, Rouault’s own work was exhibited in the Druet Gallery (his first one-man exhibition), then with Ambroise Vollard. In Vollard’s gallery particularly it was seen by several German artists and influenced the development of Expressionism.
Having apparently become Moreau’s favourite pupil, and developing a relationship of friendship and trust with the older master, in 1902 Georges was eventually entrusted with the position of the first curator of Moreau’s Paris mansion and collection. This was bequeathed to the state after Moreau’s death from cancer in 1898 and became the Gustave Moreau Museum.
Gustave Moreau had been Rouault’s major support and influence. The tragedy of losing him led to a five year crisis in Georges Rouault, emotionally, artistically, spiritually and ethically which he referred to as an "abyss" in which he felt isolated. He recalled "It was then that I learned the truth of Cezanne's famous words, 'Life is horrifying'". The memories of this harsh time emotionally and financially probably influenced the dark nature of many of his later works of social criticism. His depression was exacerbated by his parents’ move to Algeria to support his sister whose husband had recently died. The crisis eventually turned him towards rethinking his ideas about art, life, morality, spirituality, friendship and community.
In 1902 he underwent a further emotional and physical crisis, having become fatigued and ill through overwork, material insecurity and uncertainty about the direction of his career after the dispersion of the community at Ligué Abbey, which he briefly joined (discussed later). He was sent to convalesce in Evian le Bains and found that the encouragement to rest and the surroundings revived and renews his strength as well as developing new visions for his work. It led to an energetic return to painting. “The rest over there, the sky and the snow, had cleansed my eye. Nevertheless the emotions of those long tragic years that had bruised me were so stored up in me. A kind of release took place, and I set to paint with a frenzy.” [quoted by Charensol Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. Paris: Editions des Quatre Chenins 1926 p.4].
Thankfully in 1902 Rouault’s appointment as curator of the Gustave Moreau mansion and collection, to transform it into a museum provided him with some security. The salary, though relatively low, allowed him to be more regularly financially stable and helped him become more independent in his work as an artist. The regular income enabled him to follow directions which were not always appreciated by the public, buyers, the art-critical world or Christian believers.
Rouault had already painted religious subjects as part of his academic training including The Way to Calvary [1891]. Like most aspiring artists he sought to exhibit in important public exhibitions, and submitted his works from 1895. His primary regular early exhibiting was in the Salon d'Automne of which he was one of the founding exhibitors in 1903. There he reencountered Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin and Charles Camoin, with whom he had already trained under Moreau, and other artists who were to develop modernism. A growing friendship with them led to the development of the ideas of the Fauvist movement and in 1905 he exhibited alongside them in the Salon d'Automne where their ideas and images were first declared to the public. The vibrancy and apparent spontaneity of their work was influenced by the spontaneity of Impressionism, the colour and theoreticism of Post-Impressionism, particularly the expressive colour and marks of van Gogh and the spiritual expression of Gauguin and the Nabis, as well as growing interest in conveying responses through expressionism. Rouault never developed into a fully-fledged Fauve as his ideas and aims were broader. Yet the instinctive spontaneity and brightness of the Fauve’s images greatly enhanced the development of Rouault’s later work, though he went through a darker period initially. He was not an obvious ‘Fauve, but shared with them a sense that artists should consider themselves creatively free in subject-matter and technique, not restricted by conventions. This freedom was to lead to the rejection of some of his work as ugly by those who did not understand the spiritual intention behind his expressionism. However, he became more intent on refining the expressive technique of his painting than many of the freer artists of modernism and was critical of the slap-dash approach of some. He preferred to refine his techniques. Neither did he follow the over-emphasis of technique over subject-matter of cubism. In his attitude to his work subject, form, colour, style and intention all had to work together in harmony to convey his meaning.
FAMILY LIFE
In 1908, Rouault married the sister of the painter Henri Sidaner [7 August 1862 – 14 July 1939]. Marthe Le Sidaner had trained as a pianist and their relationship may account for the many parallels with music and harmony in the artist’s writings about visual art. They remained together for the rest of his life, raising four children – Geneviève, Isabelle, Michel and Agnès.
Rouault’s family life is beyond the scope of this study. But it seems to have been a supportive and happy one. Maritain wrote fondly of Rouault’s family and his relationship with them [cf.Genevieve Nouialle-Rouault, "Maritain, Rouault et Nous," Cahiers Jacques Maritain, no. 4-5 (November, 1982), pp. 79-84]. As a ‘worker’ he regarded one of his responsibilities as being the support of his family. In a letter of 1913 to André Suarès, Rouault wrote of himself: “The dream of Rouault is to meet by himself the needs of his family without surrendering an atom of his ideas.” [Correspondance p.52]. Although he worked phenomenally long hours at his painting and printmaking, it was not just out of an obsession with making art. Part of his early energetic work as an artist was to earn enough to support his growing family. Their own dedication to him is seen in the way the family maintained his reputation after his death. Isabel especially did much to promote his work throughout her life. The family maintained his last studio as it was at his death, it remains in that condition in the Bastille area of Paris, near the Gare de Lyons. They donated works to a large number of museums including their huge 1963 presentation to the French state, now primarily at the Pompidou Centre. His four children also created the Rouault Foundation to promote and protect his work and create a study centre for his archives in the apartment where he lived during his last years.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROUAULT’S FAITH AND IDEAS ABOUT CHRISTIAN ART
The early years of the 20th Century in France saw a brief revival in Roman Catholicism, in a country that was proudly secular. Several distinguished literary figures and critics were leaders within this movement, including Charles Péguy, J.K. Huysmans, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain and Léon Bloy. It also attracted artists like Rouault, Maurice Denis, Antonin Bourbon, George Desvallières, and influences other more secular artists to experiment with religious themes. Their neo-Catholicism rejected what they considered to be the official French Catholic Church’s superficial, spiritually poor, lax liberal allegiance to the Christian faith. They encouraged a revival of stricter theological and liturgical traditions, spiritual vitality and social and religious commitment and fought against superficiality and weakness in official church art. The movement attracted the young Georges Rouault, perhaps due to Moreau having awakened spiritual consciousness within him. Moreau had encouraged him in his spiritual search. However Rouault moved towards a more orthodox form of Christian spirituality than the more esoteric beliefs reflected in Moreau’s work.
Already, during his study under Moreau, Rouault had sought out and received instruction and preparation for his first communion under a Dominican Father Vallée. At the age of 24 Rouault he developed a longing to discover a deeper, more authentic faith. Moreau’s death had left him without the form of spiritual support which the older artist had provided. Around the turn of the century, when millennial ideas were revived, he began to develop contacts with writers from the revivalist movement and in late April 1901 became part of the group of intellectuals meeting for discussions at the Benedictine Ligugé Abbey, near Poitiers. He had been invited there by another artist, Antonin Bourbon, with whom he had studied under Moreau. The writer J.K. Huysmans, who became a friend, developed the idea of founding a community of Catholic artists at the abbey. They encouraged humility, resisted the idea of artists or writers vainly promoting themselves and encouraged spiritual and artistic integrity. Their intention was to encourage the creation of authentic ‘Christian’ art. This was similar to the aims of the Nazarines, certain Pre-Raphaelites like Holman Hunt, and various other movements like those which developed into Eric Gill’s similar communities at Capel-y-ffin and Ditchling
J.K. HUYSMANS
Rouault met J.K. Huysmans in 1901 and became excited by his idealistic ideas of reforming faith and creating forms of Christian art that were marked by spiritual, ethical and artistic integrity. Joris-Karl Huysmans [1848-1907] had spiritual, social and aesthetic sensibilities which resonated with Rouault. He balanced work worked as a government bureaucrat with art criticism and a love of modern art. Manuy of his artistic and cultural influences had come through Baudelaire, and a major spiritual influence was the millennial teaching of Ernest Hello. Hello also wrote ideas about Christian aesthetics, which influenced Huysmans’ thoughts on art and its aims, like: “Art ought to be one of the forces that heals the imagination; it must say that evil is ugly.” [L’Homme. Paris 1921. .p.19.] Léon Bloy, who Rouault met 3 years later in 1904, had influenced the development of some of Huysman’s early mystical ideas about spirituality but their relationship, once friendly, was erratic. Huysmans was more humble than Bloy and accepted some of his ideas. These included the belief that suffering helped to guide people’s lives and minds towards God. Yet he would not allow himself to be dominated or dictated to by Bloy and had a broader mind. His most famous writing, before his conversion to Catholicism ‘A Rebours’ / ‘Against the Grain’ [1884] was idealistic, influenced by Plotinus, and explored the spiritual aspects of art, which he considered more elevating than reality. It reflected the spiritual aspects of the aesthetics of the ‘Decadent’ movement in French art and literature. Around 1890, like many in the ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Symbolist’ movements, he had experimented with the occult, and describes this in his novel Là-Bas’ / ‘Down There’ [1891]. This fascination with the esoteric led towards his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, about which he wrote in ‘En Route’ [1895]. In the novel the main character from Là Bas rejects Satanism and explores faith in a Trappist monastery. Huysmans wrote: “In studying his conversion, I've tried to trace the progress of a soul surprised by the gift of grace, and developing in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, to the accompaniment of mystical literature, liturgy, and plainchant, against a background of all that admirable art which the Church has created".[quoted in Robert Baldick. 1955 The Life of J.-K. Huysmans OUP, revised 2006 by Brendan King, Dedalus, p.288].
As part of the community that Huysmans’ started and inspired at Ligugé Abbey, Rouault became determined not to compromise his art by pandering to flattery or watering-down his message, content or artistic production to accord with public taste and expectations. This built upon the idea of artistic freedom that Moreau had encouraged. In the abbey environment, which encouraged quiet and contemplation, Rouault explored ideas and discussed with Huysmans and others the qualities of a truer Christian art, which would abandon the Art-institutions’ traditional ideas and preoccupations with competition, medals, prizes, money or fame and aim at artistic, intellectual and moral integrity. The Liguécommunity was sadly short-lived. The French government were understandably still insecure after the Commune and various political and social movements and challenges in previous decades. They wanted to supress dissent and all groups that challenged the status quo, including any societies or idealists which they believed posed a possible threat or questioned the existing social order. The government were also strongly anti-clerical. As a result they voted in the 1901 Waldeck-Rousseau Law which banned radical societies, including religious associations, which had any political focus or nature. This led to a dissolving of the Catholic artistic and literary community at Ligugé Abbey and 753 other religious groups [cf. Dyrness 1977 p.66 note 26]. The monks of the community moved to Belgium in late June and all thel members left by the end of October. Rouault returned to Paris where he continued to search for subject-matter and style which would satisfy his spiritual and artistic ideas.
It was not an easy time, and triggered another emotional crisis, which led him to return to Evian le Bans to convalesce. This period of rest allowed him to consolidate the ideas which he had been exploring in the Ligué community and led to an alteration in his subject matter and a renewed vigour in his work. Though Huysmans had recommended idealism in religious art, Rouault was to move to a far more ‘Realist’ expression of the ideals that had been discussed in the community. He contributed some of the ideas of artistic freedom to the group founding the Salon d’Automne in 1903.
LÉON BLOY
In Gustave Moreau's library Rouault had found and read revolutionary Roman Catholic Socialist works by Léon Bloy. Bloy [1846 -1917] was a novelist, poet, essayist and pamphleteer who criticised the hypocrisy of aspects of bourgeois society. He denounced conventional French Catholic Christianity, as mediocre. The directness and independence of Bloy’s writing inspired Rouault to begin to introduce Bloy’s ideas into the subjects of his paintings. Georges Charensol quoted Rouault’s expression of how this new realisation influenced him after the emotional crisis after he left the Ligué Abbey community: “I then suffered a most violent moral crisis. I was experiencing things that cannot be explained in words. And I began to paint an outrageously lyric painting that baffled everyone.” [Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. Paris: Editions des Quatre Chenins 1926 p.24]
Leon Bloy developed friendships with Huysmans, Maritain and Rouault all of whom he attempted to radicalise in developing and intellectualising their faith. Bloy’s own conversion in about 1870 followed by the conversion of his prostitute mistress Anne-Marie Roulet, and their conviction of the imminent end of the world is romanticised in Bloy’s first and semi-autobiographical novel Le Déspéré [1886]. Bloy was fascinated by the encouragements to absolutist faith of Ernest Hello, the millennial prophecies of Eugene VIntras and the reported appearance of the Virgin at La Salette with the apocalyptic message that the end of time was imminent unless people turned to spiritual reform. Bloy's Le Désespéré also attacked the rationalism of the secular literary community, which antagonised former friendships with Zola, Renan and Guy de Maupassaint. He was uncompromising in his diatribes, a very different character from the more reconciliatory, taciturn and solitary Rouault. With a strong temper, many regarded him as a bigot. After Victor Hugo’s death in 1885, when the state was celebrating the author, Bloy criticised what he considered to be his atheism and derided the writer. He accused Hugo of hypocrisy in his championship of the lives of the poor.
Bloy’s polemicism, by contrast, encouraged the poor to endure suffering and deprivation as faith could support them. He regarded God as having arranged history and society as it was, in order to turn people towards true religion. He denounced the indifference of the rich towards the poor. Yet he believed that the poor could find spiritual consolation and sanctity in accepting their situation, not through longing for an alleviation of their suffering and poverty. In fact he taught that since Christ’s death suffering and poverty brought people sanctity in following Christs example. This coldness was very different from Rouault’s longings for social change, justice and equity. Bloy's Le Salut par les Juifs is an apocalyptic interpretation of Romans chapters 9 to 11, challenging the Catholic Church's attitude to Judaism. (It apparently influenced Vatican II’s call for a radical change of approach.). Bloy is recorded as having been impatient with God for tardiness in bringing judgement and destruction; there is not much grace towards others in his ideas. To be fair, Bloy did also recognise the hypocrisy and double standards in himself, confessing in 1914: “I have not done what God willed for me, that is certain, I have dreamed, on the contrary, what I wanted from God.” [Seilliere E. Leon Bloy: la psychologie d’un mystique. 1936 p.253],
Bloy’s attitude to faith was as tough as his attitude to suffering and poverty. Whereas the suffering Christ in Rouault’s paintings and prints evinces and encourages empathy, Bloy’s Christ is rougher. He reflects Bloy’s own bullish character, just as Rouault’s images of Christ reflect his own reflectiveness and humility. This may be seen in the words Bloy gives to the suffering Christ as he addresses the people in Le Désespéré: “I have created you, beloved vermin, in my thrice-sacred resemblance and you have responded by betraying me. Thus instead of punishing you, I have punished myself. It was not enough for you to resemble me. I, the Impassible, felt a great desire to make myself like you, so that you would become my equals. Therefore I have made myself vermin in your image.” [Le Désespéré Paris: Mercure de France 1967 p.375]. Bloy’s use of the title ‘The Impassible’ for Christ is very far from Rouault’s empathetic Christ; it implies that he is in some ways unmoved, impassive, not susceptible to pain or injury, almost an heretical view of Jesus as somewhat beyond humanity. (It has some similarities with the brand of Catholicism that influenced Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of the Christ’, which implies that if we had not sinned so greatly, Christ would not have needed to suffer so much.) This is very different from the way that Rouault’s images of Christ and his sufferings address the viewer visually. Rouault’s Christ is entirely alongside us in our pain and sympathises even with the morally deficient, who Bloy degrades as ‘beloved vermin’. Unlike Rouault, there is very little ’love’ apparent in Bloy’s idea that humanity is made in God’s “thrice-sacred resemblance”. Bloy resembles a condemnatory hell-fire preacher, while the humbler Rouault is more the one who holds a mirror up to our wounds and sins and shows how Christ comes alongside to help in the healing process.
Although Rouault was very different from the cold, dogmatic and bullying Bloy, the quieter Rouault graciously still regarded Bloy as a friend until the writer’s death in the war in 1917. This attitude was maintained despite Bloy’s savage and inconsiderate private and public criticism of the ugliness which he saw in the artist’s works. Rouault particularly admired Bloy’s novel La Femme Pauvre about the miseries of Clotilde, a woman whose committed faith strengthened her to endure many sufferings. She became a symbol in some of Rouault’s painted characters. Despite Bloy’s dubious personality he was a persuasive influence on many, particularly instrumental in Huysmans’ conversion. The painter George Desvallières who had also trained under Moreau became a similarly radicalised active Christian artist through his influence. Like Rouault with whom he trained, he applied his faith to his art, though his work took a different direction into avant-garde symbolism, more like the work of Maurice Denis.
CHARLES PÉGUY
Much has been written of Rouault and Leon Bloy, but Rouault’s social, religious and other commitments were far closer to the writer Charles Péguy [1873-1914], with whom Bloy had quarrelled.
Sadly Péguy was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Marne on 5th September 1914. So he was one of the Christian cultural casualties of war memorialised in Miserere. Maritain would have been familiar with Peguy’s work, and discussed it with Rouault. Jacques and Raissa Maritain regularly visited Péguy in the years between 1907 and his death, so knew him well during his most creative Christian years. Rouault would also have known his work through the review ‘Cahiers de la quinzaine’, which Péguy founded and first published in 1900, and to which the writer contributed many articles. Between 1910 and 1914 Péguy was being celebrated as a master by the young nationalist revival movement, longing to bring freedom, following Zola and Victor Hugo. In popular circles his work was largely neglected after his death until his reputation was re-established as a hero both for Vichy France and the Resistance, especially after the publication of his friend Romain Rolland’s two volume biography of the poet’s life and work in 1944.
Péguy, like Rouault, came from a family of poor artisans, who were more illiterate than Rouaul’s family. He had entered the École Normale Superieure in 1894 but had given up his studies to follow socially committed causes in 1897, He began to write social critique, leading to his founding of his ‘Cahiers de la quinzaine’. He wrote against the repression of people by any regime secular or ecclesiastical and was against censorship, legalism and authoritarianism of any kind. ‘Notre Patrie’, ‘Les Suppliants parallèles’, and ‘Louis de Gonzague’ were critiques written as France seemed under threat of German invasion, and in the early years of the Great War, where Péguy criticised those who he called ‘professional optimists’ who fantasised that the world was progressing. They listed many modern incidents and victims of persecutions and massacres, in much the same way as Rouault’s Miserere was to do visually. ’Notre Jeunesse’ (‘Our Youth’) [1910] attacked both the Republican Left and the Nationalist Right for their attitude to underdogs and persecuted minorities in society worldwide.
Péguy like several of the Catholic revival writers had returned to faith after a secular youth. He was converted in 1908 and his Catholicism, socialism and nationalism united in regarding God as freedom-loving. His Catholicism was not as orthodox and that of Rouault. His ‘Cahiers de la quinzaine’ began as a reaction against the ‘Index’ of banned literature or censorship imposed by the Socialist Congress in 1899, and he was not afraid of questioning orthodox views. In this he was rather more brave than the group which Rouault had joined at the Ligué Abbey in 1901, which disbanded at the governmental injunction against alternative groups.
In 1910 Péguy wrote his first of a trilogy of ‘mystery’ plays written in free verse: ‘Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc’ (‘The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc’), which was a declaration of his new or ‘rediscovered’ faith. In it Joan discusses with a nun how one might save as Christ saved, now that Christ has been long-absent from earth. She expresses deep pity for humankind, which was also the theme of so much of Rouault’s work from Miserere onward. A nun, Christ and Mary then poetically speak of the Passion and Pieta and search for the meaning within the Crucifixion. The other two plays of the trilogy are ‘Le Porche dy mystère de la douxième vertu’ (‘The Porch of the Mystery of the Second Virtue’) and ‘Le Mystère des Saintes Innocents’ (‘The Mystery of the Holy Innocents’). In these we view the pains of the world and history through the eyes and mind of God. The trilogy was far more than a modern version of the mediaeval mystery plays. In the verses the writer explored theological, social and political questions, issues and ideas of contemporary relevance. He considered the psychological feelings of the religious characters involved, including speculating on God’s own thought processes. Péguy was trying to understand the theological reasons for the anguish and despair in the world, and work out whether one could have confidence in God. Péguy’s writing was not afraid to question the justice and pain in the world. Justice and mercy, represented by Mary, don’t always agree. God views Christ’s Passion and the human condition and partly through understanding the human predicament of his Son gives answers to the Crucifixion and offers creation ‘Night, Sleep and Hope’.
Work on the trilogy led to a period of 4 years of creative vitality at the age of 37, producing much poetry, often on religious themes, leading up to his last book (published posthumously , Ballade du Coeur (Ballad of the Heart). His long epic poem ‘Eve’ of 8,000 Alexandines, written in between June and December 1913 is modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Like Rouault, Péguy supported the freedom of the artist, especially after the Socialist Congress attempted to create censorship. Although he himself was a committed socialist and regarded socialism as a Christian concept, he believed that artists should be able to think and explore without constraint, so a ‘socialist art’ was unacceptable:
“It would be dangerous if we let it be believed that we have a socialist conception of art. We have a human conception of art. The social revolution will being about the liberation of art. It will give us a free art, but not a socialist art.... We demand that scholars and artists... should be independent from the city. We demand that science, art and philosophy be left... (with a freedom from socialist regulations, a freedom)... that appertains to all humankind itself.” [from ‘Réponse brêve à Jaurès’ 1900]. This was very close to Rouault’s ideas that the artist should be able to explore in areas of creativity, free from religious, ethical, or aesthetic constraints.
CHRISTIAN REALISM
The social and religious critique of Bloy and the emotional crisis that Rouault had undergone after 1901-2 found expression in the figures and moral and social subjects which Rouault moved towards painting. Around 1907, he worked on images in a new style, which were critical of bourgeois life, the injustice of judges and courts, and the isolated lives of prostitutes, and the sad lives of clowns and entertainers. Their images are often caricatured, with the figures who he was critiquing grotesquely distorted to reflect their moral defects. Many of these new works took on some of the ideas of Symbolism to which Moreau had introduced him and became almost iconic allegories of human sins like lust, pride, arrogance, power and other social vices. He was particularly critical of the indifference of the rich or influential to the misery of the poor, needy, underprivileged or marginalised. Many of the caricatured images unmask figures who regard themselves as socially or even ethically superior, holding up the mirror of truth and reality to the corruptions within society. He transformed observed social situations though his own emotional reaction. As the ‘Naturalist’ writer Zola had written: “Art is reality, communicated through being transformed by the senses.” Rouault’s caricatures and expressionism were not intended to deliberately revolt or distract the viewer by the ugliness of reality, but to convey realism. He felt he could not indulge in escapist beautiful images, which many might have preferred.
Rouault’s attitude to art as a Christian believer, was not to simply create comfortable images to encourage faith. He talked about the beauty painted by romantics or in conventional ‘sublime’ religious art as “the horrible beautiful” because it was disassociated from “nature, life or human behaviour.” Instead, he wanted to “draws forms out of the day by day sights that provide all variety of life, and at the same time release in themselves the power of emotion” [Benoit p.446]. He developed, from Baudelaire’s Fleures du Mal and contemporaries in the ‘decadent’ movement, what became known as the “poetics of shock”. He confronted thinking viewers with the harsh realities of the world as it is rather being idealistic. The world of prostitution, the masks we wear, the horrors of war, thy hypocrisy of politics and justice all became themes for his art. In this, as in his painting technique, he was more of an ‘expressive realist’ than a ‘romantic’. He was criticised for painting the realities of prostitution, yet that had been a feature of the Realist novels of Zola, Balzac and even Hugo and he was not treating it with the delight of Lautrec, Manet or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. [1906-7].
His academic training with Moreau had introduced him to a combination of Romanticism and Symbolism, much of which touched on the Roman Catholic faith in a symbolic rather than a life-committed way, as Moreau’s own work displayed. Many in the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements explored and experimented with occult spirituality, as Huysmans had done. What is now described as ‘esoteric spirituality’ became fashionable. But in the first years of the 20th Century, France also experienced a revival in more traditional Roman Catholicism, into which Rouault became drawn. He was then radicalised in his faith by Huysmans. Maritain, Bloy and others. He wrote about this awakening, renewed Christian spirituality later in his life: “When I was about thirty, I felt a stroke of lightning, or of grace, depending on one’s perspective. The face of the world changed for me. I saw everything that I had seen before, but in a different form and with a different harmony.” His spiritual renewal and deeper commitment to his Catholic faith led him to re-think the subject-matter of his painting, as well as the priorities of his life.
His faith encouraged him to consider those who suffer, the debased or marginalized in society; those Christ reassured were blessed and valued by God’s love, as emphasised in the Beatitudes [Matt.5:3-12]. He embarked on a series of socially-committed works and everyday subjects that reflected the realities of life, which had been features of the works of Courbet, Zola, Balzac, the French Realists and the Impressionists. In his mind, his figures, particularly his paintings of prostitutes, refused to be idealised. They showed the less savoury aspects of human life and emphasised suffering, hypocrisy, indifference and degradation.
Rouault’s relative financial independence due to his employment at the Moreau Museum enabled him to continue in his new direction, despite much rejection of his new work. Sadly he received a lot of negative correspondence and criticism over his abandonment of his previous artistic direction, to follow the less elevating, unconventional style and subject matter of his new painting. He was criticised for the immorality of his subjects, the violence of his drawing, painting and colour and the ugliness of his subject matter. In his search for a new, uncompromising form of realism he lost the support and patronage of several of the collectors of Moreau’s work who had been attracted to his previous work through that connection. His work was also rejected by critics at the Salons and he gradually moved away from applying or exhibiting there. This leads one to consider how much a contemporary Christian artist has an obligation to work within certain conventions or expectations. The best sermons, we are told ‘comfort the uncomfortable and discomfort the comfortable’. Christian art should surely be similarly challenging not simplistic or just follow traditions. But artists with a message also needs to communicate effectively with their audience. Rouault’s coming great series of prints Miserere et Guerre similarly challenged aesthetic expectations but truly communicate..
BLOY’S CRITICISM OF ROUAULT
Rouault’s new emphasis on the unconventionally beautiful and the immoral is society inevitably shocked and disturbed some critics including friends, particularly close friends with religious sympathies like Léon Bloy and Jacques Maritain. They had previously championed him but could not comprehend his change of direction. Rouault’s direction in modernism remained rather incomprehensible to many modern critics both those of secular and religious persuasions. Some did not trust his work as being committed to modernism, others failed to recognise any relevance of Christianity to modern art. Bloy dismissed these works as “pornographic”, “sadomasochistic”, “an embarrassment of modernist art.”, a “leap into utter darkness,” by the artist he had previously encouraged. In arguments, letters, then in print he attributed this change to some “mental aberration.”
In an extensive printed diatribe L’Invendable (‘The Unsaleable’), Bloy publicly lambasted his friend’s work in the Salon d’ Automne, in the popular Mercure de France. Rather than critiquing Rouault’s work with understanding, it betrays Bloy’s bullying character, and shows his false, self-obsessed belief that he was the sole arbiter of Christian truth. This open immoderate address to the artist must have hurt the quiet Rouault more affectingly than most other criticism. He was young as a Christian, sincerely seeking to integrate his faith and his art. The ill-considered diatribe was hardly an authentic Christian response and sorely damaged the artist’s emerging reputation among intellectual and ecclesiastical circles, as well as critics and collectors: “I had the grief in understanding nothing of the sketches of my friend Rouault, who probably had as great a future as any modern painter, but who has been pulled down by some weird vertigo. The miserable man began with Rembrandt, only to throw himself into outer darkness… The artist that I thought was capable of painting seraphim seems only to be able to imagine the most atrocious and avenging caricatures. The meanness of the bourgeois works in him such a violent reaction of horror that his art seems to be a mortally wounded creature… Not for all the money in the world would I accept this ‘illustration’.” (This referred to a work illustrating one of Bloy’s own writings) “Today I have only two things to say to you, only two, the last! After which you will be no more to me than mere ‘acquaintance’. First, you are attracted exclusively by the ugly; you seem to be enthralled by the hideous. Secondly, if you were a man of prayer, a ‘eucharistic’, you would not be able to paint such terrible canvases. A reflective man would feel a little fearful at this point. I have told or written to you several times that your obsession grieves me. That has not seemed very serious to you, has it? You have thought of it as a rather amusing whim without suspecting for one minute that it is a question of a very real grief, of a man of the absolute, and that is a serious thing, It is time to stop.” [L’Invendable Paris: Mercure de France 1904-07 publ.1909 pp.43; 132; 290].
Bloy was himself a polemical social critic, very much more likely than Rouault to deliberately offend by expressing his ideas in shocking ways. Yet Bloy could not accept that the artist had had the temerity to not followed his advice. He failed to recognise the true spiritual intention within the nature of Rouault’s recent work. Rouault was aiming to be moderninst in his subject matter, but not deliberately aiming to be avant-garde in shocking the public visually, unlike many of his contemporary modernist artists. He wrote in 1945: “I have respected a certain internal order and laws, which I hope are traditional; removed from passing fashions and contemporaries – critics, artists or dealers – I believe I have kept my spiritual liberty.” [quoted in Soby p.129]. The artist was using visual means to encourage contemporary society, Catholic and secular, to become more sensitive and socially committed. This was close to the aims of the Realist artists and Naturalist writers who Bloy and Huysmans had admired. Rouault later stressed that he was not moralising. He claimed that he believed art to be ‘above the ethical’. [Dyrness 1971 p.70]. What Bloy considered ‘ugly’ was a rather more sensitive visual representation of the Bloys’ own literary comments on society (in Bloy’s case ‘diatribes’). For Rouault humanity was not ‘ugly’; only mediocrity, narrowness and hypocrisy were ‘ugly’, because they damaged the potential of light and life in human beings: “… the real ugliness, the absolute ugliness. And this is the mediocrity of spirit, short-sightedness that is enamoured with the vulgar… the stupid anecdote, baseness of spirit or heart, these are the truly ugly.” [Rouault ‘Enquete’ Caihiers d’Art 1935. No 10. p. 12]
Raïssa Maritain wrote of Rouault: “The religious inspiration is constant in his work… One feels he is perpetually watching over the evangelical values of human life” [Les Grandes Amitiés 1941 vol.1: p.227]. Rather than just painting conventional religious ‘elevating’ subjects, Rouault took religious visual art into the realms that Liberation Theology and the art it inspired, would challenge the Catholic Church towards socially and politically much later in the 20th Century. The conventional Church could not accept that direction either. As a result of misunderstanding like this, although Rouault had links and friendships with a number of clerics, he remained largely independent of the Church in his development of his ideas about Christian art and the application of his Catholic faith.
EARLY RECOGNITION AS AN ARTIST & FRIENDSHIP WITH MARITAIN
Despite recognition and a little success with his first one-man show at the Druet Gallery in 1910 Rouault’s income was low and his regular salary from the Gustave Moreau Museum was insufficient to support his growing family, which included his parents after their return from Africa. In 1911 Rouault and his wife moved to the then-cheaper old quarter of Versailles, where their home has been described as ‘squalid and rat-infested’. The philosopher Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa were neighbours, who he had first met in November 1905. The Maritains recollected that the artist was struggling internally at this time, recognising that if he returned to the academic style and subject-matter of ‘The Child Jesus among the Doctors’ which had won him the Prix Chenavard, he might be more able to sell his work. Yet he felt prompted by a desire to follow a different way, which he believed had more integrity. If he pandered to popular fashion he believed that he would have been betraying the high ideals that Moreau had fostered in him before his death. In a letter of 1913 to André Suarès, Rouault wrote of himself: “The dream of Rouault is to meet by himself the needs of his family without surrendering an atom of his ideas.” [Correspondance p.52]
In 1909 the Maritains had moved to Versailles where the Rouaults followed them two years later. Rouault had known Maritain previously through the Catholic revival movement. They had first met at the home of Leon Bloy, who became their godfather, and to whom they were very committed. Both of them wrote affectionately of Bloy in ways that make him and his opinions on life, suffering, art and faith seem less harsh than his relationship with Rouault sugested. [cf. J. Maritain "In Homage to Our Dear Godfather Leon Bloy," in Untrammeled Approaches . Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, pp. 37-39 and ‘Quelques pages sur Leon Bloy’ in J. Maritain Ouvres Completes, vol. III, p. 1022.]
Maritain was already gaining respect as a philosopher: he was to become one of the most influential Catholic philosophers and intellectual spokesmen on faith and culture of his time. He grew to influence both the French government, French culture and also became an influential cultural and philosophical advisor of the Vatican. Under the influence of Bloy he and his wife had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1905. Rouault attended their baptism in mid-1906. Maritain also befriended the painter Maurice Denis and was a friend of the politician and writer Peguy who had similar cultural sensibilities.
In Versailles the Maritains and Rouaults met frequently. The Rouaults were invited to their home for meals almost weekly and the two men talked for hours, discussing religion, mysticism, social justice, the philosophy of beauty and artistic practice. Rouault and Jacques and shared and interest in the purity of childlike innocence, as well as a sensitivity to truth and the beauty that they recognised in the world. They also felt a solidarity with the poor and disadvantaged, and longed for social justice. Their religious sensitivity was also close, though Maritain became more conservative in his practice than Rouault. Maritain added intimacy and warmth to Rouault’s reserved character. He understood and encouraged the artist. Rouault helped Maritain to clarify his aesthetic ideas and sensitivity towards art as well as helping to liberate him from the dominant spiritual and intellectual constraints that had burdened him through the guidance he had received from strict spiritual directors during his conversion to the Catholic faith.
Soon after the move to Versailles, Rouault’s father who lived with them, died and Rouault received much support and companionship from Jacques Maritain in particular. Maritain and his wife’s friendship with Rouault strongly increased Rouault’s commitment to his Catholic faith and practice. Their discussions deepened Rouault’s application of his faith to the world and to art. Rouault’s enriched ideas through this friendship proved vital in helping the artist understand subtleties in his faith and feelings. This in turn led to his art becoming more specific in its religious content. Georges and Jacques remained friends throughout Rouault’s life from the first decade of the 20th Century. So close was their relationship that Rouault gave Maritain a full set of his treasured prints of Miserere, which the writer admired..
Maritain’s writing on aesthetics and faith were greatly influenced by his friendship with Rouault, and he mentioned the artist and his ideas particularly in ‘Three Painters’ [] ‘Frontiers of Poetry [1935] Art and Scholasticism [1947] and ‘Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry’ [1953]. Rouault became one of his favourite painters, as well as a friend, and Maritain wrote about him in his lifetime with more understanding then most critics. Before Jacque composed any of his writings on philosophy he was asked by Rouault to write the introduction to the catalogue of his first exhibition at Galerie Druet [Feb.-Mar. 1910]. At Rouault’s suggestion Maritain wrote under a pseudonym and chose ‘Jacques Favelle’ for its working-class connection with those who built the cathedrals of France. Jacques' grandfather had been Jules Favre. Maritain wrote of Rouault in the catalogue as ‘a true primitive who was a popular or people's artist, for his frank and naive inspiration is very close to that of the happy artisans of days gone by, those of Romanesque and early medieval times’.… Rouault's "naive images, made by a patient workman who loved his tools and the matter he was working on… who loved his craft … with a serious and obstinate passion and with a constant need to perfect his technique." He wrote that Rouault "finds his inspiration, not in some abstract system or some literary emotion, but in what life itself, the life of [his own] time and of [his own country], makes him, so to speak, touch with his finger."
Later, in reference to Rouault’s thoughts Maritain wrote “a philosopher could study in him the virtue of art as in its pure state, with all its demands, its mystery and its purity." [Jacques Maritain, Frontieres de Ia Poesie (Paris: Rouart, 1935), p. 133.] … "What he sees and knows with a strange pity, and what he makes us see, is the miserable affliction and the lamentable meanness of our times, not just the affliction of the body, but the affliction of the soul, the bestiality and the self-satisfied vainglory of the rich and the worldly, the crushing weariness of the poor, the frailty of us all."[ Cahiers Jacques Maritain, no. 12 (November, 1985), p. 24.] Maritain published a more considered monograph on the painter and his works, which showed a deepening in understanding that had come through further reflection.
The distortions ("defonnations," and "gribouillages") which Bloy so disliked did not disturb Maritain as much. He wrote of Rouault’s aim to "reproduce as much as he possibly can the-truth of the things that move him," with a kind of "naive frankness"…"He knows that truth is never found in the copy. He does not see things in their banality. He has an imaginative vision of things, he contemplates them in the world of their greater reality and it is in this world that he paints them." [Cahiers Jacques Maritain, no. 12 (November, 1985), p. 26.] Later, in ‘Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry’, Maritain wrote: “Saint Thomas (Aquinas) insisted that art imitates nature in her operation-not in respect to natural appearances, but in respect to the ways in which nature herself operates .... Such a genuine concept of "imitation" affords a ground and justification for the boldest kinds of transposition, transfiguration, deformation, or recasting of natural appearances, in so far as they are the means to make the work manifest intuitively the ‘transapparent’ reality which has been grasped by the artist." [Jacques Maritain. 1953. ‘Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry'. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 224-5].
ROUAULT’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CHURCH.
Rouault’s subject matter during this period of his art can sometimes still feels uncomfortable to some religious people, though his subjects are often no different from Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ or Beckmann, Dix or Grosz’s images of war and sexuality. His work was neglected even in the 1930s Dominican review of sacred aspects in modern art ‘L’Art Sacré’ though they included mention of works by Picasso and Surrealists, which had no direct Christian content. This neglect of the artist by the Church was publicly challenged by the defender of Rouault’s art Waldemar George between 1937 and 1938: “The Church is accustomed to an art rather more governed and conventional. It mistrusts mystical effusions” [La Renaissance October-December 1937: no.5. p.10]. The committedly Catholic painter Maurice Denis was also critical of the contemporary Church’s attitude to art, believing that sacred art at the time was dead due, not to the lack of faith of the people, but from the indifference of the Church to visual art’s potential. It was rather too common that throughout the 20th Century and even today, churches or church leaders have often attempted to be ‘contemporary’ or aspired to seem culturally enlightened by commissioning or lauding well-established secular artists who sometimes merely produce art with a religious subject. They have frequently neglected to encourage artists with specifically Christian commitment, who might imbue their work with more committed and profoundly thought-through faith. Lack of artistic and spiritual sensitivity by Church leaders has often too often led to the commissioning of mediocre works or art by well-known secular artists without sufficient sensitivity to the Christian message which could potentially be conveyed. What it needed in art for ecclesiastical settings is both fine artwork to glorify God, and a depth of specific Christian content which can challenge those with or without belief to authentic Christian spirituality and discipleship. Rouault would have been able to produce this. Imagine for example what a set of Stations of the Cross or Meditations on the Nativity might have been like if commissioned at the time of his artistic and spiritual maturity, or after he had created his Miserere cycle of prints.
Maurice Denis wanted to create a school to encourage the production of new Christian, sacred art but Rouault believed that an emphasis solely on religious subjects would unnecessarily restrict the freedom of artists. In fact, at the time of his early exploration of his ideas about the application of his faith to his art, between 1905 and 1910, Rouault only worked on six paintings of specifically religious subjects. He is reported to have frequently stated that he believed that “there is no such thing as sacred art, only an art made my artists who have faith.” Speaking of how his focus in art changed from academic subjects towards less orthodox ways of representing faith, Rouault said: “this instinctive moment, this turn of the helm, was not under the influence of… the moderns. It was rather by an inner need, and the wish, perhaps unconscious, not to fall into the mould of conventional religious subjects.” [quoted in Charensol Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. Paris: Editions des Quatre Chenins 1926 p.23]. He was to write later “It is not always the subject that inspires the pilgrim, but the accent that he puts there, the tone, the force, the grace, the unction. That is why some so-called ‘sacred art’ can be profane” [Soliloques p.53].
For most of his life of faith church-leaders largely neglected or rejected Rouault’s work as too dark or unconventional and did not recognise the spiritual sensitivity and significant Christian meaning within it, or recognise that it could have intense value for contemplation. He only ever received one ecclesiastical commission. This was towards the end of his career between 1945-9 when Rouault was commissioned to create stained glass windows, which his art most immediately reflects, for the church at Notre Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d'Assy, in Haute-Savoie. By this time his energy and the challenging aspect of his work were declining, so the church commission is far from his finest work. He was unable to achieve the potential which his work for the church might have achieved.
Notre Dame de Toute Grâce is itself an example of ‘too many cooks…” Built between 1937 and 1946, partly to serve the local sanatorium and spa, of which Canon Jean Devémy was chaplain, it was an attempt, particularly by Devémy, the Dominican friar Marie-Alain Couturier and the architect Maurice Novarina, to show its cultural relevance and enlightenment of the Church. They commissioned big names in modernist art, regardless of their spiritual affinities to contribute artworks. Glass, mosaics, paintings, sculptures, tapestries, metalwork and ceramics were commissioned from Jean Bazaine, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Constant Demaison, Ladislas Kijno, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz,Jean Lurcat and his apprentice Paul Cosandier, Claude Mary, Henri Matisse, Germaine Richier, Georges Rouault, Carlo Sergio Signori, Théodore Strawinsky and others. Together they make for a confusing whole. To my mind, the artworks, particularly the clumsy mosaics by Léger at the entrance, supposedly representing the litanies of Mary, and Lurcat’s Apocalyptic tapestries that dominate the chancel, largely distract from worship, liturgy and contemplation. The stained glass window by Rouault on the theme of the Passion of Christ was apparently not even specifically designed for the church. Devémy had seen the glass at an exhibition in Paris to which he was invited. On his return he supposedly measured the windows of his church and found that Rouault’s ready-made design would fit the dimensions precisely. He called it the "miracle of Assy", but whether one believes the tale is open to debate. The story does imply, however that the choice of Rouault for a design may have been a last-minute decision. As well as the Man of Sorrows, Rouault also contributed windows of Veronica and a vase of flowers to accompany her, bearing words that relate to the Suffering Servant “He was mistreated and oppressed” [Isa.53:3-5]. There is little sense in the disparate designs in the building and its contents of the ‘harmony’ by which Rouault sought to convey the spiritual. However Rouault’s windows are beautiful, vibrant, harmonic and spiritually significant.
Several religious writers and clerics mistrusted the fact that Rouault’s paintings were unconventional and did not conform to what they considered as traditional Christian Art. They did not recognise that Rouault’s aim was precisely to go beyond conventions. Many found his subjects dark, gloomy and depressing and his technique too rough for religious contemplation. Just 5 years before he died, Pope Pius XII eventually acknowledged and honoured him as a significant Catholic artist, but by this time his full potential was in decline.
ROUAULT’S REACTION TO HIS FATHER’S DEATH AND WORK FOLLOWING IT
When Rouault’s father, who had returned to France and had been living with the artist’s family, died in 1912, it led to a new sense of responsibility in Georges. He had a family to support yet was no longer able to be reliant on an adult more mature than himself other than the busy Maritain. IN the future ne never had a mentor as close as Moreau had been. He wrote meaningfully of his father to Suarès: “this poor man, uneducated in worldly terms, gave proof of such humility, such gentleness and such goodness during his final moments that I can find no words to express what I felt. It was as though I had discovered and unknown and misunderstood work of art. This man, silent and uncomplicated, withdrawn almost, throughout his life, blossomed forth at the time of his death; he was a child…”
As in the aftermath of Moreau’s death and the dissolution of Huysmans’ community at Ligué Abbey in 1901, the loss of his father triggered a dark period of crisis in Rouault’s emotions. This is reflected in the sketchbook which eventually developed into the Miserere cycle of prints. He recalled this preliminary album to Jacques Rivière in a letter of 13 Oct. 1912: “I have an almost religious respect for it, regardless of its artistic value.” It was to provide him with subject matter and compositions that became foundational to his mature work.
Between 1913-14 new developments in his work and ideas arose through a move to become more personal in his art and through continued technical, formal and compositional experimentation. His painting became less didactic more personal in its expression and spirituality. During the Great War Georges was declared unfit for service and moved with his family to the countryside in Normandy where he managed to paint relatively undisturbed physically by the bombardments of warfare nearer the coast. However the news of the war all around him and his feelings about the horrors and injustices of wartime led him to return to more politically committed images, culminating in the profound Miserere et Guerre prints. The personal commitment to his images contributed to his growing maturity, both as a man and in his art, leading to far more personally intense imagery.
SPIRITUALITY IN ROUAULT’S APPROACH TO SUBJECTS & TECHNIQUES
This verse written at the height of Rouault’s maturity as an artist shows how he sought unity in his work:
“Form, colour, harmony, mark,
Not so simple their borders.
Beauty is not always
so easy to distinguish.
But how the blind
love to speak of colours
in the light!
And the deaf
of subtle sonority
as each one knows how.
Where language
no longer is prostituted
neither beauty is trapped
in worn out formulae
or monopolised “
[Rouault ‘Art et Beauté” in L’Intransegent, 8 Feb. 1932. p.5]
From an early date in his work Rouault’s use of materials was treated with almost as much sense of value as he attached to his subject-matter and the harmony of his colours. This relates back to his father’s own valuing of the qualities and beauty of the materials with which he worked, as well as George’s academic training and the technical influence of Moreau. Rouault regarded his technical work as an artisan as of almost equal importance to his subject matter and its expression, as all were integral to his communication of significant meaning and feelings. His paintings of prostitutes are worked in a combination of vivid layers of watercolour combined with gouache and pastel for expressive effect. He mounted the paper equally carefully onto canvas for quality and permanence. From about 1910, he developed the potential of stronger colour, which he had already explored in his Fauve phase 5 years earlier by returning to paint in oils. Oil-painting came to dominate his painting over mixed media work, though he also worked later in ceramics.
Up to and beyond 1912, his major theme had largely followed the Realist theme in art and literature of the degradation of human life, though he also painted landscapes and less anguished figure-studies. He was not purely criticising his subjects; rather he was showing that they were redeemable and worthy of value. Between about 1915-17 his approach and subject matter gradually evolved. There was less emphasis on the dark underbelly of society, like its prostitutes, and more figures who could be allegories of the human condition – clowns, circus dancers, courtrooms and judges. He also represented more social and spiritual struggles and produced 17 works on specifically religious subjects (though he would say later that “all” his subjects were “religious”.)
Stylistically his work also altered: The subject of the image itself became less dominant than in his prostitute paintings and the overall emotion conveyed by the image became more important to him. “For me it is only a matter or trying to transcribe my emotions in plastic form.” [quoted in René Huyghe ‘Le Fauvism’ in L’Amour de l’Art, 1933 no.14. p.131] One wonders whether in his more mature work he had considered Bloy and others’ condemnation of his darker works more closely, and decided that attracting his viewer, in order to communicate to them was more important than expressing or evoking visceral emotion. This did not prevent the rawness of his Miserere imagery from triumphing. The experience of the Great War around him could not be ignored yet he focused it to speak to the whole of society, not just recording specific horrors as Expressionists like Dix and Grosz did. Rouault is gentler in his imagery, viewing the problems in society with a similar empathy to that with which he painted Christ on the Cross in 1913.
He was fascinated by technical experimentation. He wanted to create various forms of expression that were relevant to his subjects and conveyed his feelings towards them. His painting of the ravaged ‘Head of Christ [1905Crysler Museum Collection] was intensely expressive. His prints were equally intensely worked using varieties of experimental techniques of engraving and etching, some of which were developed alongside master printmakers. He spoke of valuing the touch of materials and developing his thinking about work through touch. In this emphasis on technical refinement Rouault was further from the looseness of the Fauves and closer to Cezanne, who he admired, though Georges had a greater desire to convey spiritual content through the use of figures. Touch was an important aspect of Rouault’s way of discovering truth through physically working and meditating on a piece. In Miserere plate 32 a blind man recognises Christ through reaching to touch the figure of Jesus standing beside him on his journey of life: “Lord, it is you, I recognise you.” Rouault’s work could be similarly thought of as a painter who, though he could not physically see God, felt that he found God’s truth and sensed the presence of Christ through exploring the subjects of the physical life around him with the gifts and materials which he has been given.
Later, Rouault wrote of “a certain harmony of rhythm and colour that I have long been seeking”. He wanted his art to have the truth of ‘realism’, rather than the ‘idealism’ of some modernism, including the Fauves… “there is no respite from anguish for the dreamer who clings to reality and does not allow himself to be enslaved by the deceptive dream.”.
Painting became the extension of Rouault’s life where he felt most able to express his thoughts and reactions. However his works were not just spontaneous and intuitive. It took hard labour to realize and express his ideas to the full, and it often took a long period of time, and many revisitings to refine the image before he felt satisfaction with his results. He wrote: “I am mad about painting and like any child I dream of and hope for I know not what wonderful garden. It is a promised land, one that I shall not be permitted to enter in my lifetime.”
SOCIAL COMMENT AND FAITH
The social content and commentary in Rouault’s work is more often a lament than a political or socially radical manifesto. He was creating visual metaphors as mirrors of reality for others to recognise and act upon. Unlike revolutionaries, he emphasised that he was not motivated by ‘hate’ or uncontrolled ‘anger’, even when portraying the inequitable, unjust or painful subjects that most distressed him. He was presenting the iniquities as he saw them, inviting positive response and change.
The Miserere series is perhaps his most all-embracing social and religious visual commentary. A large number of the subjects in the prints show the falseness in society:
Alone in this life of pitfalls and malice
Are we not slaves/convicts?
Believing ourselves kings.
in the old quarter/district of Long Suffering.
The hard task of living…
So-called ‘Daugher of Joy’ / or So-called ‘joyful good-time girl’.
In the mouth that was sweet, the taste of gall.
The high-class society lady believes that she has a place reserved in heaven.
The emancipated woman cries midday, when it is two o’clock
The prisoner is led away…
his counsel, in hollow phrases, proclaims his complete indifference…
Street of the lonely.
“Winter, scourge/leprosy of the earth.”
Jean Francois never sings Alleluia…
in the land of thirst and terror.
“Morality weeps her tears…
“Even the ruins have perished.”
Man is a wolf to man
We are mad.
Face to face
“War hates mothers “
“We are doomed to death, we and all that is ours”
My sweet land, what has become of you?
“Out of the depths…”
In the winepress the grapes were crushed.
The nobler the heart the less stiff the collar.
Tooth and nail
Far from the smile of Rheims
The Law is the law
Onward the dead!
Sometimes the blind have comforted those who see.
At the same time, a large number of the prints also show the potential of a spiritual and loving response to the predicaments and sufferings of the world:
“Have mercy on me O God, according to your loving kindness” {Ps.51:1},
Jesus reviled, forever scourged, takes refuge in your heart poor wanderer.
Sometimes the way is beautiful in the old quarter/district of Long Suffering.
Tomorrow will be fair, says the castaway / the one lost at sea.
to love would be so sweet.
under Jesus forgotten on the cross.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. [Isa.53:71]
In so many different places, the noble task of sowing in a hostile land.
“He who believes in me, though he die will live” [Jn.11:25].
Sing Matins, for a new day dawns
“we,.. it is into his death that we have been baptised” or “his death is our baptism.” [Rom.6:3]
“Love one another.” [Jn.13:34]
Lord, it is you, I know you.
And Veronica with her compassionate veil walks once more mong us on our way…
“Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world “ [Pascal Pensées 553-5]
The just, like sandalwood, perfume the axe that strikes them down.
Sometimes the blind have comforted those who see.
In these dark times of vainglory and unbelief, Our Lady of the Ends of the Earth keeps watch “Obedient unto death, even the death of the cross”
“And with his stripes we are healed”
The poor had been common subjects of art from the Dutch genre scenes and landscapes to Daumier, Millet, the Realists and Van Gogh. Many had used them to convey religious meaning. Rouault created images of them more often than he did the wealthy, and often represented them with greater gentleness and compassion. But he did not idealise them as some of the artists mentioned above did. He saw many as victims of social ills more than as creating those ills themselves, which in a way over- idealised their plight by emphasising their innocence. Zola was more true in recognising that people were not just trapped in poverty but could also be the cause of their own downfall or deprivation. Bloy regarded suffering and poverty as a means by which people could approach redemption. Like Zola, Rouault saw social deprivation more realistically as an indictment on the leadership of the nation, and believed that inequity was inescapable without substantial social change. He spoke of those who suffer socially as ‘exiles’, ‘wanderers’, ‘captives’, ‘pilgrims’, ‘fugitives’, ‘fellow sufferers.’ He saw them as exiles from the Kingdom and life that God intended, in which all human beings are meant to be able to flourish. Rouault’s paintings of the Holy Family on their Flight into Egypt became a metaphor for this wandering of the innocent or dispossessed in search of security. ‘Motherhood: Run-Down Neighbourhood shows a child being sheltered by his mother from the ravages of the world.
Some of Rouault’s landscapes represent the poor industrial suburbs, like that in which he grew up, which he referred to as ‘the old quarter/district of long suffering’. ‘Realist’ artists and ‘Naturalist’ writers like Zola and the de Goncourts had written about the social conditions, needs and evils of such environments. As a visual artist Rouault could not represent the same amount of detail as literature could represent. Nor could he present a clearly reasoned argument in a single image. (The Miserere series came closest to enabling him to do this.) A painting may include many references and have much underlying profundity but it conveys this by feeling and contemplative qualities, rather than an excess of physical content. The qualities of the deprived areas are represented in Rouault’s paintings by the bleakness of the environment and the expressions and gestures of loneliness and social entrapment of the people. At times this also reflected his own loneliness as in ‘Street of the Lonely (Miserere plate 23). Others titles like ‘The old quarter/district of long suffering” represent the anguished lives which are often hidden behind the suburban facades.
Into some of these landscapes Rouault introduced the figure of Christ as though faith can offer and bring light and hope to the people: Christ in the Suburbs [1920]; Christ and the Poor Man [1937] depict him identifying with their suffering and standing alongside them, as he is shown to do in the Miserere series, through suffering and his Passion.
Even those who in the ‘Miserere’: “believe themselves kings” or “believe they have a reserved place in heaven” are trapped by their false, deluded ideas of themselves. In Rouault’s eyes the complacency or disinterest of the bourgeoisie towards the difficulties of other sufferers reduces their humanity. So did their pride, self-righteousness and smug attitude to wealth and position. Rouault portrayed them as haughty, culpable, untrustworthy and rather’ ugly’ in moral terms, but he did so with more of a sense of pity for the humanity that they had lost or denied themselves, rather than an attitude of condemnation. They are as pitiable as the suffering poor, though in different ways. His faith taught him that the Kingdom of Heaven was easier to reach by the despised, the poor and harlots than the rich, powerful and self-righteous [Matt.19:23, 21:31; 5:3-12]. In his painting ‘Poulots’ Rouault illustrated the distorted features and bodies of two arrogant characters from Bloy’s novel ‘La Femme Pauvre’ who deludedly considered themselves privileged and superior by birth.
Both the rich and the poor are treated as individuals in Rouault’s works, though they may stand for others. They are victims in different ways of the sins that penetrate, damage and corrupt society. As the wisdom books of scripture suggest we are all equal in our responsibilities and our end. Several similarities could be drawn between Rouault’s work and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Rouault’s imagery of the circus reflected this, where he stated: “The rich and the poor bend towards the earth, where they will be sleeping tomorrow.” [Cirque p.16]
JUSTICE AND THE LAW AS RELIGIOUS THEMES
Rouault was never explicitly politically involved, but had a strong social conscience. He emphasised that he did not condemn judges; rather he was ‘perplexed’ by seemingly double standards in the judicial system. The subject of the law and lawyers was common in Daumier’s work, which Rouault had known well since a child. Around 1906-7, when Rouault was exploring new subjects for his art, he had a friend among the judiciary, Deputy Prosecutor Granier, who invited him to attend court sessions. One of his first works based on these visits to trials was ‘The Condemned Man’ [c1907] based on the trial and execution of the rapist and murderer Joseph Vacher in 1898, which disturbed the artist. Rouault was not so much worried that injustice had been done in this case, as Vacher’s crimes were similar to those of Jack the Ripper in England. Rather, through his times in court the artist was struck by the differences between the ways that lawyers and the law treated the rich and the poor.
About two decades later he wrote a poem, published in 1929, using some phrases that he had used in sequence in the Miserere series, which highlighted indifference to justice and the way responsibility for social ills is often laid on others rather than accepted by leaders or those who implement the law: It is probably that the last Phrase about Jesus ‘forgotten there’ on the cross intentionally contains a variety of meanings: Faith and its obligations are forgotten in the contemporary world, as our the moral responsibilities which Christ aid upon us. But primarily the presence of Christ and the saving work of the Cross and the consolation of faith are often forgotten in the ‘district of longsuffering’
The condemned man went away
indifferent and weary.
His lawyer in hollow/empty
pompous phrases
had proclaimed his innocence.
A red robed prosecutor
held society blameless
and indicted the condemned man
under a Jesus on the cross
forgotten there.
[in ‘Paysages légendaires’ 1929]
The Three Judges c.1937-8 is almost a Trinitarian image with the head of the central frontal figure surrounded by a halo. He seems to be consulting and contemplating the law, while the right hand figure appears to be moving off to put the law into action. The stern nature of their expression, however, is a contrast to the care and activity of God. Rouault said of his court imagery: “If I have made of the judges lamentable figures, it is no doubt because I was betraying the anguish that I feel at the sight of one human being having to judge another. I would not be a judge for all the wealth and happiness in the world.” [quoted in Jacques Guenne ‘Georges Rouault’’ in Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Nov.15. 1924. Vol.3. No. 109 p.5]. By contrast to the limitations of human judgement, of God was able to perceive and act in all things with omniscient, compassionate, , loving and pure understanding and judgement.
Like Rouault, one of his religious heroes, Pascal, had been fascinated by the law, and had also spent much of his time in legal circles. Rouault drew parallels between the contemporary justice system and courts and the trial and condemnation of Christ. ‘Men of Justice’ [c1913 show a lawyer and a bespectacled judge in front of an image of Christ on the Cross. Plate 6 of Miserere‘Are we not all slaves/ convicts’ shown a naked man looking to heaven, seemingly for mercy, with a mother and child looking on. In the distance is a church, the place where forgiveness and reconciliation, rather than condemnation, should be available.
In many of the images that refer to the law, Rouault highlighted the contrast between the negativity of legal and religious condemnation and God’s grace towards us, as represented by Christ’s cross. The recurrent theme of ‘Christ before the Doctors’ gave the artist a theme that contrasted the arrogance, self-satisfaction and indifference of the administrators with the humility an love of Christ and his willingness to endure suffering on behalf of others. He painted images of ‘Christ Mocked’ nine times between 1912 and 1942, as well as several images of ‘Ecce Homo. Rouault used the iconography of the ‘Man of Sorrows’ to emphasise the damage that false human judgement can produce. The frequent interspersing of the imagery of the suffering Christ through the Miserere series also emphasises how the miscarriage of justice in Christ’s case enables him to identify with others who suffer injustice. The one who himself suffered from injustice, created and fulfilled divine law and will be entrusted to judge and redeem the world. This recalls the example of the understanding judgement of Christ, described in Heb. 4:15- 5:3,
On a simpler, aesthetic level, it is not surprising that French judges became one of the artist’s themes, found in 23 of his paintings, as the bright red of their robes provided him with a vivid subject that suited his style and love of colour: “The black bonnet and red robes make pretty splashes of colour and that is all that is necessary…” [quoted in Michel Puy. Georges Rouault p.16].
A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE - PROSTITUTION AS A THEME
On the surface it seems strange that a young Christian artist searching for themes should choose images of prostitutes. Rouault produced only 20 paintings on this subject, from 1902 to 1912 did not return to it, apart from Plate 14 of the Miserere: ‘So-called Daughters of Joy’ or ‘So-called joyful good-time girl’. Yet the images of prostitutes are among the artist’s strongest and most memorable early realist/expressionist paintings. They were also the most controversial, as I have discussed. The theme, however, is not so surprising for a young artist exploring modernism and seeking contemporary ethical subjects for his art. Several modern artists had or were using the theme – Lautrec, Manet, Constanin Guys, and Degas preceded him, Picasso was to work on the same theme perhaps having seen Rouault’s images at the Salon d’Automne of 1904 and 1905. Naturalist literature also explored lives that included prostitution: Zola, the de Goncourts, Dostoevsky, who we know Rouault read, and even Huysmanss and Bloy (Le Désespéré) . One of the ironies of Bloy’s criticism of Rouault’s subject is that the writer had himself been living with a former prostitute and mistress Anne-Marie Roulet, who had converted to faith a few years after him.. In the double standards of the time, many young men’s first sexual experiences were with prostitutes.
Young artists must have mixed with prostitutes regularly as they were often the models in the academies and then became affordable models to employ in their own studios. Working from the figure was still a key requirement for any artist working in academic traditions and also for many modernists. Most of the young artists lived in poor districts where many prostitutes also lived. It was apparently not uncommon for prostitutes to frequent the young artists’ studios to warm themselves at their stoves. When Rouault was living in Belleville, Montmartre and the poor district of Versailles they would have been a common sight. Rouault apparently was moved to adopt the theme through seeing a prostitute offering herself while shivering in a doorway near his studio. It bought home to him the difficulties of such a life: “For me it was the shock, the suggestion. I saw this bluish lady just as anyone else can, though more clearly since I am a painter. When I returned home it began to work on me… The spectacle I happened upon was transposed, a transposition or perhaps a call frim the inner world. Nothing was premeditated… The woman standing in the door is not the one I painted. That one and the others corresponded to the state of mind I was in” [Roulet ‘Souvenirs’ p.188-9].
There are conundrums in Rouault’s images of prostitutes. Partly he was valuing the people themselves, partly perhaps fascinated sexually, though his figures rarely seem to be objects of desire. Partly he felt sorry for their condition and needs while his beliefs were against the practice morally and he felt protective on grounds of security and health. There were probably many other associated feelings, some of which he sought to convey in the images. He was still in a vulnerable state emotionally and financially at this time, so he was probably more empathetic towards the individuals whose profession was officially regarded as degraded and sordid. He recognised the hypocrisy of those among the bourgeoisie and others who commonly exploited the women privately yet might publicly criticise the profession. It is probable that Rouault’s attitude reflected what his friend André Suarès wrote of prostitutes in The Passion, illustrated by Rouault: “You are sacred for those who are willing to understand. You are not sinner but victim, the receptacle of all our sins. Nor are you the guiltiest. Rather you are the cesspool of our sins and lies. Al other women, your sisters – the rich, the fashionable, the married, the highly esteemed, the very moral – you are the ransom for them all. Not one of them would possess the jewels and the gold she is so proud of – nor modesty, purity, nor vain plumage, nor the aigrette of her fair name, nor the hand-kissing and other marks of respect – if you, the victim, were not on the auction-block for all women” [quoted Dyrness 1971 p. 142].
Rouault’s paintings, however, were more immediate; they were probably not intended to convey such a moral statement. The women are not painted in any way idealistically or romantically, unlike the images of Lautrec or Degas. Rouault painted their awkward proportions, strange poses, attempts to make themselves alluring, sometimes filthy or over-made up bodies and faces, as well as the dissatisfaction some felt in a profession which was supposed to be about ‘love’. There does not seem to have been misogyny, fear or dislike of the women in his attitudes, despite the sometimes grotesque images. Nor does the artist seem to have been stressing as a religious or ethical message that purity is a greater quality to strive towards. He often emphasised that he was not being self-righteous, and criticised hypocritical or self-righteous attitudes in society. The artist claimed: “No, I never had the intention of being an ‘avenger’ or a moralist. There is such an emphasis in the heads of my ‘filles’ that some thought I wanted to show off the shame of these creatures. This dishonour I did not even notice until after they pointed it out to me. Actually I could only pity them.” [Guenne. Jacques Guenne ‘Georges Rouault’’ in Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Nov.15. 1924. Vol.3. No. 109 p.5]. Pity is also a key feature of the poor subjects in the ‘Miserere’ prints, particularly heart-wrenching in ‘The hard task of living’’ Rouault’s aim seems to have been to present the images of prostitutes as realistic characters, like those in French Naturalist’ literature, representing society as it is. He was holding a mirror up to society just as ‘Fille au miroir’ [1906] shows a prostitute arranging her hair and posing in a mirror, either aware or unaware of the irony in the idea of her allure.
CLOWNS AND THE CIRCUS AS MEANINGFUL IMAGERY
Images of entertainment were very much a part of modernism. Circus entertainers were painted by Lautrec, Seurat, Degas, Renoir and other artists. Picasso’s Saltimbanques and Harlequins [1905-6] were being painted around the same time as those of Rouault. Daumier had also represented the sadness of life beneath the joyful exterior and make-up or mask, as both Rouault and Picasso later used the imagery to suggest.
As with Rouault’s adoption of the prostitute motif, his writings imply that this theme came to him through a specific encounter, where the significance of the people made a visual, mental and spiritual, impact upon him: “The gypsy women stopped along the road, the emaciated old horse grazing on the thin grass, the old clown sitting on the corner of this wagon mending his bright, many-coloured costume. The contrast between brilliant and scintillating things made to amuse us, and their infinitely sad life, if one looks at it objectively, struck me with great force. I have expanded all of this. I saw clearly that the ‘clown’ was myself, ourselves, almost all of us. This spangled costume is given to us by life. We are all of us clowns, more or less, we all wear a ‘spangled costume’ but if we are caught by surprise, the way I caught that old clown, oh then; who would dare to claim that he is not moved deeply by immeasurable pity? My failing (if it is one, in any case it is the source of immense suffering for me) is never to let anyone keep on his ‘spangled costume’. Be he King of Emperor, what I want to see in the man facing me is his soul, and the more exalted the position, the more I fear for his soul” {Rouault Letter to Eduard Schuré 1905 quoted Dyrness 1971 p.149].
This quotation is significant in many ways. It demonstrates how Rouault was constantly looking at the world around him to glean ideas and how physical encounters could imprint themselves on his mind, vision and work. It shows the artist’s personal identification and empathy with his subjects, which in some ways became representations of his inner self, as well as of contemporary society. In this case the clowns’ make-up and costumes are reflections of the masks and false images he assumed were adopted and worn by the world around him. They expresses his pity for the inauthenticities in society. This is illustrated in his poignant, rhetorical ‘Miserere’ print “Who does not also wear a mask?”, also translatable as “Who does not also wear make-up?’ In the letter to Schuré cited above, the artist also expressed his feeling that it might be a failing in him to be so sensitive to the predicaments and sufferings of others, as it often caused him personal anguish. He wondered if the very ability to see through the masks and hypocrisies of others might also be a disadvantage. However, this was what made Rouault a sensitive, perceptive artist with so much to communicate. Rouault wrote: “We are fallen, it is true, but my clowns are really only dispossessed kings; their laugh is familiar to me; it reaches the realm of a million stifled sobs “[Souvenisr Intimes] p.14].
Some of Rouault’s paintings of circus figures show groups and families, but more often they are represented as solitary individuals. The figure of Pierrot is the most common theme among thecircus images. This is probably because the melancholic figure more closely resembled Rouault’s personal character than other clowns, acrobats or circus dancers. Interestingly Georges often gives the circus girls, squires and dancers specific names: Carmencita, Carlotta, Douce Amère. Most are probably invented characters, though some may be based on real characters. The names are important, since they emphasise that these are not generalised representations, but have individual characters and personal characteristics. Though they may stand for social situations, they show that every person is an individual who is capable of a personal relationship with God. There is a sense of mystery about the real person behind their masks, make-up and costumes. Some may be tragic, some representing the more joyful aspects of human life, but all are redeemable individual characters and souls.
The clown is not just a symbol of sadness, escape from reality or an expression of joy. In one of Rouault’ poems he attributed spiritual reflective aspects to the clown. This may be similar to the reflective side of the prostitute, suggested in the painting ‘Fille au miroir’ [1906]:
I prefer to be the court jester
and say freely,
laughingly
to immortal courtiers
that I am not their servant
in spiritual things.”
He showed the spiritual side of the clown in “The Reflective Pierrot’ / Le Pierrot Sage’ [1943] where the clown looks down at his book, which he holds in an almost prayerful manner. Behind him is a framed picture of another figure of a clown, perhaps a muse or an ancestor from whom he has inherited his role. The image is not unlike the iconography of Christ as the ‘Man of Sorrows’. It may also reflect the mediaeval idea of the ‘fool of Christ’, revived by the Franciscans, and the more modern idea of the ‘foolishness of God’ in giving so much for our redemption
Despite Rouault’s recognition of what might be hidden behind the clowns ’make-up or masks, there is also a simplicity of spirit in the visible joy that some of them show. Though the artist was a serious, quiet man, play, like painting was part of his spiritual freedom.. “The laugh is good to hear and to see, for it delivers us from so many miseries, real and imaginary:
He who no longer knows how to laugh
or smile
is only waiting to die”. [Rouault Cirque p.52]
Some of Rouault’s clowns have a spirit of peace and contentment as well as joy in their faces. Others wear the melancholy features of the ‘sad clown’. These can represent the difference between the circus world of appearances and the sadness of the realities of the world in which we all live. “Dream or reality, the wan child from the poor neighbourhoods will still find his way to the circus midway. One way or another, he will find there new and better ways to forget the long winters, the gloomy days, the hard and hostile faces, the depressed spirits and the callused hearts.” [Cirque. p.105} This may reflect Rouault’s own visits to the circus as a child from a poor neighbourhood. From his use of the term ‘midway’. the Circus seems a liminal place, partly for a moment secure form the hard realities of the world, where one can decide whether to move forward on a path of joy or melancholy.
In 1938 André Suarès published an essay on clowns which may reflect an allied aspect of Rouault’s ideas: “He who can mock anything has the ability to hold himself above the world and himself.” Rouault was not personally mocking anything in these paintings or his social critique. Yet by standing apart and viewing the world through his metaphors, emotions and reasoning, he was able to comment on difficulties which he perceived within reality. The circus entertainers partly lifted people out of reality for a while, but they too lived and experienced a very different reality in their personal lives. Suarès wrote in a 1917 letter to Rouault “The clown is the victim of life, especially city life/. As such he is a serf; he is miserable… he is an object of compassion and you have seen him with loving eyes” [Correspondance p.151].
WORK WITH VOLLARD
In 1917 the maturing Rouault gained further financial and artistic security in the patronage of the significant Parisian art-dealer Ambroise Vollard. Georges had been acquainted with Vollard previously, through visiting and studying the works of other artists in Vollard’s gallery from 1907, which was when they first met. They had begun to discuss terms for Vollard to deal in his work as early as 1913, when Vollard bought Rouault’s entire output and offered to finance his printmaking and experimentations. We do not know Rouault’s initial reaction to this offer of patronage, but it must have been an encouragement to one who had ten year before been severely criticised and felt less secure. Vollard wanted exclusive rights to George’s works in return for supplying the artist with a fixed salary. He also offered Rouault a studio on the top floor of his private home where he insisted that the artist could work at his own pace. In 1917 Rouault accepted the offer with the main proviso that he was himself in charge of the decision as to when a work was finished and acceptable for sale. The artist stipulated that he was to be allowed to work on his paintings at his own chosen pace, without pressure from the dealer. The arrangement brought Rouault and his family greater financial and career security, as he would be able to focus his energies into his art. It also promoted Rouault: In 1917 Vollard persuaded the French state to buy Rouault’s prize-winning ‘Child Jesus among the Doctors., which went to the Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar and became his first picture to enter a museum.
However, Vollard was controlling patron who liked to monopolize the work of his artists and was jealous in wanting to maintain their sense of responsibility towards him. It was largely due to the dealer’s passion for publishing books that Rouault’s painting decreased and his printmaking increased’ Rouault often became frustrated with his dealer. He wrote to Suarès: “I have an infinite patience when it comes to spiritual matters. But patience can still be used up and human energy sometimes has a limit.” [Correspondance p.307].
This patronage arrangement gave the artist greater financial security, supplementing his small salary from the Moreau Museum. It allowed Rouault far greater personal and artistic freedom, including freedom to experiment and innovate, rather than simply satisfying a patron’s expectations. Vollard did, however put other pressures on Rouault. He was a keen publisher of high quality, limited edition portfolio Fine Art books and commissioned illustrations for many volumes. Among these were commissions for Chagall’s illustrations for Gogol’s Dead Souls, Picasso’s etchings and woodcut illustrations for Balzac, and Maurice Denis’ woodcuts for Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. His sponsorship of Rouault’s own massive Miserere et Guerre and the Passion, produced two significant advances in publication because bot h were so experimental. Other illustrations from Rouault included: Alfred Jarry’s Réincarnations du Père Ubu (1927), Cirque de l'Étoile (1938) and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1928), which was eventually published in 1966, several years after the deaths of both Vollard and Rouault. In 1928, Rouault and his "brother in art", the poet and critic André Suarès [1868-], had completed a book project on which they had worked together for several years. Vollard, who harboured a petty grievance against the poet, refused to publish Suarès's writings. Though frustrated, Rouault agreed to replace Suarès's poetry with his own writings, naming the finished book Cirque de l'Étoile / The Circus of the Shooting Star [1938].
Ambrose Vollard was a major impresario in the promotion of modernist artists. He developed a patronage relationship with many major artists including Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Vuillard. Chagall, Redon and Denis. However, he often attempted to monopolise the work of artists who he patronised and exhibited Suarès described Vollard as “a slave merchant” [quoted by Timothy Mitchell ‘The Passion’ intro. p. v.]. This led to several challenging situations in his relationship with Rouault, who, though he was quiet and insular had a strong sense of justice and integrity. It came to a head after Vollard’s accidental death in a car crash in 1939. Rouault found himself suddenly released from his contract with his dealer. However, Vollard's estate sealed the entrance to the dealer’s house and refused Rouault permission to retrieve sketches, notes and unfinished works from his studio and store. Vollard’s heirs claimed ownership of Rouault’s works and the artist was forced into legal action which lasted for 8 years. It was delayed partly through Rouault and his family having been forced to leave their Paris home for the South of France during the war but Vollard’s heirs fought determinedly for their rights. Finally a landmark court decision in 1947 affirmed the artist’s rights to the ownership of his own work "provided that he had not given them away of his own volition". This secured the return of over 700 unfinished paintings.
After the years of legal wrangling with Vollard’ heirs, Georges wrote in a reconciliatory fashion in his Preface to Miserere: “If injustice has been shown towards Ambrose Vollard, let us remember that he had taste and passion for making beautiful books, regardless of time; but it would have taken three centuries to have completed the works which he wanted, without considering our human limitations, to entrust to the artist.” All Rouault’s works in printmaking, as in his painting, are the result of many years and elaborate processes of experimentations and perfection of techniques. He rarely simply repeated his techniques in the various series he produced. As the subjects were so different, he aimed to find the imagery, medium and techniques which would best reflect them expressively..
MISERERE ET GUERRE
In 1912 Rouault began a series of Indian ink drawings in a sketchbook, which metamorphosed into the 58 Miserere engravings on which he worked for almost the next 15 years. The original title was intended to be ‘Miserere et Guerre’ but he later refined this to the simple yet resonant title of ‘Miserere’. This focused on and emphasised the religious connotations of the word, based on the opening of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me O God, according to your loving kindness / steadfast love” which was part of the Catholic liturgy of repentance: “Miserere mie Deus”. The psalm is a prayer for cleansing and pardon, pleading for a healed, righteous form of religion, so is very relevant to Rouault’s attitude to the ills of war, society and the Church:
Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.
Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco: et peccatum meum contra me est semper.
Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum judicaris.
Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum: et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.
Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti: incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi.
Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam: et exsultabunt ossa humiliata.
Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis: et omnes iniquitates meas dele.
Cor mundum crea in me, Deus: et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.
Ne proiicias me a facie tua: et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me.
Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui: et spiritu principali confirma me.
Docebo iniquos vias tuas: et impii ad te convertentur.<
Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae: et exsultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam.
Domine, labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.
Quoniam si voluisses sacrificium, dedissem utique: holocaustis non delectaberis.
Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum, et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies.
Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion: ut aedificentur muri Ierusalem.
Tunc acceptabis sacrificium justitiae, oblationes, et holocausta: tunc imponent super altare tuum vitulos.
Full English Translation:
Have mercy on me, O God: according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy: blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity: and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned: and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence: and blameless when you pass judgement.
Indeed, I was born guilty: a sinner when my mother conceived me.
You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Let me hear of joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins: and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God: and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence: and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation: and sustain in me a willing spirit.
Then I will teach transgressors your ways: and sinners will return to you.
Deliver me from blood-guiltiness O God, O God of my salvation: and my tongue will sing of your deliverance.
O Lord, open my lips: and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you take no delight in sacrifice; if I were to present a burnt-offering, you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Do good to Zion through your good pleasure; rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
then you will delight in right sacrifices, in burnt-offerings and full burnt-offerings; then true sacrifices will be offered on your altar.
Rouault interpreted the psalm as far more than a plea for the forgiveness of an individual’s sins against God. Personal confession was how the words were most often used liturgically or in private. The artist regarded the cause of Christ’s sufferings and death as much broader than the sins of individuals. Christ’s Passion could offer healing to all for all the earth’s sins. Rouault applied the title and longings of psalm to the suffering and evils of the whole world, including the causes and horrors of war. The title Miserere and the whole series of prints became a visual plea for God’s forgiveness for the sins of the whole of society, especially the oppression and neglect of the poor, the weak, the marginalised and all who suffered as a result of war.
The extremely large copper plates became a focus for his feelings about more than the war, social ills and faith. Work on them focused the artist’s sense of spiritual responsibility towards the world. His daughter’s notes to the series state that she believed that he only started work on the actual plates right after the war, though the artist’s Preface dates the subjects from 1914-18. Ironically, though printed under the artist’s careful supervision in 1927 the series was only finally published in 1948, after the struggles with Vollard’s heirs and the destructivity and depravations of the Second World War had further delayed the display of what Rouault considered his most significant work. Unsurprisingly Rouault dedicated the works to his former mentor and support Gustave Moreau, who had encouraged him in the freedom to produce such personal work.
The series has been hailed as “a monument of twentieth-century printmaking”…“one of the greatest modernist interpretations of religious iconography”… “Rouault responded to the ravages of World War I by creating aggressive, sparse, and grand compositions, which attain a pitch of tragedy and salvation rarely achieved by his contemporaries.” [O'Shaughnessy West review of exhibition Lines Etched with the Weight of Life: Georges Rouault's Miserere Snite Museum of Art 2013]. Although Rouault’s paintings created iconic images based in his faith and social commitment, printmaking was where his ideas developed in the most accessible ways, particularly his works created in response to the horrors and iniquities of the Great War. Through the 1920s, Rouault worked primarily on printmaking. The drawings and ideas for his series Miserere et Guerre developed during the war, but the plates begun immediately afterwards in 1918 were not completed until 1927. This delay is not surprising; initially quality materials must have been scarce, and he wanted to work on the largest plates that could then be used on the press. Rouault describes meticulously “reworking the plates again and again, sometimes making as many as twelve successive states; for I wished them as far as possible to be equal in quality.” Though many were printed earlier, the full set of fifty-eight prints was only published in 1948, in a weighty limited edition, followed by reproductions from1950. The sheets are extremely large: 65cm. x 50cm / 25⅝” x 19 ¾” and the work weighs over 21 kilos. Miserere was eventually first exhibited to the public in 1948.
Rouault’s reworking of the plates for so many years was not just to achieve his sense of technical perfection. It seems also have been part of his meditative process of exploring the ideas and refining his sensations into expressive images. He also wanted to recreate something of the spontaneity of his original drawings, as well as developing greater feeling in its texture, He initially drew out the images in India ink on paper, creating a spontaneous expressive image. This drawing was then mechanically reproduced as an engraving onto a plate by the heliographic method. But this was only the initial stage of developing the final image. To consolidate and complete it he worked into and reworked the plates with burins, files, scrapers, rollers, emery-paper, brushed-on acid and other chemicals etc. He densened the black areas, enhanced the white unprinted areas and increased the expressive textures of the print. These repeated reworkings preoccupied him for years; he often spent full days at the modest printers’ workshop, only leaving in time to catch the last metro home at night. He enjoyed working with the craftsmen-printers, as he felt that they regarded him as “one of their own” rather than as a rarefied artist. “I am of the people” he often asserted [Dyrness 1971 p.83]. He spent similar energy and thought on refining the texts, to focus clarity and enhance the meanings of the images. Some of the texts were taken from his own poetry, or later became part of his poems. In Vollard’s Memoires the dealer admitted to having been apprehensive at the amount of refinement and extent of ripping-away that went into the plates. But this was all part of Rouault’s desire to explore and refine a work until it conveyed his feelings and intention to the fullest.
As well as considering that “I put the best of myself” into the Miserere, it was also a therapeutic exercise for him in expressing his response to the vicissitudes of life and the horrors of wartime. He wrote to Suarès: “Misery was my tutor, which did not prevent me from singing, for in my childhood we used to sing:
Old songs of France
you were in tune with the people of my region.
Clear, gentle and forthright
you helped along the way
the vagrant, young or old soldier, shrewd artisan,
hardworking or happy-go-lucky, fondly singing.
Miserere became the artist’s personal song - a lament, a plea for chang, a love song to his subjects, many of whom had died in the conflict, as well as a longing for the healing of the suffering earth.
In his Preface to Miserere and in a letter to Jacques Rivière of 13th Oct. 1912 Rouault claimed that he began the drawings to express his feelings after his father’s death, The series developed into a far broader reflection on the sufferings and injustices experienced by the marginalised in society and the conditions, inequity and horrors of warfare. A key theme of the Miserere cycle of prints is the search for integrity in the world. Rouault believed that through the Christian faith and the love of God and people, it would be possible to deal with and understand the suffering and injustice in the world. This could lead to healing, peace, equity and comfort for those who despair. The image of Veronica’s veil with which the series begins and ends represents Christ’s face not just watching and suffering with the world, but also showing us our own responsibility to act like Veronica in the legend, offering comfort to the suffering, weary and needy. Writing in 1939 Rouault spoke, as he did in the texts on the Miserere prints of the world as an the “hard business of living”, “the old district of long suffering.” Yet he believed that somehow within the corruption of the world, God was still with us in essence and in loving care. He wrote: “Deep down inside the most unfriendly, unpleasant, and impure creature, Jesus dwells.” The Miserere et Guerre cycle balances details of human suffering with Christ suffering on our behalf and identifying with the human predicament. He believed in the Catholic concept that Christ presence was closest to people in their most intense suffering. He suggested that we should reflect that presence by ourselves bringing comfort to the needy. This is one reason why the image of Veronica’s veil became so significant in Rouault’s art, right to the end of his career.
Rouault’s personal feelings were an essential part of his painterly expression. He wrote: “All I seek is the plastic transcription of my emotions.” This is particularly true of his Miserere cycle and his paintings of the crucifix, in which his feelings with suffering injustice and corruption are vividly expressed both in the images and the pains which he took to convey both meaning and feeling with expressive techniques. Perhaps the most expressive of the images is “The hard work of living” showing a frowning, naked, half-length of a man bent in sorrow. Like Christ, the artist was not just observing and recording the problems of the world, but also identifying and feeling with people’s needs and pain. He wrote: “I carry within myself an infinite depth of suffering and melancholy, which life has only served to develop and of which my paintings, if God allows it, will only be the flowering and imperfect expression.” His print “Christ will be in agony until the end of the world” shows Christ in his crucifixion identifying physically with the despair of humanity. More texturally ravaged images are the first crucifixion plate “Beneath a forgotten Jesus on the Cross” and the third image of the series of the Man of Sorrows: “forever scourged.” To Rouault Christ’s Incarnation and Passion was key to understanding God’s continued knowledge of and care for the world. Another print showing a refugee father reaching down to comfort a despairing child is labelled: “(Jesus.. forever scourged) takes refuge in your heart poor wandering soul / vagabond of misfortune.” Rouault had himself been brought up in a poor area of Paris and had experienced poverty and seen displacement. The bleakness of some of his landscapes do not literally portray the suburbs and factory-areas which he knew well, but are more universal. They represent the bleakness and poverty of both those areas and so many environments in the wider world. Rouault was expressing both his own social commitment and care for people’s predicament, as well as the care of Christ himself.
The texts printed below the images seem roughly written, and have unfortunately been cut off a number of prints in framing. Yet their simplicity and almost awkwardness was intentional; they seem spontaneous, just as he worked to make the images appear. Rouault was very careful over the words which he added to the images; they had to reflect and lead the viewer deeper into the meaning of the image, as part of the overall page. Rather than distracting from the picture the viewer or reader was intended to imbibe the feeling created by the entire page and contemplate its meaning as a whole. Writing to his friend the poet André Suarès he called the texts ‘omens’ and said that some people, critics and friends, complained as soon as he had added them beneath the images. They interpreted them as making the images “belong to literature or worse yet… to ethics , and therefore it has nothing to do with painting.” [Correspondance p.322] The criticism of his art being closer to literature must have been particularly irksome for Rouault, as he was proud of the separate language of visual art: “Art is not subject to explanation, for it is a marvellous language in itself.” [Enquête’ 1936 p.5]. For Rouault in Miserere the image and text were inseparable for conveying the meaning of his work, especially as the texts combined to present a narrative link between the images. Originally Suarès was intended to provide the words for Miserere but for various reasons, including Vollard’s hostility to Suarès, Rouault eventually provided his own texts, which made the work more personal. Though brief, so as to not distract from the power of the image, he combined his own words with significant quotations from other authors relating to war and humanity’s responsibilities to one another. Together the writings beneath the prints form a sort of narrative poem about the nature of the sinful world and Christ’s suffering alongside that of his people, as seen below: (Items in square brackets [] explain the reference, items in rounded brackets () explain the image. Occasionally I have included a potential variant translation which reflects the intended meaning of the title):
‘MISERERE’ “Have mercy on me O God, according to your loving kindness” {Ps.51:1},
Jesus reviled,...
forever scourged…
takes refuge in your heart poor wandering soul / vagabond of misfortune.
Alone in this life of pitfalls and malice
Are we not all slaves/convicts?
Believing ourselves kings.
Who does not wear a mask/make-up?
Sometimes the way is beautiful…
in the old quarter/district of Long Suffering.
Tomorrow will be fair, says the castaway/the one lost at sea.
The hard task of living…
to love would be so sweet.
So-called ‘Daugher of Joy’ / or‘So-called joyful good-time girl’.
In the mouth that was sweet, the taste of gall.
The high-class society lady believes that she has a place reserved in heaven.
The emancipated woman cries midday, when it is two o’clock (ie she has lost her bearings on life.)
The prisoner is led away…
his counsel, in hollow phrases, proclaims his complete indifference…
under Jesus forgotten on the cross.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. [Isa.53:71]
In so many different places, the noble task of sowing in a hostile land.
Street of the lonely.
“Winter, scourge/leprosy of the earth.”
Jean Francois never sings Alleluia…
in the land of thirst and terror.
“Morality weeps her tears…” [Virgil, Aeneid I]
“He who believes in me, though he die will live” [Jn.11:25].
Sing Matins, for a new day dawns
“we,.. it is into his death that we have been baptised” or “his death is our baptism.” [Rom.6:3]
“Love one another.” [Jn.13:34]
Lord, it is you, I know you.
And Veronica with her compassionate veil walks once more mong us on our way…
Beginning The ‘GUERRE’/‘War’ Section: “Even the ruins have perished.” [Virgil; Pharsalia IX:969]
“Jesus’ agony will continue until the end of the world “ [Pascal Pensées 553-5]
This will be the last time little father (a son saying farewell to his father before going off to war, as a skeleton of death awaits them both).
Man is a wolf to man (a skeleton dressed as a soldier).
The Chinese invented gunpowder, they say, and made a gift of it to us.
We are mad.
Face to face (a fat proud general facing an emaciated naked man. Rouault repeated this composition later in a painting of Christ and the Pharisee/Doctor, so this print may be intended to draw a religious parallel).
Auguries (three women like the Fates in modern dress discussing the war.
“War hates mothers “ [Horace. Odes I: !:24-5] (a sorrowing mother with a child on her lap).
“We are doomed to death, we and all that is ours” [Horace. Ars Poetica 63]
My sweet land, what has become of you?
Death took him as he rose from his bed of nettles.
The just, like sandalwood, perfume the axe that strikes them down.
“Out of the depths…“ [Ps.130:1]
In the winepress the grapes were crushed.
The nobler the heart the less rigid the collar. (An arrogant stiff-collared moustached general pointing as if unbending in ordering his troops forward to their deaths).
Tooth and nail (an arrogant socialite woman looking on indifferently, with arms crossed
Far from the smile of Rheims (an indifferent bishop)
The Law is the law (an indifferent lawyer)
Our Lady of seven sorrows. (a sad crowned Madonna who looks more like a secular queen than Mary)
Onward the dead! / “Arise ye dead! (skeleton soldiers rising to march, being called and led forward by a uniformed skeleton leader. They form almost a Dance of Death. It is not clear whether they are already dead or represent a foretaste of their fate.)
Sometimes the blind have comforted those who see.
In these dark times of vainglory and unbelief, Our Lady of the Ends of the Earth keeps watch. (a sad Madonna standing against a bleak landscape holding her Child who appears to be praying for the earth, the peace and harmony of which has been destroyed by its people.)
“Obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” [Phil.2:8] ( A crucifix.)
“And with his stirpes we are healed” [Isa.53:5] (Veronica Veil).
Rouault’s poem, which completes the Preface to Miserere sums up the theme of this narrative. In it he suggests that his role or aim as the artist was to give form to the suffering of the world, which Christ and the famous and less famous saints have also suffered, and which the neglected and suffering people of the earth still endure:
Form, colour, harmony
Oasis or mirage
for the eyes, the heart or the spirit.
Towards the surging ocean of the call of art
“tomorrow will be fair” said the castaway / the one lost at sea.
Before disappearing below the hostile horizon
Peace hardly seems to reign
in this anguished world
of shadows and pretences
Jesus on the cross will tell you better than I,
and Joan on trial in brief and glorious phrases,
as well as the saints and martyrs
obscure or hallowed.
The last stanza repeats a theme that recurs throughout the series of prints and allied texts, that Christ, “as well as the saints and martyrs obscure or hallowed” and St Joan, patron of France, have all suffered as the land and its people have done through war and deprivation. Monet gave his Nymphéas series to the nation in thanksgiving for the end of war. Rouault’s Miserere could be seen as a similar offering and response to the needs and sufferings of his people.
‘PASSION’
During the 1920s Rouault was also working on a very different series of prints of Passion which were eventually published in 1939 by Vollard. Suarès and he had worked together on a similar project Le Cirque de l’Étoile Filante, which was planned and written before the concept of the Passion. Rouault had already completed 70 wood engravings and 8 colour etchings for Le Cirque…, but publication was delayed until 1938, with Rouault’s own text rather than that of Suarès. It is probable that, to Rouault, the importance of the theme of the Passion meant that it took priority after the completion of the Miserere plates in 1927.
The Passion consists of 82 wood engravings and 17 colour etchings, and again reached a height of technical achievement, using very different media and approaches to those of the Miserere. The theme of the Passion of Christ was at the heart of Rouault’s faith, as he emphasised when he wrote “I believe only in Jesus Christ on the Cross. I am a Christian of olden times” [Charensol Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. 1926 p.8].
The prints were accompanied by texts written by the poet André Suarès, who had been a friend of Rouault for about 30 years, when the book was published. They corresponded regularly [their letters were published in 1960 as ‘Correspondance’] and Rouault called André ‘my brother in art’. Suarès was also entrusted with writing the preface to Rouault’s memoirs ‘Souvenirs Intimes’ [1926] and they collaborated on a publication on Moreau. [Rouault and Suarès’ article ‘Moreau’ was printed in L’Art et les Artistes. April 1926 p.240]. Suarès had originally been intended to provide the texts for the Miserere, but after this had been vetoed by Vollard, who also published Passion, the poet was probably involved in this new project at Rouault’s insistence. Rouault regarded Suarès as one of his closest friends, Vollard was ore regarded as a business associate. The publication eventually occurred just before Vollard’s sudden accidental death. It is interesting that Rouault had trusted Suarès to accompany his major expression of his spirituality in the Miserere and that he promoted his text for Passion. There must have been something in their spirituality which was shared, despite important differences in emphasis.
Suarès was not as committed to Christian belief as the artist; he did not belong to a church or accept the orthodox creeds of Christianity. But Rouault did not see this as precluding their collaboration on a religious project to which he was so committed. The artist trusted his friend’s writing and knowledge of himself to do justice to the subjects: “If he did not believe as I did, I was not proud of the fact. I thought we would be able to treat together one of the great themes that had always occupied me, the suffering and death of Christ. And I felt that we could work together without either one having to sacrifice to the other his personal convictions or his interpretation of certain words or facts reported in the Gospels. I did not know if Suarès believed in the resurrection of Jesus or not, a fact which I never doubted. In any case he did not make any allusion to it in the work, while I celebrated it in one of the last plates.” [Letter in L’Art Sacre March to April 1965 p.25]
Suarès’ 24 sections of text for the Passion combine prose and poetry. They are far from conventional religious meditations on Christ’s Passion. Challenging and unorthodox theologically they concentrate on the theme of suffering rather than on Jesus; they even fail to mention ‘salvation’. Emotionally the words reflect Rouault’s feelings of empathy with suffering and the significance of suffering to human beings throughout history. With the publication, Rouault was not creating the prints to ‘evangelise’; they were artistic expressions responding to the central story of his faith. He trusted Suarès to create his own verbal responses to the theme as a work of literary art. Both of them recognised the significance of suffering in human life, and the emotional tone of the prints and the written text is similar. Christ as the ‘Man of Sorrows is seen to stand for and reflect the suffering of much of humanity.
The printing techniques for Passion were again meticulous, combining strong expressive acid etching in the large dark brushstrokes of the drawing and colour prints with the precise hatching more common in the wood-engraved plates of 19th Century publishing, which form the mid-tones in the black and white prints. Initially I personally found this a disconcerting mixture of techniques, then grew to recognise the subtleties and spiritual sensitivity within the images. The bold black marks provide a visceral reaction to the scenes; the refined hatching makes one’s continued contemplation calmer and more profound. Rouault ensured the technical excellence of the printing of the book by using the finest paper, binding, typography, inks and technically excellent engravers and printers.
In the Passion the wood engravings and colour etchings communicate together with the text. The images do not illustrate the text, nor do the words illuminate or describe the image. Some plates seem closely relevant to the text which they accompany, others simply complement the words thematically and emotionally. The colour etchings often more directly relate to the text which they accompany than the wood-engravings. Some of the imagery in the prints also relate to other works by the artist. The colour etching ‘Sainte Pute’ is very similar to the figure entitled Our Lady of Seven Sorrows print in the Miserere. This showed a sad crowned Madonna looking more like an image of a queen than the Virgin Mary. But ‘Sainte Pute’ means ‘blessed whore’, so the comparison of subject matter is closer to Rouault’s paintings of prostitutes 30 years earlier. The comparison makes the interpretation of both prints enigmatic. Sainte Pute may possibly be a reference to Mary Magdalene, but is more likely to refer to Rouault’s belief that all have the potential of redemption. She is represented with far more grace than the quartet of women portrayed consecutively in Miserere:
- So-called ‘Daugher of Joy’ / or ‘So-called joyful good-time girl’.
- In the mouth that was sweet, the taste of gall.
- The high-class society lady believes that she has a place reserved in heaven.
- The emancipated woman cries midday, when it is two o’clock.
The colour etchings, which were so innovatory and complicated, are very close to Rouault’s paintings of the 1930s. The requirements of the printing process meant that they must have been far more meticulously planned and designed initially than his works on canvas, which were altered continuously during the painting process. The intensity of colour is striking, due partly to the quality of the inks employed. Yet Rouault also managed to vary the hues, tones and shades subtly, by using multiple inkings and pulls of the print. He creates images on paper that almost reach the quality of luminosity of the the stained glass that he admired, yet they have the subtle variations and textures of his painting. At least four plates were used for each colour print, one for black and three for the primary printing colours. As with the Miserere plates, the artist worked in close collaboration with a master-printer. In the case of the colour plates it was Roger Lacourierre, with whom he also worked on the etchings for Le Cirque de l’Étoile Filante. Georges Aubert worked with him on the wood engravings. With the colour etchings Rouault worked the plates himself. For the wood engravings Rouault initially painted the images in oils, then Aubert, translated them into hatched prints, with the skills of a master engraver, which would have taken Rouault an entire career to master, Rouault personally and carefully supervised the whole process of engraving and printing, to ensure the production reached the high qualities that he required for the expression of his ideas and feelings.
The engraver, Aubert did a masterful and difficult job in aiming to convey the spontaneity of Rouault’s painting into the more rigid and rigorous linear technique of engravings. The wood engravings are masterpieces technically and interpretatively. None of the wood engravings have quite the same spontaneity of touch and emotion as the etchings, which were worked into over a long period of time by the artist himself, until, like the Miserere prints, they expressed his feelings. But the engravings’ slightly reserved nature and their quality mean that the black and white prints are quieter and suited to prolonged contemplation.
There is a strangeness in the arrangement of the plates that seems to have a symbolic significance or meaning in itself. They are not grouped in order of narrative, and initially seem random, yet there is also a sense that they are intended to evoke feelings through the book and direct the viewer through certain emotional and spiritual feelings. Certain symbols are significant: Figures carrying the beam of the cross recur, suggesting both the movement of a narrative and the fact that we and all humanity carry a cross of suffering in many ways, and, like Simon of Cyrene, we have the chance to help carry others’ loads. The book ends with this enigmatic image of a figure (of Christ?) with the beam of the cross leaning on his shoulders, as though he is still carrying it for the suffering world.
Fairly often Rouault included the three crosses of Golgotha, not just a crucifix, which had been the dominant theme of Misrere. The three crosses do not just represent the Gospel narrative the Passion; they deliberately showed Christ suffering on behalf of others and accompanying others in their own suffering. Neither Christ nor we are alone in suffering. At the end of the book wood-engraved images in the same design as the colour plates, are grouped together to form three crosses, reflecting the imagery at the beginning of the book, The heart is also a common theme, representing the sacred heart of Jesus and the love of God, but they also encourage the viewer to align their own love with that of the Trinity and learn a more authentic love of God and humanity. Images of the cross itself are central to the book’s theme and also are grouped centrally in the volume, as well as being interspersed among the other scenes, as in the Miserere.
LOVE AS AN ASPECT OF CHRISTAIN ART
Rouault spoke of love being a major element of his motivation as an artist as well as a man: love of the subjects of his art, love of the world, love of the act of creating, love of materials, love of nature, love of detail: “Any artist worthy of the name loves the merest atom of life” Despite the darkness of much of the Miserere series, Georges wrote in a letter to G. Cabot at the time of the completion of the plates: “The secret of fervour: love in the midst of sorrows and the fiercest torments, is still love for all that lives, for all that dies… The secret… is to love in secret and in silence and then to speak of it as well as you can, whether it be a serene visions of the finest gilded palace or a tragic vision of death at Gehenna, having first contemplated it then closing one’s eyes in order to see it more clearly.” This ultimately is how Rouault created many of his works of art: To Suarès he wrote in 1913: “Live in love with nature from now on… We are artists in order to affirm, that is, to create a beautiful form… Our business is to be and not to deny.” [Correspondance p.65].
Despite being an apparently rather taciturn, reserved and insular individual, he felt internally a love for his subjects, contemplated their situations, reached into the darkness of many and worked hard at depicting them by expressing as much of his feeling and love for them in their situation as he could. This is probably why he claimed that his art was not moralising; it was reflecting his emotions towards the world. Pascal had written: "The grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable… Man is but a reed, the most feeble (thing) in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself in order to crush him; a vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But when (even if) the universe would (were to) crush him, man would (still) yet be more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying (that he dies) and the advantage (which) the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of it (of this)." [Pensées 347] We know that Rouault enjoyed reading Pascal and this recognition of the value of human beings is at the heart of Rouault’s social consciousness and is reflected in his love of the subjects in his art.
Rouault wrote of the people whose lives he was painting: “Be he king or emperor, what I want to see in the man standing before me is his soul. And the more exalted he is and glorified by man, the more I feel for his soul.;” [Letter to Eduard Schuré 1905 quoted in Marquette Bouvier ‘Georges Rouault: expresionista y místico’ [Goya 1958-60 p.19]. Dignity of soul can be seen in his painting of people of different status: it is in his humble self-portrait painting ‘The Workman’s Apprentice’ 1925 as much as in ‘The Old King’ 1937. Considering his empathy towards those who had damaged their souls or had been damaged by life, he wrote “If I speak of myself, fellow sufferer, I am thinking of you; and perhaps even more I am thinking of my faith….” [Rouault ‘Le Visage de la France’. Verve 1940 Vol.2 No.7. p.18].
He also highly valued the materials, techniques and skills which helped him to express and represent his love. It would be false to interpret negatively Rouault’s confession to Suarès “I love my art as much as I loved my father”, especially as it was made soon after his father’s death, about which he wrote so movingly. In fact it was meant positively. Rouault, as we have seen, loved and cared for his father, even looking after him in his household at the end of his life. He greatly admired his father’s skills and love of materials as an artisan. These prompted a similar love of materials and techniques in George’s own art. Rouault’s statement about loving art as much as he loved his father is not confessing to any idolatry towards art or artists. It draws a parallel between his care, love and admiration for his father and his sense of the specialness of his artistic calling and his responsibility to love the world, which he expressed through his art.
He felt sorry for the people who were just ‘lovers of pleasure for whom the function of art is merely to pass the time’ For him “art is (my) sole raison d’être”. [Correspondance p.46]. This again does not meant that his other Christian commitments and his family, friends and wider responsibilities weren’t high in his priorities, but that he expressed his love of all through his art, and he was able to release his pain and passion through it: “I have always been happy painting, crazy over it, forgetting everything else even in the darkest affliction. The critics have not been aware of this because my subjects were tragic. But joy is always in the subject you paint.” [quoted in Henri Perruchot. ‘Georges Rouault: L’insatisfait’ in Le Jardin des Arts. June 1967 No. 151 p.8]
The sensitivity with which he wrote about art and people in his letters and other writings so often expresses this sense of value. Love was a characteristic of Rouault’s approach to art: “The language of form and colour… must be seriously learned, absorbed during a whole lifetime of love and, in addition, of authentic gifts. One spends his life in a spirit of love and humility, deciphering imperfectly Nature and Humanity” [quoted in Louis Leon-Martin ‘Georges Rouault’ in Art and Decoration 1930 vol.57. p.111]. Although Rouault’s images are not naturalistic, he is described by friends as constantly observing the world around him. He explained his love of observed details to Suarès “An ever more loving and precise observation of nature will bring me to a more vibrant art.” [Correspondance p.97]. “There is a child in every artist, for he cherishes the least little creature and every living thing under the sky.” [Rouault. ‘Etequête’ in Beaux-Arts 1936 no.198 p.5.]
Rouault attributed the growth of his love, even for the darker aspects of his subjects, to his faith: “The real nature of man dwells in the about-face of a conversion: He turns his love towards God, nor is his love less strong as a result, but rather the contrary. The emptiness of the creature is so great, the powerlessness of men towards one another so deep, so absolute… that in turning to God everything is transfigured.” [Correspondance p.104]. “The beautiful rhythms are everywhere.” [Rouault:’Stella Vespertina’].
Personal humility and humility towards his subjects was a result of this love: “If God gives us the inner humility, we are saved, for the language of God and his Spirit come to the aid of him who retires sincerely within himself, following the gifts he possesses.” [Correspondance p.11]. Such humility was not characteristic of many of the successful artists who reached fame at this time or today, or of some of the critics who rejected or neglected his work. He was essentially a rather private artist who experimented with the subjects and materials which he loved in the seclusion of his studio. He claimed “Creators are and ought to be solitary”…” Solitude is the natural dwelling place of all thought”. [quoted Dyrness 1971 p.82].
PAINTING CHRISTIAN SUBJECTS
Rouault wrote of faith to Suarès in 1939 as: “the only thing that brings hope to the poor wretches who still retain a great love for those things that cannot be seen, that cannot be weighed – and that is why I paint, not for the learned, for the bosses or the members of the Fairweather Academy.” Towards the end of his life he spoke of his art as a "fiery” or “ardent confession". The artist was able to express his essence and inspiration more effectively in visual form: “We express very clearly what we are: art is an ardent confession.” [Souvenirs Intimes p.14.] .
Between 1917 to 1926, Rouault’s concentration primarily on his printmaking meant that he rather neglected painting, though he emphasised that he continued to paint in his studio for several hours on most days, but left many works unfinished. He returned to painting more intensely after the completion of the plates for Miserere in 1927. From that point he made up for neglect of his painting contract with Vollard by intense work to complete several hundred paintings. These include portraits, nudes, circus performers and landscapes, but the majority of new work represented more specifically Christian themes. This may have been a response to his work on religious themes in the Miserere and Passion. Grotesque qualities in his forms were gradually replaced by more gentle representations, though the social commitment in his imagery remained strong. Yet still he regarded himself in a letter to Suarès as a “painter of darkness and of death…” This was a title given to him by some critics, who he called ‘imbeciles’ for just seeing his work as moral critique. He regarded the critics as blind to the religious meaning within the works: “(it took some) thirty years to see the ‘bite marks of Sin’ in my works… The imbeciles… if only they were a little more artists: everything in my work is religious. They want to make me Lautrec’s heir, put me among the girls… or place me alongside Daumier - to emphasise insistently ‘the overtones of original sin in my work’ – as if I were able to define and dissect myself so precisely in my pictures.” This, he contrasted with the humility of the more simple people of integrity, who were the subjects of most of his work: “such a treasure-trove of modesty, great delicacy, gentle and enduring love to be found amongst those upon whom these pontiffs would not deign to look.” … “I was born with a horror of ugliness and an over-precise analysis of reality” [Correspondance]
Although Rouault’s work was not naturalistic, and used figures which were simplified and honed down, rather as in icons, Rouault was not an idealist in his faith. Some of his images may have been caricature-like, influenced by artists like Daumier who had been formative since his days with his maternal grandfather’s collection. But the caricature for Rouault was in no way intended to debase or be cruel to his subjects; rather it held a mirror up to them. Jacques Maritain, a friend of Rouault’s for many years, recognised that art often needs to ‘de-form’ in order to realistically express the true nature of the world. A ‘naturalistic’ (i.e. almost photographic) representation often falls short of expressing the feeling of reality. Dyrness applies this quotation to Rouault’s approach to realism: “The one who makes a melodious beauty is the one who delivers himself of the object that inspires him, while transforming and transfiguring it.” [Dyrness p.211].
The seeming simplicity and slightly child-like innocence of some of Rouault’s images is balanced by his profound consideration of the inner life of his subjects, which he imbibed from his training with Moreau. He honed down his figures and other subjects to an expressive form that contained within it their inner characteristics. Yet he regarded them with a sense of wonder, even where he recognised corruption. This accounts for the statement mentioned previously. “There is a child in every artist, for he cherishes the least little creature and every living thing under the sky.” [Rouault. ‘Enquête’ in Beaux-Arts 1936 no.198 p.5.] The human figure became the clearest subject through which to expression of his ideas, love and his vision of life. However, his imagery is not naïve, simplistic , escapist or detached from reality. He wrote “It is impossible for me to isolate myself from the events of the day” [quoted in G. Marchiori Georges Rouault. Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts. 1965 p.17]
Rouault’s realism did not derive from broad travel. Much of his knowledge of humanity was drawn from watching the predicament of people in the world around him from his Paris studio, which looked down onto the events in the streets below him. He wrote: “One is never finished seeing and watching”… “Our eyes are the door of the spirit and the light of the mind.” [quoted in Jacques Guenne ‘Georges Rouault’’ in Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Nov.15. 1924. Vol.3. No. 109 p.5]. He prefaced the quote in the letter to Suarés mentioned above: “An ever more loving and precise observation of nature will bring me to a more vibrant art... It is impossible for me to isolate myself from the events of the day.” [quoted in G. Marchiori Georges Rouault. Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts. 1965 p.17]. However, social realism was not enough for Rouault; he approached reality by meditating on the spiritual content and implications of what he saw around him: “Our art finds its equilibrium between two realms, the contemplative (a rather outmoded word) and the objective.” [Stella Vespertina]. Rouault confessed: “I do not feel as if I belong to this modern life in the streets where we are walking at this moment; my real life is back in the age of cathedrals”. [quoted inT. Mitchell p.3] This reference, however, probably related to the orthodoxy of his faith and ethics, and his love of mediaeval art and stained glass, since his social commitment to the people of his own day was always so strong.
Claude Roulet, a friend with whom Rouault took holidays recalled: “Rouault was one of the real ‘spiritualist’ painters of his time, who thought with his hands and in the material, pondering with his eyes.” Rouault had been taught by Moreau to look for the spiritual content within the reality of nature not to merely attempt to make naturalistic art that copied nature. He regarded art as a form of expression of the inner self and the inner qualities and meanings within his subjects. Moreau taught him to listen to an inner voice within him and express what he was discovering. This led him to work for long periods on his images, reflecting, exploring, meditating upon and contemplating their meaning and building up the picture in many layers until it expressed the meaning he found within it. This exploration with the eye and the hand is an important aspect of Rouault’s approach to art. Although he wrote lucidly about his work, he claimed to not like theorising. When asked to explain his faith and discuss the relationship between his art and his faith Rouault was frequently reluctant [Charensol 1926 p.7, Cahers d’Art 1928 no 3.p..102]. “Images and colours for the painter are his means of being, of living, of thinking and of feeling.” [Soliloques p.66]. This is, however slightly disingenuous, because he was so clear when he spoke about his work and equally reflected his faith in his words, Nevertheless he was clear that “My writings are not worth as much as my painting” [Soliloques p.13].
For Rouault, life faith and art were inseparable “My life and my art make a single whole” [Roulet Georges Rouault: Souvenirs 1961 p.71]. Yet “in principle the artist ought to disappear behind his work. O artist, it should defend itself alone” [Soliloques p.107]. This is very different from the self-promoting attitude of many modernists and the contemporary art world, where the artist often aims to become more of a sensation than their art. Rouault’s attitude to fame was founded on the ideas about the Christian artist’s aims and role, discussed with Huygens and others at Ligué Abbey, and the modesty and anonymity that he attributed to mediaeval craftsmen.
The lack of naturalistic detail or portraiture in many of Rouault’s figures may be accounted for in the fact that they represent many people, as much as individuals. The figure of the proud woman, the indifferent leader, the bullying general, or the corrupt judge are generalised caricatures representing sinful individuals and situations, rather than specific people. The sad Pierrot or circus dancer, similarly present figures who we pity for their situation or position. Even his self-portrait as ‘The Workman’s Apprentice’ 1925 in a painting and in a print, shows the artist iconically as a simple artisan rather than celebrating individual features of his particular identity. Many of his figures seem lonely, but Rouault represents them as part of a far wider story of the world’s suffering in which he believed that Jesus identified with them and could reveal God’s presence to their situation. The poses and gestures of Rouault’s figures often reflect their emotion, position in society or feeling of status. Christ at the opening of the Miserere has his head bowed; the bishop and the rich hold themselves erect and aloof.
LANDSCAPES
Just as in his portraits the bleakness of Rouault’s landscapes in the Miserere do not literally portray the suburbs and factory-areas which he knew well. They represent the bleakness and poverty of those areas and the wider world. Rouault often used his landscapes and settings to convey his social and religious ideas: He recognised that all aspects of a painting could be transformed expressively: "A tree against the sky possesses the same interest, the same character, the same expression as the figure of a human."
His landscapes often seem simplified. He used colour to create a sense of depth, though the hues are not as subtly gradated to form aerial perspective ,as in conventional landscape painting. The early landscapes especially often seem cold, though the sun is shown shining, which enhances the impression of the loneliness of figures portrayed in the landscape. Even in several compositions of the road to Emmaus, the figures walking with Christ appear lonely, perhaps lost in thought and conflicting emotions. The road, landscape and inn before them all feel rather bleak and the lowering sun seems dull. They do not yet recognise the identity of the one walking beside them. These landscapes are reflective of his feeling about the Ile de France, where he recognised a sadness, coldness and indifference to the Christian faith. Nature sometimes seems threatening, with lowering clouds.
Rouault had painted a few landscapes around the time of Moreau’s death, like ‘Night Landscape’ [c1898],and ‘The Plain’ [1900] but he had not yet worked out what such scenes might meant and convey, other than mood, or how he might could use landscape symbolically. Around 1913 he began to recognise that landscape could carry something of the qualities of life lived within it. This is something which Millet especially had recognised. ‘Christmas Landscape ‘c1920- conveys something of the magic and hope of the nativity, with the church tower radiating the possibility of hope to a cold, snowy village, whose inhabitants seem to be sheltering indoors.
The landscapes of the 1920s and 30s, however gradually became brighter and warmer. The architecture seems more Eastern and the sun more vivid. From c1935 the sun became a more prominent symbol in the landscape, offering hope. It was perhaps meant as a symbol of the presence of the divine.
There had been a move towards topographical truth in religious painting of the late 19th Century, particularly in the works of Tissot, Holman Hunt and Tanner. But Rouault’s ‘Biblical Landscapes’ make no attempt at topographical naturalism, though the mushroom-topped buildings and towers convey something of the exoticism of the East. A few, like the Flight into Egypt contain figures which can be related to particular scenes from scripture. Characters are often dressed in simple, non-descript tunics. There is little specific reference to these being religious subjects, or traditional Christian iconography, though Christ is sometimes represented with a halo, or a glow of light around his whole figure. The emphasis seems to be that Christ and the scenes are just like normal life today. The presence of God is there in the everyday as it is for us. Some of the Biblical Landscapes simply contain anonymous figures. Autumn: Nazareth [1948] shows a few parents and children in a small grove of trees outside a village. Presumably the artist includes the child Jesus with one or more parents (probably the front two figures on the left, nearest the sun. But it conveys no direct religious message other than the impression that the Holy family were part of the community and gave light to it. The most central figure in the middle distance may be an angel watching over them, or the adult Jesus. It seems an innocent and hopeful scene, but this seemingly ideal landscape was completed not long after the Second World War had disrupted European life, and around the time of the final publication of ‘Miserere’. With bombed towns being rebuilt all around him, might the artist be developing an image of the sort of society that he hoped might be reborn?
The emphasis of most of these apparently simple landscapes seems to be that God is with us in our lives as securely as he was in biblical ties. Christ brings God’s presence alive as clearly as the sun warms and reassures of God’s blessing in the landscapes.
FORM, COLOUR, HARMONY
The poem at the end of Rouault’s Preface to Miserere (quoted above in my section on Miserere et Guerre) begins with an invocation of “Form, Colour Harmony”, terms to which he repeatedly referred as his approach to art. All three need to be integrated to convey meaning and feeling. In Miserere the ‘colour’ by which he chose to communicate feeling was white and black. In the prostitute images it was a greenish blue which added coldness when combined with flesh tones. In joyful pictures it was often a chrome yellow combined with glowing reds, which might sometimes conveyed a sense of danger, pain or the reassurance of the warmth of love. In some of his images of the Crucifixion or Man of Sorrows it combines all three. Such symbolic use of colour may have derived partly from Moreau. Form was conveyed by his dark outlines, heavy shadows, textures, the body of paintwork and the bulk or emaciated nature of his figures. He also used different intensities or tonal qualities in colours to convey form, as in the Passion colour etchings. Harmony was created by the combination of colour, since Rouault had ben steeped in modernist colour theory since before his time with the Fauves. Harmony was also achieved particularly by making the lines, marks, colours, and overall feeling for the painting harmonise with the meaning or emotion which his subjects evoked and which the pictures were designed to convey. When Rouault writes so often about exploring and working physically at his paintings by ‘touch’, he was seeking this harmony.
The emphasis on harmony seems connected to the interest in the interrealtionships of the arts, particularly the parallels between visual art with music which were being discussed at the end of the 19th Century and early 20th Century. Delacroix, Baudelaire, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, the Nabis, Fauves, Expressionists, Kandinsky and Klee all discussed them. Maritain discussed and wrote on their interrelationships, which greatly influenced Thomas Munro’s ‘The Arts and Their Interrelations’ [1949]. The influence of Rouault’s wife, who was an accomplished musician, must also have been strong. But Rouault’s interest in ‘harmony’ is far broader than visual and musical connections. His idea of harmony was a total interrelationship, similar to the idea of harmony expressed in the concept of the Kingdom of God. He wanted all aspects of his work, techniques, aims, faith and subject matter to work together and harmonise.
The innocence and slightly child-like vision that many of Rouault’s mature images superficially suggest is deceptive. Behind them was profound and prolonged thought and consideration of their symbolic significance to contemporary life. The seeming innocence or simplicity of vision may relate to Rouault’s idea of not over-intellectualising his scenes, but aiming to create a work that can be meditated upon and contemplated over time, as he himself had done in the process of painting: “We ought to be nourished on a mixture of classical and pictorial elements. We ought not to lean overmuch on the intellectual. There is an equilibrium, an order, a discipline to find little by little and step by step.” [Rouault, ‘Enquête’ in Beaux-Arts 1936 no.198 p.5]. Rouault’s images are not designed to have their meanings recognised immediately, which would have enabled the viewer to move on without thought or response. He intended them to be contemplated “little by little and step by step.” In the process of painting he had formed his thoughts into a harmony, which he wanted others to discover.
The beauty of colour, texture and love of subject with which Rouault painted the figures and scenes intentionally shows their value, and the hope and trust that he expressed that Christ was present in the struggles, changes and challenges of life. Among the glories of Rouault’s paintings are the beauty of the colours he used even in images of grief and pain. Even the poor and suffering are represented in jewel-like images that raise them to the level of saints in stained glass windows. Some of his paintings, especially those of saints, like ‘Joan of Arc’ [1948-9] or Veronica in the Assy window, are painted in radiant light and colour, almost as though they inhabit a spiritual world or dimension far more vivid than our present material world.
The link with painted glass has often been made in references to Rouault, because he trained in early years in a glass workshop. But the significance of stained glass is deeper than this. By creating coloured-glass-like icons, he was raising the status of his subjects and suggesting their eternal significance. He emphasised more often that ‘Form, Colour, Harmony’ was more important than colour alone in conveying emotion and faith. He could express himself equally deeply in black and white, as the Miserere and Passion cycles demonstrate. In one of the many personal poems which he included in his letters he wrote:
“You wold like me to talk about white and black.…
Good heavens, what a rich subject!
Some simplistic souls do their utmost to proclaim
whenever they can
that one thousand different shades make for the richest keyboard.
I’m a stubborn fellow, and I don’t think so.
The main thing for a painter
is not to have one hundred tones at his disposal,
but just a few
which harmonise with his special melody.”
Often in Rouault’s early and mature work colour takes on a symbolic role, creating a sense of hope, joy, sadness or desolation according to mood. This works together with form, line and mark to convey meaning. It can be seen particularly in a work like “The Fugitives’ [1911], where a contemporary poor family trudge through an unwelcoming landscape. The confusion of the marks , unbalance of the composition and weight and ungainliness of the figures adds to the sense of poverty, desolation and unwantedness. In the same year, 1911, he painted his Tragic Clown in a violently expressive impasto and dark gloomy shades, which may also reflect the poverty and want in the society around Rouault’s home in the poor district of Versailles His watercolour of the suffering Head of Christ as Man of Sorrows, in the Crysler Museum collection, painted earlier in about 1905, conveys its meaning by a similar harmonic approach, yet using confused, flayed marks and disjointed, sombre colour and form.
IMAGES OF THE SUFFERING CHRIST
Many of Rouault’s religious paintings represent Christ himself. Several represent his Passion, others his face, either as represented on the veil of Veronica or as an iconic presence, others represent scenes in which Christ is present, either biblical subjects like ‘Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha’, or present in the everyday, as in “Christ in the Suburbs’.. The initial print of Miserere represents Christ’s head, crowned with thorns, with the words “Jesus despised….”. The whole cycle shows that Jesus was ‘like us’, is with us, and knows our situation intimately, having undergone similar humiliations and suffering. The series ends again with the head of Christ on Veronica’s veil: , “And with his stipes we are healed”. This quote form Isa.53:5 represents Christ as the source of healing for the world’s ills, but the veil suggests that we, like Veronica should regard ourselves as responsible for taking his presence and his healing into the suffering world.
In images where Christ is among other figures he is often represented wearing white to distinguish him from other figures, yet he is never aloof, and is always represented as deeply involved in their lives. Christ in the Suburbs [1920-24] represents Christ present with and walking beside all who live in a poor district, feeling their situation with them. In his ‘Biblical Landscapes’ Rouault also represents Christ welcoming children to him, healing lepers and a sick man, speaking with fishermen or debating with the doctors of the law. In Christ and a Pharisee [1937], representing Jesus with Nicodemus, [Jn.3:1-21], a rather sombre Jesus seems to be explaining in wide gestures of his arms how God’s love for the world must entail his own suffering.
Rouault’s images of Christ’s crucifixion particularly explore the combined aspects of suffering and glory in his death. His painted crucifixes are often jewel-like and his prints expressive of sorrow and suffering. The Miserere print “Love one another,” expresses our need to comfort one another in grief as the suffering as Christ’s head bows his head towards the two Marys and John who cringe in anguish as he dies. Miserere opens with the head of Christ observing the world of suffering. In the final print the head of the thorn-crowned Christ on Veronica’s veil, quotes Isa.53:5: “It is by his wounds that we are healed.” The sequence is thus brought to completion by showing how Christ’s submission to humiliation and death like Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, not only identifies with human suffering, but resolves and heals the evils of the world which were so powerfully reflected in both the Great War and the Miserere et Guerre images. Plates of the face of Christ and the image of the crucified or suffering Christ are interspersed and echo throughout the series of prints as a leitmotif, reminding us that Jesus is with us in every situation of damage or distress.
The Cross was central to Rouault’s understanding of his faith. Charensol quotes him as saying: “As a Christian in such hazardous times, I believe only in Jesus on the Cross. I am a Christian of olden times.” [Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. 1926 p.8]. Among the Miserere prints of the crucifixion, ‘beneath Jesus, forgotten on the cross” shows Jesus at his most severely ravaged. This plate was more textured and eaten away than all except Plate 3:“forever scourged”. My favourite print of the crucifix, however, is more serene and seemingly simple: “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world…”. Here Rouault was quoting Pascal’s commentary in a section of the Pensées on ‘The Mystery Of Jesus’ on Matthew 26:36-46. It is a comment on the period of anguish in Gethsemane, where Jesus asked his disciples to remain with him and stay awake while he prayed in severe distress, preparing for his coming suffering. The disciples failed him by not keeping awake and Pascal meditated on the thought that human support could not accompany Christ at the height of his pain and passion. The sentence by Pascal which Rouault quotes continued: “…and we must not sleep during that time… Are you content that it is costing me the blood of my humanity, if you do not give it the least of your tears?” Rouault was reminding us that our own spiritual and physical responsibility is to stand with those who suffer and support, or at least weep in empathy with the suffering world, not neglect them.
The 5 images of Veronica’s cloth which intersperse the Miserere prints appear to carry a similar intention, acting like the crucifixes as significant anchor images linking the series. They are a constant reminder that we are not alone in suffering. God in Christ has walked this way with us and continues to do so. The legend of ‘true image’ imprinted by Jesus on his journey towards the cross may not just be intended by Rouault as a gentler reminder of the Passion than the crucifixion images. Nor are they just a reminder of Christ’s presence suffering alongside us. The veils of Veronica are probably intended to encourage us to ‘bear with one another’s burdens and thus fulfil the laws of Christ’ [Gal.6:2]. In legend Veronica had helped Jesus, as we and the Church are commissioned to love and help our neighbours, particularly supporting them in times of need as Veronica did in the legend, as Jesus encouraged his followerst o do in the Parable of the Good Samaritan [Lk.10:25-37], and as the Maritains had supported Rouault after his father’s death. Unlike the idea of Bloy that we should simply endure suffering to achieve sanctity, Rouault’s message seems to be that we encourage sanctity by imitating Christ in supporting others. Jesus’ self-sacrifice, and Veronica’s legendary humble support of the needy reveal the love of God and act as models for our care for others.
THE CHURCH AND THE BOURGEOISIE
By contrast, Rouault’s paintings of the rich and self-content often express their aloofness and disregard of the needy. They also represent Rouault’s personal distress at the disparity and injustice in the world. He himself led a fairly simple life and felt disgust at the corruption of some of those who seemed to control society. The rich, powerful, influential or corrupt were often represented in his most grotesque caricatures. One of the most elaborate of his Miserere prints represents: “The upper-class lady believes she holds a reserved seat in Heaven”. Like many others her features are more distorted and ugly than his representations of the suffering poor, which are often simple and beautiful.
Even the Church is not spared Rouault’s critique, as in his print of a bishop’s detachment from the plight of Christ’s people in: “Far from the smile of Rheims.” There, the bishop is a bland, almost characterless thick-spectacled figure, showing less humanity than most of the figures. He is grouped with the fat, arrogant general of ‘The nobler the heart the less stiff the collar’, the hard woman of ‘Tooth and nail’ and the indifferent unsympathetic lawyer of ‘The Law is the law however hard.’ The title ‘Sourire de Reims’ refers more specifically to the smile on the face of the famous sculpted angel of the Annunciation on the North Portal of the West façade of Reims Cathedral, sculpted around 1236 and 1245. Rouault employed it ironically to highlight the self-satisfied, disconnected indifference of the cleric. Already well known for its art-historical significance and local folk-teles, the angel statue had become particularly famous through having been beheaded on 19 Sept. 1914 through a fire after German shelling during the Great War. The head had been broken into several pieces after a four metre fall. Abbot Thinot had collected the remains and stored the fragments in the cellars of the Archbishop’s Palace. They were rediscovered by the architect Max Sainsaulieu on the 30 Nov. 1915, then reconstructed and preserved in the Musée National des Monuments Français. During and after the war it was used as a well-known French propaganda symbol of ‘French culture destroyed by German barbarity’. Before the completion of Rouault’s plates, the now notoriously famous sculpture was restored and returned to its place on the West front of the cathedral on 13 Feb. 1926. The title given by Rouault to his plate would have therefore been recognised almost universally as referring to an icon of French wartime propaganda. Rouault’s reference to the angel’s smile thus made the symbol of the self-satisfied, uncaring bishop even more ironic. Those of the church hierarchy who saw the series, reacted negatively to this image particularly, as well as the message of the series, as well as some of Rouault’s other more challenging work. This might partly account for the lack of ecclesiastical commissions for Rouault, at a time when Catholic churches in France were beginning to acknowledge and commission significant modern art. But the artist was being true to his beliefs and his perceptions of contemporary society. His Miserere print ‘Jean-François never sings alleluia… (In the land of thirst and terror). Refers to an ordinary man having doubted or lost his faith through seeing the hypocrisy and suffering around him.
As well as wanting to appear modern and in touch with contemporary trends, the Church as an institution, and its hierarchy, were still primarily interested in maintaining the social status-quo and appeasing the rich and influential in society. Bloy and Huysmans, like Rouault and others in the short-lived group at Ligugé Abbey bewailed this. Maritain admired Miserere, and had been given a complete set of prints by Rouault. But though he was enlightened and aware of the qualities in modernism, he was at the same time part of the system that maintained the relatively conservative ecclesiastical hierarchy. Similar situations occur today: Churches often talk of Christ’s bias to the poor and speak caringly about the needs of the underprivileged in the world, yet words are easy; sufficient activity to bring equity and justice is often neglected . Church institutions still primarily court the privileged for patronage and, despite their charitable offerings and acts, still largely seek to maintain the social status quo. Rouault, by contrast disagreed with the idea that the rich, famous or influential might feel that their status meant that God was working for and blessing them. His own character was relatively humble, and he recognised the privilege which had raised him out of the poverty which so many people shared. Christ’s bias towards the poor and downtrodden seems to have been strong in his social consciousness. In two plates of the Miserere: cycle: “Sometimes, the blind man consoles the seeing ” and “Lord, it’s you. I recognize you.”, Rouault contrasts the spiritual insight of human beings. A bind figure is suggested to truly recognise, find and touch Christ through his understanding and perception. Those who claim spiritual insight are suggested to be more spiritually blind. The implication is that the latter need the blind to guide them. Such a statement seems to have more resonant implications, in coming from a visual artist, to whom sight was so important. Rouault made few high claims for his own spirituality, but offered his art for contemplation of the truths contained within it.
MATURITY AS AN ARTIST
Rouault gained a wider international reputation in 1929 through his sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's ballet The Prodigal Son, choreographed by George Balanchine to Sergei Prokofiev’s music. From 1930 began to exhibit internationally and his works began to develop a different, more majestic or confident form of expressionism, seen in a painting like The Old King [1937}. Exhibiting successfully at the Paris World Fair in 1937 helped to establish his reputation. This success was followed by major retrospectives in the Venice Biennale [1947], the Kunsthaus, Zurich [1948] . Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels [1952]. The Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam [1952], Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris [1952] The Museum of Modern Art, New York [1953], Cleveland Museum of Art..The County Museum of Art, Los Angeles [1953], Tokyo and Osaka [1953] and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Milan [1954],
World War II forced Rouault to leave Paris for the south of where he joined other displaced artists and continued to paint. Working in more solitary surroundings than in his studio in Paris he completed many significant works. In these years he refined his use of line shape and colour, developing in paint upon the work he had achieved in colour printing for the ‘Passion’ and ‘Cirque’ colour etchings. His paintings became rather more dream-like in their reflection of his inner imagination. The harsh realism of his earlier works turned towards creating more meditative figures and images, even though he was often painting the same themes and subjects. The impression conveyed by his paintings and writings is that he was increasing in the sense that the process of painting and the subjects themselves, were spiritual and sacred.
Between 1930 and 1948 in printmaking as in painting Rouault’s work became gradually simplified in form and design. By about 1940 he had refined and reduced many of his forms almost to symbols for his thoughts. The techniques remain intense, carefully considered and worked-through, but several works feel almost as though the idea which he wanted to convey was becoming more important than the physical image itself.
In the 1950s the expressionist realism of Rouault’s painting was gradually replaced by images that are more idealised and icon-like, particularly his heads of Mary and saints. A greater personal security seems reflected in the apparent simplicity, peace, calm and sense of harmony and unity in his works, though they remain intensely painted. His subjects were often less dark and violent, considering that they were produced not long after wartime. Even his paintings of the crucifixion have a greater serenity and sense that this was a redeeming and healing act rather than a primarily barbarous one. The compositions themselves seem calmer and the use of paint and drawing less expressive of negative emotions, even sometimes decorative. Some compositions are surrounded by painted borders or frames that detach the image from us and present the viewer with an iconic image for quiet meditation. This is quite a contrast to the more violently politically or socially emotive images of his earlier painting. He seems to be presenting the viewer with images of greater intensity and serenity, to encourage contemplation.
MATURE USE OF COLOUR AND TECHNIQUE
Rouault used colour as much as line and texture to express feelings and emotions as well as spiritual meanings. From early in his career Gustave Moreau had taught him a mastery of colour and harmony, which Moreau often used symbolically to convey meaning as well as to create a sense of spiritual feeling in his works. Rouault developed upon the jewel-like intensity of mysticism in much of Moreau’s work. Particularly in his later paintings and some of his coloured prints, Georges unites colour and texture to convey a feeling that the image is like a reliquary formed of preciously applied paint or ink and radiant colour to emotively evoke feelings for the subject of the picture.
As his art matured, Rouault’s colours became more luminous. Chrome yellows, crimson reds and Veronese greens dominate his range, with less emphasis on deep blues. This brought colour to the surface of the image rather than receding. Rouault used the intensity of the colours to evoke and enhance emotion. He used contrasts and variations of tone and hue to modify expression, particularly where black created powerful shadows and heavy forms within brightly lit scenes. Rich contrasts of reds, oranges, greens and blues surrounded by black enhanced the impression of colour and light, as in stained glass windows. In some of his mature paintings he managed to create almost iridescent effects with the intensity of his colour.
Rouault used his strong, textured, black outlines to create a sense of form, weight, shadow and solidity in his images. But colour contributed to the form too, particularly in the creation of depth in the image. His late paintings are often very highly textured. The paint was not made more translucent by as much mixing with oils, but with contrasts that made the purity of colours still appear to radiate light. He chose his hues and tones carefully to enhance each other and balance within the contrasting black lines that helped to emphasise form. In his landscapes he used colour to create a sense of depth and perspective, even though the compositions are seemingly simple and the hues not as subtly gradated to form aerial perspective, as in conventional landscape painting.
The overlaying of colours in a variety of keys helped to elaborate these contrasts. Rouault was already highly trained in creating luminosity and expressiveness with colour through his apprenticeship in Moreau’s studio (and also building upon his early training in stained glass. He would have absorbed the colour theories of Post-Impressionism, the science of colour contrasts discussed with the Fauves and the experimentation of other early 20th Century artists at the Salon d’Automne. But by the time of his maturity as an artist Georges’ use of colour must have become almost instinctive by practice. The amount of time he spent refining his paintings shows that he was never satisfied until the image entirely expressed the feelings which he was working to create.
Around the end of the Second World War c1945-47 his palette grew brighter and lighter. The contrasts between cold and warm tones and hues enhance the expression of feeling. His use of paint became even thicker, more expressively sculptural and uneven in depth. The contrasts and broad touches of the brush create a sense of depth of relief. This confident use of paint is perhaps rather surprising at a time of scarcity of materials during and immediately after the war. Rouault must have had good access to suppliers!
From his comments about discovering through seeing and touching, I assume that he did not begin his paintings with a fully-fledged clear idea of what he was trying to convey. Very few artists do. The intention of the image would have developed over the long periods of time, often years, that he spent revising the work. Even though he so often revisited similar subjects in his paintings, each Pierrot, crucifix, Veronica veil, judge or dancer seems to have been for him a new exploration of form, colour, harmony and the feelings emotions and spirituality. The works grew through exploring the ideas that the current piece began to convey under his hands, eye and mind. Those feelings would change and modify as the colours blended and the expression created by the marks altered. So each new work, even variations on well-rehearsed themes, would have been a new and different exploration.
In his mature and later works Rouault did not tend to paint on an easel. His canvas was laid flat on a table like a physical object that he could see from above, turn to different angles and handle as he painted. He treated the canvases that he was building up in layers like a craftsman making an artefact. The treatment was very little different from a potter making his ceramics or his work as an engraver working away at the textures on his copper plates. It is not surprising that he experimented with ceramics, as the firing of iridescent and transparent colours which is a feature of ceramics, suited his feeling for colour, as did work in stained glass.
Rouault was meticulous in his all the techniques that he utilised in painting, printing, ceramics, glass, even his writing of texts and letters, sometimes returning to unfinished works over years in order to perfect them. His published writings Paysages Légendaires [1929], Cirque de l’Etoile Filante [1938], Soliloques [1943] and Stella Vespertina [1945] were worked on as meticulously as his painting. The intensity with which he worked into his art is shown in the layers of paint and multiple reworkings of the marks and textures in his prints. His friend Claude Roulet recalled him saying, like Bonnard, “'The terrible thing in art is knowing how to stop”. I recognise this in my own work as a painter. It is easy to over-work a painting and much harder to regain a feeling of spontaneity. Rouault worked slowly and patiently, often working on several paintings simultaneously. He was critical of the speed, generalisation and occasional insensitivity to technique in some modernist painters. This insistence on technique partly reflects his early academic training. Though he had been free of its constraints since the beginning of the century, he retained a preoccupation with paint and image quality.
ROUAULT’S FAITH
Although Rouault was not a theologian his work appears rooted in considered faith rather than a generalised painting of traditional religious subjects. Many of his themes of course are traditional in Catholic art: The Cross, Mary, saints, biblical scenes and more occasionally the Resurrection. Other works less explicitly suggest the presence of Christ in human beings or his nature as ‘one of us’. I am not sure that I agree entirely with Dyrness’ statement “Rouault conceived of and painted Christ in the same flesh as that of the clowns and prostitutes. His was always a human portrayal of Christ.” [Dyrness 1971 p.185.]. While Rouault is intent on showing that Jesus is ‘incarnate’ and identifying with even the most personal needs of the most deprived and suffering, there is also an ‘otherness’ about his image that sets Christ apart in Rouault’s paintings. He is the healing model and example for humanity not just its representative and saviour, who suffers with and in our sufferings.
The themes of the texts on the Miserere prints reflect much personal thought about faith in concise words, which show that he had considered theologically the key meaning of the images. The image of John baptising Jesus, for example, shows that the artist is doing far more than representing Christ’s moment of initiation inti humanity and his dedication in embarking on his ministry. Rouault wrote: “we,.. it is into his death that we have been baptised”, quoting Romans 6:3, implying that our own mission is to take on the implications of Christ’s death and follow Christ’s example. Like him, we are to feel with and support the suffering world, so that we will also deserve to share resurrection and the newness of life, to which the verse from Romans later refers. How much help Rouault was given with choosing this text and others like the classical writers and Pascal, we cannot be sure. Georges may have found them himself from his own extensive reading and his church attendance. He certainly had key literary and theological contacts with whom to discuss them. Some references, like the mariner on a journey, lost at sea, seem to refer to poems he wrote about his own pilgrimage:
Poor mariner
upon the limitless ocean
I am indigent dust
that is swept by the wind.
I love the Divine Peace
and the light,
even in the blackest nights.
At war for spiritual good
that I would never betray.
[Soliloques p.56.]
Like many in Europe at the time, the Great War had a profound influence on deepening Rouault’s already committed faith. While disillusionment after both World Wars led many away from the conventional Church, Rouault’s faith deepened as he contemplated the implications of the war and the ills of society. After the Great War he fed this into his work on the Miserere plates, and also the quieter prints of The Passion, produced afterwards as a more mystical response. The Second World War led him to paint positively about his faith, expressing a new hope that faith and society could improve.
Although they do not dominate his output, images of Christ’s Passion became one of Rouault’s most profoundly expressed themes. He regarded Christ’s suffering as being alongside us, with us and in us. This is seen in a verse which he sent to Suartès at a time of exhaustion an depression in 1938, when the artist was looking in on himself and on the world:
“So little righteous
and certainly helpless, the poor wretch
with the best of intentions,
trips and falls more than once.
Like Jesus on the road to Calvary
under the weight of the Cross
wanting to take on our sufferings.”
[Corresponadance p.312].
The later heads of Christ whether on Veronica’s veil or alone as the Suffering Servant, are often as restrained in their expressions as Rouault’s crucifixes. They are meant to represent the love for the world, which led to his self-sacrifice and intend no feeling of revenge or hatred. The images of the suffering Christ show him resigned to his suffering, as it will bring healing. This is very different from some more violent images of the Passion created by other modernists in response to war, particularly Picasso’s variations on Grünewald and Graham Sutherland’s and Francis Bacon’s Crucifixes, or those painted after the Mexican Revolution, which focus on the suffering rather than its salvific outcome. The one major exception is the Head of Christ [1905] in the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, which expresses sorrow and the effects of flagellation more horrifically and sadly than most of his other works combined. This was painted in the same period as his watercolours of prostitutes, at a time of preliminary experimentation, when the artist was still exploring the potential of expression to convey spiritual meaning. He never worked so violently again. Even the most textured plates of Christ’s Passion in Miserere have a restraint which encourages the viewer to contemplate the suffering of Christ for them, rather than react over-emotively against it.
Reference to life beyond the suffering of the world is found in a few of the Miserere prints. A cancelled print “Resurrection” shows Christ rising from the tomb, his arms and face raised towards heaven. It was given the alternative title: “In every heart well-born, Jesus rises again”, implying not that the socially high-born will find blessing but those whose hearts are enlivened and renewed by Christ. Another plate in the series; “He who believes in me, though he be dead, shall live,” [John 11:25] shows a charnel house-like chapel of skulls surrounding a niche holding the cross of promised salvation. This is further emphasised in the plate “Arise, you dead!” (or “Onward the dead!”), where the living and skeletons share in a dance of death, both foretelling the death of the living and their shared participation in Resurrection, rather like the vision of Ezekiel 37:1-14. Rouault was to write about 10 years later: “Jesus can always resurrect in any well born heart, if he is lucky.. the hope of seeing a certain beauty born in this world that perspires tedium and smells of death… Everything has a price, force, beauty, grace, and the faith in you, Jesus, a great price. And for all that is valuable, I would prefer, if you feel I am worthy of it, to pay with my flesh.” [Le Cirque de l’ etoile filante. Paris 1938 p.36-7].
Although Rouault does not often portray Christ’s Resurrection specifically, hope is present in the light and coloursof many of his religious paintings and prints. Significantly in a 1936 lithograph of Christ on the Cross, John and the two Marys kneel and raise their heads in worship against a chrome yellow sky, suggesting, (unlike the empathy with pain in the Miserere prints of the Cross,) the light of salvation rather than the horrors of suffering.
Though he often produced art about death and hope, Rouault wrote little of his own death: “One day, when death comes, I shall be bereft of everything that I have loves most here on earth. One has to get used to this idea of mortality, unbearable to the heart of the artist and wait for this hour to arrive with the wise man’s resignation.” (The underlining is his own) But his life and the themes of his work had been immersed in that recognition and preparation for reality of death: “When I see again certain things old or modern, I feel that I am with Orpheus in the resting-place of the dead. I live among them, I think with them, I love and communicate with them through their works, a strange activity for a living person. Life has dipped me in the deep Styx and I shall always be torn between the two.” His painting ‘De Profundis’[1946] shows the death-bed of a man with a cross placed on his chest and a crucifix above his bed being prayed for by a woman, who could be his wife, a nun, a nurse or Mary herself, with a kneeling child by her side. The crucifix has a dominant presence in both the man’s eye-line and over his heart, offering the promise of salvation.
Meditating on his work as a painter, Rouault wrote of how his painting was part of his journey of faith. His comment on a “world of shadows and appearances” probably refers to Plato’s cave and the world of truer reality beyond. Rouault’s land of peace combines the world of present reality with the world of heaven, where he longs for all to be made harmonious by God through the healing work of Christ:
O, Crucified Jesus!
He paints to forget the ‘pursuing weariness’ of life
far from this world of shadows and appearances.
He has departed quietly for the land of peace
which has haunted him day and night,
towards the land of peace
where all is harmonious
to the eyes, the mind and the spirit.”
[Stella Vespertina].
Most of Rouault’s work recognised the duality between the “weariness of life” and the land of peace where all is harmonious. His paintings of holy figures often depict a serenity which he believed had achieved that peace.
TOWARDS THE END OF ROUAULT’S LIFE
During the last 10 years of Rouault's career his work became intense in colour and texture. Whereas many artists, having reached maturity and fame sometimes rest on their reputation, Rouault continued to advance his work and some of his late paintings are among the best of his career. He used less oils to dilute his paint, building up the images in thick layers, sometimes to the depth of several centimetres. The black lines accentuated the form of his subjects. Since the early days of the Salon d’Automne at the beginning of the century, Rouault had freed himself from the requirements of academic art, but these later paintings are even further from formal art and combine expression with a delight in the almost sculptural texture of paint.
He would often leave paintings for months before returning to them to build up their layers and continued to experiment in them. They often have a greater serenity than his earlier work. He spoke of being "torn between dream and reality”. This may be compared to the intensely expressive realism of his earlier works. Now the realist subjects were treated with a greater sense of grace. He continued to use similar themes of the circus and a few of judges, but the percentage of specifically religious subjects increased to a quarter of his whole output during the period from 1941 to his death in 1958.
Such was Georges Rouault’s commitment to his integrity as an artist that towards the end of his life he burned many of the unfinished works with which he was dissatisfied. He recognised that he would not have time to finish them to his own satisfaction. A year after the return of over 700 of his unfinished paintings from Vollard’s heirs, he called in a public notary to witness the burning of 315 of the pieces that he felt unable to complete. He burned more works a few years later.
The success of the struggle with Vollard’s heirs seems to have been far more to him than aiming to achieve material gain by the return of his paintings. By that time he was financially, socially and artistically secure. The return of the works to him was regarded by him as an act of justice, which he needed to pursue legally, due to his preoccupation with the need for honesty. It was also his way of controlling and leaving a legacy of which he could feel artistically and ethically proud. It ensured that works with which he was dissatisfied could not be wrongly exploited by the art market. He did not want them to go out into the world without his personal approval of their aesthetic value. He knew that that his family, executors or galleries could have sold even weaker works for vast sums, but he maintained his integrity of purpose. After his death his children founded the Rouault Foundation to continue protecting the integrity of his legacy.
As the destroyed works no longer survive, we cannot judge whether the burnings were the right decision or not. It would be fascinating to see different stages of his works at various points of completion. But we can still do this through the (presumably) better unfinished works that remained. We now interpret preparatory drawings and unfinished works and even ‘bad’ works in different ways to the past. They can provide invaluable and enlightening insights into further understanding of an artist’s work and aims, as well as being appreciated aesthetically or as thought-provoking images in themselves.
Rouault had been frail as a child and his health declined towards the end of his life, until by 1956 he was too frail to paint. Georges Rouault died in Paris on February 13, 1958 at the age of 86. . He was survived by his wife and three children. He was the first artist in history to be given a state funeral by the French government. In 1963, his family donated almost 1000 unfinished works to the French State
CONCLUSIONS
Georges Rouault was probably the preeminent committed Roman Catholic artist in France during the first half of the 20the Century. He moved from a primarily secular upbringing to an awareness of spirituality initially through the influence of the Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau. Moreau encouraged him to move away from Academic art and taught him to listen for the ‘inner’ in his subjects and in himself. Moreau also advised him to be free and not tallow himself o be restrained by the constraints or conventions in art or traditions in faith, a lesson that he followed throughout his career. Rouault sought a more orthodox Christian faith than his mentor and in his early 20s was prepared for his first communion, deepening his commitment to the Catholic faith. From the first years of the 20th Century Rouault was in contact with many significant Catholic intellectuals and radical Catholic literary figures. They were critical of the relaxed attitude to faith of contemporary French Catholicism and radicalised the young artist. Through them, early in his career, he developed personal ways of applying his Christian faith to his art, some of which were misunderstood and not accepted. They also encouraged his sense of social commitment, which he applied and expressed in some of his most impassioned works like his series of prints ‘Miserere’ and his paintings of prostitutes and other marginalised figures.
The integrity and faith of the artist was not always recognised by the Catholic Church to which he was committed, or by his Christian friends. He therefore developed his work and ideas somewhat independently from the Church, though he had many friends in Catholic circles. His early attempts to find imagery that applied his beliefs and sense of Christian social commitment were misunderstood by some as ‘ugly’ and ‘unchristian’ in subject-matter. At the height of Rouault’s mature art, French churches were renewing their contact with and commitment to the arts and commissioning works from well-known contemporary artists, in order to seem in touch with the modern world. But sadly they neglected Rouault, whose spiritual commitment to the Catholic Christian faith was far greater than that of many of the famous secular artists who received commissions. He received only one ecclesiastical commission during his career, for stained glass, a skill in which he had been initially apprenticed.
Dyrness concluded that the aim of Rouault’s art “was neither aesthetic experience alone or emotion, though it involved both of these. The end of Rouault’s work was to inspire in the viewer the same religious effort towards God, the absolute, that the painter himself felt. This absolute, he felt, was reflected in God’s highest creation, man.” [Dyrness 1971 p.110]. Yet Rouault was not an evangelist in any orthodox Christian sense. His art was often a personal exploration of his emotional and inner response to his faith. It frequently responded to the disfigurement of the image of God in human beings, which he recognised in his contemporary world. He was painting the ‘inner reality’ of what he saw and perceived in the world and in people. He wanted to lift his audience to higher levels of perception, spirituality and behaviour.
When Rouault talked of his art as a “fiery/ardent confession” he expressed the vigour and personal nature of his commitment to his work and his subjects. He saw himself as a labourer on par with the artisans of the past who, with a sense of their own humility, had built the cathedrals ‘to the glory of God’, not themselves, and to inspire others to glorify God in their lives. Rouault wanted his art to elevate others and hold a realistic mirror up to the world but not to moralise. He believed that art was above moralisation; rather he intended to hold a mirror up to society, for it to recognise its needs and failings. Judgement was God’s business; the arts were gifts for uplifting humanity and helping it recognise realities.
He took from his tutor Moreau a visionary attitude to his subjects, by ‘listening to the subjects’ inner voice, listening to his own inner response, and reflecting both in the forms, marks, colours, textures and feelings of his images. His emphasis on ‘harmony’ was intended to bring these together in forming a Christian response to his subject matter. Though his representations of people, especially of those whose lifestyles he did not approve, are sometimes rather caricatured, they are not meant cruelly. He was ‘de-forming’ to use Maritain’s phrase, in order to express inner reality more closely, as his maternal grandfather’s hero Daumier had done. Rouault felt that a Christian should value all, though they might abhor activities and effects of sin. He rejected the idea that his images were ugly; to his mind only the thoughts and deeds of people could be ugly.. All people, even the sinful held something of the essence of the image of God.
After his tutor and mentor Gustave Moreau’s death, Rouault gained greater independence, though a small salary as curator of Moreau’s artistic legacy; between 1917 and 1938 he gained further financial security through a regular salary from the dealer Ambroise Vollard. These meant that he could experiment with his art without needing to pander to the fashions or aesthetic expectations of his day. He had already decided around 1901, through the influence of the community at Ligué Abbey, that a Christian artist should be above ambitions for fame, position and fortune. He aimed for a higher integrity and sincerity. Rouault does not follow the direction of many modernists in moving away from figurative representations into more abstract art. He always remained figurative, because the human figure was the main vehicle through which he felt he was able to express his emotions, ideas and faith.
Rouault loved art and loved the process and technical and physical qualities of craftsmanship, which he first learned to appreciate through his father. Rouault applied his faith to his technical work. It influenced his method of working, his materials, techniques, his use of colour, his valuing of his subjects, the emotion he conveyed, his way of working with clients and the honesty of his business practice, as well as the subjects he chose. Only by harmonising all of these was he satisfied with the integrity of his work. Love of materials and techniques accompanied his love of his subjects, though he did not idolise art. His response of love, whether towards subjects, methods, materials, business, etc. was all part of his faith and called for integrity and committed hard work. He saw himself as a craftsman/artisan as much as an artist, and enjoyed working alongside master-printers and others of skill. He expressed dislike of the sloppy technique of some of his contemporaries. Even towards the end of his career he worked tirelessly into his artworks until they satisfied his high standards of harmony between technique, spirituality ad expression.
Rouault worked phenomenally hard, regarding himself as an ‘ouvrier’ or ‘worker’, like his craftsman father. He repeatedly refined his images, without worrying about the time or energy taken, until he achieved the feeling and aesthetic result that conveyed his intention and emotion about the subject. Though many of his works seem simple or spontaneous, they are often the result of years of painstaking refinement. This is especially true of his plates for the Miserere, his colour etchings of Passion and his finest impasto paintings. The process of ‘touch’ was his physical way of working into and meditating on the meaning and value of the images which he was creating.
Rouault was also a craftsman with words. He was quiet and reserved personally. He expressed a dislike of explaining his art, believing that the medium should communicate enough of itself through its own qualities. But he talked and wrote lucidly about art and the responsibilities and values of being an artist. Similarly he did not like talk much to explain his faith, but the writings and quotations that do refer to his beliefs and his application of them show his commitment and the depth of his spiritual thought. He was not a theologian but read widely and reflected deeply on the meaning and implications of his subjects.
Due to his writings and some of his images, it is possible to read an over-romantic idealism into Rouault’s faith and art, which was not his intent. It derives partly from a more romantic approach to Catholicism which influenced him later in his life. Some of his most serene images of saints, Veronica’s veil, Mary and biblical landscapes, Pierrots and dancers seem to imply idealism. But Rouault’s writing and quotations about his aims insist that his intention was to express the essence and truth about human life and faith in ‘realist’ ways, not to idealise or provide spiritual or artistic escapism. What may be mistaken for idealisation or romanticism in some of his work probably derives from his wish to portray the ‘inner’ and the ‘intrinsic spiritual value’ of his subjects. However people failed, he believed that they were still made in God’s image, loved and valued by God and capable of redemption. That is one reason why he produced so many images of the source of that redemption - Christ’s Passion.
Many of Rouault’s subjects became metaphors for his faith and social commitment. His clowns, prostitutes, dancers, landscapes, everyday figures and portraits all relate human conditions and predicaments to aspects of life and faith. These fictional figures are far more than just generalised metaphors for the human condition. They are often given specific names and certainly had particular characteristics painted or drawn into them by the artist as he meditated on them during the long process of creation. In his mature work certainly, they have personal identities, and we are intended to feel with them as they face their predicaments, just as we might with a character in a good novel. Through them we are meant to learn about aspects of ourselves and the individuals, society and world around us, and act in response.
At different stages of Rouault’s career specifically religious scenes dominate or become less prominent in his oeuvre. When he wrote: “Everything in my art is religious” it meant not that he always painted specifically religious subjects, but that he believed that his faith related to everything about the world within which he lived, and to which he was committed. He regarded everything in life, as related to the Creator. His own life and art were committed to reflecting his faith with integrity.
BIBLIOIGRAPHY
Charensol, Ernest 1926 Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. Paris: Editions des Quatre Chenins
Chapon, Francois., Rouault, Olivier Nouaille 1978 Georges Rouault, Oeuvre Gravé Monte-Carlo. Editions Andre Sauret.
Courthion, Pierre. 1961 Rouault. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc..
Doering Bernard. Lacrimae Rerum-Tears at the Heart of Things: Jacques Maritain and Georges Rouault: https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/Truth/Truth301.pdf p.205ff.
Dorival, Bernard. 1984. Rouault, GEORGES ROUAULT AS A SPIRITUAL ARTIST Iain McKillop
Georges Rouault (1871-1958) has fascinated me for five decades since I first encountered his work in an exhibition in Manchester City Art Gallery in 1974 when I was at university studying Art History. As someone newly committed to my faith I was drawn to his subject-matter as well as excited by his use of mark, colour and expressive textural paint. I am not sure that I then understood his work, or even that I still do comprehend fully what he was exploring in some of his works. Even the critic Gustav Coquilot, who knew him well and defended his work, wrote “(one) must be a monk to understand him.” Discovering William Dyrness’ writing on the artist soon afterwards helped to clarify my understanding and I am indebted to his research and ideas, as I am to several other scholars and Rouault’s own writings.
There are enigmas within Rouault’s imagery, which make one continue to look, think, meditate and contemplate. Rather like Orthodox icons, they convey a sense that, though one might recognise their subjects and something of the theology within them, they also hold mysteries and meanings for the artist that are not easily explicable. I am fortunate to own what I find the most expressive print among his Miserere cycle “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world”, a title derived from Pascal’s Pensées [553-5]. The image has a fascinating, hypnotic effect that draws me into the implications of Christ’s Passion. The torso of Christ appears more simple and smooth than the other three crucifixes in the series and seems to spontaneously convey emotion, expressing sadness, vulnerability, pain, empathy with the human condition, glory, triumph and love.
I recognise that Rouault worked for years to convey such feelings with apparent spontaneity in his prints and paintings. Rouault himself wrote: “I put the best of myself” into the Miserere series, and considered it his finest legacy. His daughter Isabelle wrote in her Preface to the series that Miserere was “the work to which he attached primary importance.” His Passion cycle of colour etchings and wood engravings is similarly technically masterful in rather different ways. His work has influenced my own attempts to try in my own different way to express spontaneity of emotion, considered spirituality, committed faith, and considered theological thought in my own paintings. Like him, I have found that discovering your personal voice and message does not come easily and requires intense commitment. I have found, like him, that I have made mistakes and gone down paths that do not always fulfil my aims or are not always understood or accepted by others of faith, let alone those who do not respond to spiritual imagery. If there is truth in the Christian faith as I, like Rouault, believe it is worth the struggle and conviction of exploring and conveying. Faith is the highest subject with which an artist could aspire to work.
ROUAULT’S PLACE WITHIN MODERNISM
The subject matter and spiritual content of Gorges Rouault’s art is unusual, amid the varied themes and largely secular preoccupations of modernism in the art of the first half of the 20th Century. In fact he was the only major modern artist, in France and probably in the west to gain a reputation through producing art that was so predominantly religious. Perhaps it was because of this religious preoccupation in his work, that he did not gain the height of reputation of his friend and fellow student Matisse or Matisse’s great rival Picasso. Their ideas on art was very different yet Matisse and Rouault shared a fruitful relationship as testified to in their correspondence over several years. Matisse’s few works on religious themes, like the Stations, glass and vestments for the Vence Chapel hardly had the intensity of religious commitment of the art of Rouault. Picasso also produced several works based on the crucifixion, particularly exploring surrealistically Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, yet this was for expression and innovation. not through personal conviction of faith Several modernist artists accepted commissions to produce artefacts for churches, but few had the commitment to faith that drove Rouault’s life and work from about the age of 24.
Rouault’s work remained fairly independent and insular within the genres and aims of the Parisian art community. However, he counted many artists and writers among his friends and in 1903 helped to found the Salon d’Automne, which was to become significant in promoting the work of many other modern artists. Among Christian artists he had similar interests to his exact contemporary painter Maurice Denis [1870-1945], who he knew, though their work was extremely different. But Rouault never became a permanent member of any ‘school’, ‘group’ or ‘ism’, so is not easily categorisable. He was quiet and rarely promoted himself, though his writings are more profoundly thought-through and practical than many modernist art manifestos. He seldom mixed in the cafes where artists discussed together or joined in the Bohemian life of Paris. He preferred the quieter circles of Catholic friends, or was supported by individual friendships like that with André Suarès, J.K. Huysmans or Jacques and Raïssa Maritain.
His work is still ‘revolutionary in that it remained expressively figurative and realist when so many other successful artists were moving towards abstraction of form. His religious faith became enhanced and important to him when many other artists and intellectuals were deserting the Church. Religious subjects as a source for art diminished as artists’ training altered and subjects moved away from the themes of academic art, which had included biblical subjects. Though he was definitely a ‘modernist’ Rouault is therefore not an obvious representative of 20th Century modernism. Even museums that hold significant works by him within their collections rarely exhibit them on their walls today. Yet in his time his work was exhibited in major Paris galleries and later in New York, Chicago, London, and Tokyo. Rouault gained worldwide recognition through an exhibition of forty-two paintings at the Paris World Fair in 1937. He was promoted in New York by Pierre Matisse, son of the artist, whose gallery staged three solo exhibitions of Rouault’s work between 1933 and 1947.
Rouault’s art did not appeal universally to critics and collectors who did not always recognise his importance in developing the expressive use of colour and texture. Yet his work was as significant as that of the r Fauves with whom he exhibited in influencing the German and Frencb Expressionists, whose emotional energy he reflected. He was not always valued by churches or the collectors of religious art either. Sseveral religious writers especially denigrated his early attempts at integrating his Christian and social beliefs into his work. For all his difference from the secular themes of most art of the first half of the 20th Century he remains an important innovator in modernism and highly significant in the development of ideas and forms in modern religious art. He is not easily placed in a category as ‘Fauvist’, ‘Expressionist’, ‘Modernist’ or even ‘Christian Artist’. Like all great art his work is unpredictable and challenging, as well as formally delighting the eye. Yet, as he was to claim: “Everything about my art is religious”… “All my art is religious for those who know how to look at it.” [Correspendance. p.19].
EARLY YEARS
Georges Rouault did not begin his career with religious convictions; his early upbringing was primarily secular. He grew to be proud of having had humble origins and artisan roots, partly because his faith, which developed later gave him a social and ethical consciousness, and he recognised that Christ identified with the downtrodden. Even when he was rising in fame, and as a mature artist, he is described as “cutting a poor, solitary figure.” He saw parallels with the background of Jesus, who had emerged from artisan roots, his father being a carpenter (or ‘tekton’, probably a ‘general workman’). Rouault’s father was a cabinetmaker who worked for the distinguished manufacturer Pleyel varnishing of pianos, though this was not a well-paid job and his family lived in relative poverty. Vollard recalled artist later expressing pride in his father’s integrity as workman, (an ‘ouvrier’/’worker’ was Rouault’s term), saying that the integrity of such a craftsman should be “honoured as Joseph the carpenter and his apprentice the infant Jesus” [Souvenirs 1957. p.162]. Of the false distinction between ‘artisan’ and ‘artist’ he was to write: “One starts as a craftsman and then one becomes an artist if he can. But is it not better to be a good craftsman then a mediocre artist? [Soliloques 1944 p.104]. He celebrated the anonymity of the mediaeval craftsmen who worked with what he called “the cathedral spirit” out of faith and love of what they were making for God, rather than personal fame or financial reward [Soliloques p.51]: Their modest humility, he believed led them to carve “Non nobis Domine, sed nomini tua da gloriam” / “Not to us, O Lord, but to your name be the glory” on their work [Ps.115:1 or Ps.113:9 in the Vulgate]. Rouault claimed to regard his own work and aims similarly, when he wrote about it between the late 1920s to 40s.
There is a tendency to over-romanticise his life, art and ideas in some of Rouault’s sayings, which contrast with the artist’s ‘Realist’ aims. This romanticism may also account for the seeming ‘sweetness’; in some of his mature subjects like clowns, dancers, saints, Mary, heads of Christ /Veronica veils and Biblical landscapes. He intended them to seem more raw that they appear today. He was aiming to express realism about the vicissitudes of human life and faith, yet they sometimes cross the border into sentimentalism. This was also the case with some other modernist artists like Derain, Utrillo, Bonnard, Buffet, Maurice Denis, Franz Marc, Ewald Mataré, even Arp and Brancusi. Rouault’s occasional romantic or sentimental parallels between the life of Christ and his own may be influenced by some particular brands of Catholicism which influenced him, though other spiritual influences rooted him in the realism of the hard life experienced by many who he saw around him.
Georges later repeatedly referred to the almost-legend-like story of his birth. He was born on 27th May 1871in a poor area of Paris in a cellar under bombardment during the insurrection at the end of the Paris Commune, which came to be known as ‘Bloody Week’. His family home had been destroyed during the attack. Later this, rather over-romantically, encouraged parallels with Jesus’ birth in a stable, away from home and his marginalised status in Egypt as a refugee. Georges was baptised a month later on 25th June 1871 in the parish church of Saint-Leu, but neither his upbringing and education were religious.
He grew up as a frail child. Until his mid-20s, his priorities were primarily secular, spending his childhood in the challenging social environment in Belleville. .As his father was a partisan, opposed to the current papacy, he refused to send his son to a Catholic school, and enrolled him in a Protestant one, from which he soon removed him due to their over strict regime of punishment. Belleville was one of several poor and dismal working-class ‘faubourgs’/‘suburbs’ of Paris, to which Rouault later referred in the Miserere and elsewhere as the “district of long-suffering” or ‘rue des solitaires /-street of the lonely).. In these areas for the poor and manual workers, many lived in crowded tenements or rundown smaller homes near the factories where they worked. People had said of Jesus ‘Could anything good come out of Nazareth’ [Jn.1:46], a poor district of Israel, known more for its rebels than for harmonious religious teaching and peace-making spiritual leadership. It is probable that during Georges’ childhood time few inhabitants of Belleville aspired to political, social or cultural greatness, or to be fine artists. However, he remembered his future tutor Gustave Moreau saying that ‘a painter should be grateful if he was poor, for it is difficult for a person to sense the wonder and horror where all the world lives, if he has never been down with them’ [quoted by W. Dyrness 1971 p.61].
Rouault he called himself one of the “labouring classes”, an ‘ouvrier’, like his father who would actually have been called an ‘ebeniste’ or ‘skilled craftsman’. Part of his inherited ethic was hard work with integrity, which he later formed into his Christian ethic as an artist. An intense feeling for morality is seen in the subjects of his art. Doing what was ethically right was also largely his reason for later persisting with a prolonged legal battle with the heirs of his dealer Ambrose Vollard over the ownership of his own work. From Georges’ father Alexander he learned to appreciate quality and beauty in materials and workmanship, which contributed to the meticulous technical way in which he later approached his own art. His mother encouraged him in his appreciation of arts, as did his maternal grandfather, who owned and introduced him to a wide variety of reproductions of works of art, particularly a large collection of lithographs by Daumier and prints of paintings by Rembrandt, Courbet and Manet. His grandfather, with whom he often stayed as a child, frequent took him on walks along the quays of the Seine to book stalls where he collected prints. or prints. Rouault later claimed that his ‘first schooling was with Daumier’, an influence which can be seen in many of his own figures. He was influenced not just the forms of Daumier but also the concept of creating moral images which commented on the society of his day. He was encouraged to draw in chalk. drawings on the floor, or at his grandparents and through his aunts, who painted porcelain. Despite their background the family were particularly artistically and culturally aware. They were interested in creating and self-educating rather than simply collecting for decoration. Rouault saw this as part of his artisan heritage and contrasted it to what he considered as a bourgeois passion for buying, collecting and ownership. However, the latter culture was how his career was supported.
Rather than follow his father into furniture manufacture, in 1885 at the age of fourteen, Georges left home and began an apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer under the mediaeval glass restorer Georges Hirsch. This continued for five years until 1890. Rouault later attributed his love of intense colour and the moods it could evoke to this experience: After all the destruction in Paris of the previous decades, and the rise of the arts and crafts in interior design this must have felt to be a secure career. Rightly or wrongly, his experience in glass painting has often been linked to Rouault’s later use of black lines surrounding luminous colours in his later painting. This has sometimes been over-stressed, though Rouault also pointed to it. At the same time, to advance his painterly skills for his work Rouault also augmented his apprenticeship by copying art on Sundays in the Louvre and attending evening classes at the School of Decorative Arts, then in 1890 at the School of Fine Arts.
EARLY CAREER AS A PAINTER & HIS TUTOR GUSTAVE MOREAU
This experience in art led Rouault’s career towards a new direction. In December 1890, at the age of 18 he became a full-time student at the École des Beaux-Arts, then France’s most prestigious official training school for artists. After his first year his tutor Jules-Élie Delaunay died and Gustave Moreau was appointed to succeed him in teaching in the studio where Rouault studies alongside Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin and Charles Camoin. Moreau’s teaching was less didactic and dogmatic than many academic artists. He discouraging his pupils from simply imitating the conventional academic art and theories of the time. He encouraged them to explore freer methods and ideas that would help them to find their particular individual enthusiasms and follow personal creative directions at an earlier stage in their training than most teachers allowed. In effect, he guided Rouault to find himself as an artist and to feel free creatively. Moreau also took interest in him personally, helping and advising him in his private and emotional life. Morea did not just introduce Georges to the artistic ideas and techniques of his own field of Symbolism; he encouraged him to look wider and explore as many directions in art as appealed to him. .These included the subject matter and techniques of late 19th Century Realism and by contrast Mediaeval religious art, which influenced the iconic nature of his later images. Rouault developed a rather different aesthetic, aims and ideas to those of his teacher. Whereas Moreau often represented what was technically and culturally termed ‘le beau ideal’, Rouault’s work became more rooted in social realism. But Moreau had the integrity not to allow this difference to impair their relationship, as both were aiming to convey truth in art. Rouault recalled Moreau teaching “The harmony and secret rhythm of life, there is our certainty” [Souvenirs Intimes 1927: p.20].
Moreau’s attitude towards religion was more that of a Symbolist than the committed Catholicism of the Christianity which Rouault was later to develop. Moreau was a Catholic but he claimed to distrust dogmatism and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had a deep attachment to the aesthetics of the Christian faith, which Rouault grew to share. Moreau expressed a love of the sacramental aspects of Catholic liturgy and tradition. He used their symbols in his art – the elements of the Mass, baptismal water, candles, oil, fire, ashes, palms, incense,all fascinated him for their symbolic content. He drew on the Bible and Catholic traditions for much of his iconography. Like Odilon Redon or Gauguin’s later works Moreau sought to express spiritual ideas often through representing exotic or unreal mystical scenes. Maurice Denis or Puvis de Chavannes represented the spiritual through idealising figures and settings. Jules Breton and Millet used naturalistic realism to convey a sense of the Christian spirit found in the simple aspects of everyday life. Their realism became closer to Rouault’s faith and aims. However Moreau’s mystical attitude to spirituality had a profound effect on Rouault’s exploration of how to represent the transcendence and mysteries of faith and the inner world of his subjects. He recalled Moreau’s teaching that the artist’s role was : “defending the rights of the imagination and the inner vision over against visible reality” [Rouault Souvenires Intimes p.44] Georges later defined Moreau’s creed as: “Do you believe in God? I am asked. I believe only in God. In fact I do not believe in what I touch nor in what I see, I only believe in what I cannot see; solely in what I sense. My mind and my reason seem to me ephemeral and of a dubious reality. My inner consciousness alone appears eternal and unquestionably certain” [Rouault and Suarès’ article ‘Moreau’ in L’Art et les Artistes. April 1926 p.240]. Primarily Moreau’s lasting influence on Rouault was his insistence on the freedom of artists to go in the direction in which their inspiration directed them. He encouraged Rouault to search for the ‘inner’ in the subjects that attracted his imagination and find ways to express the ‘inner voice’ of the artist’s response.
Rouault thrived as a student, producing paintings derived mostly from the academic subjects of mythology and religion like ‘The Dead Christ’ and ‘Samson Turning the Millstone’. His ‘The Child Jesus among the Doctors’ [1894] reveals the influence of Rembrandt on his early work, which Moreau cautioned him not to over-play. At this time, it was probably the style and expression in Rembrandt that impressed and influenced Rouault rather than anything of the artist’s personal faith. At the age of twenty three in 1894, Georges won the Chenavard Prize for painting with ‘The Child Jesus among the Doctors’. In 1895, at only his second attempt, he was also in the running for the prestigious Prix de Rome, and was apparently agreed to have won, but this was vetoed by the academic painter Léon Bonnat. Gustave Moreau appears to have particularly provided comfort and encouragement to Rouault following this disappointment, which cemented their future friendship more deeply. Moreau’s advice was not to continue to follow the dry process of academic art but to move on from the school and develop his painting independently. Rouault’s close friend André Suarès was to write later to Rouaulr, of how he had developed through Moreau’s guidance: “You have studied the masters, you have followed them, and you have understood the great lesson which is to be yourself.” [Correspondance}
Beyond the Ecole des Beaux Arts Rouault’s art and ideas expanded further. He moved away from the subjects which were expected to win academic art competitions and moved towards greater realism. He became influenced by the works of Courbet, Manet, Daumier and Forain. He painted images of social tragedy like those in the literature of Zola, Balzac and Victor Hugo, which reflected the life of the community in which he had lived as a youth. Here I need to define ‘Realism’ and ‘Naturalism’... ‘Realism’ is the movement in French painting which sought to represent the everyday life, often of ordinary people, with a roughness, physicality and sometimes visceral painterliness that was very different form the idealism, smoothness and elegance of line and paint of academic art. ‘Naturalism’ in art is closer to creating a photographic likeness than ‘Realism’. However the term ‘Naturalism’ in French literature was the equivalent of ‘Realism’ in painting. Writers like Zola and the de Goncourts sought to represent the realities of the everyday life of ordinary people who were representative of the society of their day. Often the ‘rawness’ of their lives was in their behaviour, thinking, lack of bourgeois sophistication or the roughness of the situations in which they lived.
An aim at ‘realism’ was to flourish into the subjects and techniques of Rouault’s work in the first decade of the 20th Century. Realism in art and Naturalism in the literature he read particularly focused on tragic events, the challenges of life and sense of fate which dominated the lives of people from various communities or lifestyles, but particularly the downtrodden or marginalised. Rouault, as a young artist, sought to find subjects that reflected his own vision of reality and appealed to his personality and ideals. Gustave Moreau continued to support, advise and guide him after he left the art-school, but also introduced him to other members of the literary and artistic world who became influences. Moreau also encouraged him spiritually in his growing quest to explore what was true and meaningful in faith and helped him find ways to express his spirituality. This helped Rouault find an art style and subject-matter that suited his personal character.
The surviving early works by Rouault combine the heroic style and subject matter of academic art with an attitude towards colour, symbolism and pose that are clearly influenced closely by Moreau. In Rouault’s 'Souvenirs Intimes' Georges quoted his former teacher “You like serious art, and sober and, in its essence, religious, and everything you do will be stamped with that seal.” Whether the prophetic aspect of this was recollected romantically in hindsight we cannot be sure, but Rouault later regarded it as a key to the direction which his future career would take.
In developing as an independent artist Rouault began to send work annually to the Salon des Artistes Française. He became influenced by artists like Cezanne and Gauguin whose works he saw in the Ambroise Vollard Gallery. From 1910, Rouault’s own work was exhibited in the Druet Gallery (his first one-man exhibition), then with Ambroise Vollard. In Vollard’s gallery particularly it was seen by several German artists and influenced the development of Expressionism.
Having apparently become Moreau’s favourite pupil, and developing a relationship of friendship and trust with the older master, in 1902 Georges was eventually entrusted with the position of the first curator of Moreau’s Paris mansion and collection. This was bequeathed to the state after Moreau’s death from cancer in 1898 and became the Gustave Moreau Museum.
Gustave Moreau had been Rouault’s major support and influence. The tragedy of losing him led to a five year crisis in Georges Rouault, emotionally, artistically, spiritually and ethically which he referred to as an "abyss" in which he felt isolated. He recalled "It was then that I learned the truth of Cezanne's famous words, 'Life is horrifying'". The memories of this harsh time emotionally and financially probably influenced the dark nature of many of his later works of social criticism. His depression was exacerbated by his parents’ move to Algeria to support his sister whose husband had recently died. The crisis eventually turned him towards rethinking his ideas about art, life, morality, spirituality, friendship and community.
In 1902 he underwent a further emotional and physical crisis, having become fatigued and ill through overwork, material insecurity and uncertainty about the direction of his career after the dispersion of the community at Ligué Abbey, which he briefly joined (discussed later). He was sent to convalesce in Evian le Bains and found that the encouragement to rest and the surroundings revived and renews his strength as well as developing new visions for his work. It led to an energetic return to painting. “The rest over there, the sky and the snow, had cleansed my eye. Nevertheless the emotions of those long tragic years that had bruised me were so stored up in me. A kind of release took place, and I set to paint with a frenzy.” [quoted by Charensol Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. Paris: Editions des Quatre Chenins 1926 p.4].
Thankfully in 1902 Rouault’s appointment as curator of the Gustave Moreau mansion and collection, to transform it into a museum provided him with some security. The salary, though relatively low, allowed him to be more regularly financially stable and helped him become more independent in his work as an artist. The regular income enabled him to follow directions which were not always appreciated by the public, buyers, the art-critical world or Christian believers.
Rouault had already painted religious subjects as part of his academic training including The Way to Calvary [1891]. Like most aspiring artists he sought to exhibit in important public exhibitions, and submitted his works from 1895. His primary regular early exhibiting was in the Salon d'Automne of which he was one of the founding exhibitors in 1903. There he reencountered Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin and Charles Camoin, with whom he had already trained under Moreau, and other artists who were to develop modernism. A growing friendship with them led to the development of the ideas of the Fauvist movement and in 1905 he exhibited alongside them in the Salon d'Automne where their ideas and images were first declared to the public. The vibrancy and apparent spontaneity of their work was influenced by the spontaneity of Impressionism, the colour and theoreticism of Post-Impressionism, particularly the expressive colour and marks of van Gogh and the spiritual expression of Gauguin and the Nabis, as well as growing interest in conveying responses through expressionism. Rouault never developed into a fully-fledged Fauve as his ideas and aims were broader. Yet the instinctive spontaneity and brightness of the Fauve’s images greatly enhanced the development of Rouault’s later work, though he went through a darker period initially. He was not an obvious ‘Fauve, but shared with them a sense that artists should consider themselves creatively free in subject-matter and technique, not restricted by conventions. This freedom was to lead to the rejection of some of his work as ugly by those who did not understand the spiritual intention behind his expressionism. However, he became more intent on refining the expressive technique of his painting than many of the freer artists of modernism and was critical of the slap-dash approach of some. He preferred to refine his techniques. Neither did he follow the over-emphasis of technique over subject-matter of cubism. In his attitude to his work subject, form, colour, style and intention all had to work together in harmony to convey his meaning.
FAMILY LIFE
In 1908, Rouault married the sister of the painter Henri Sidaner [7 August 1862 – 14 July 1939]. Marthe Le Sidaner had trained as a pianist and their relationship may account for the many parallels with music and harmony in the artist’s writings about visual art. They remained together for the rest of his life, raising four children – Geneviève, Isabelle, Michel and Agnès.
Rouault’s family life is beyond the scope of this study. But it seems to have been a supportive and happy one. Maritain wrote fondly of Rouault’s family and his relationship with them [cf.Genevieve Nouialle-Rouault, "Maritain, Rouault et Nous," Cahiers Jacques Maritain, no. 4-5 (November, 1982), pp. 79-84]. As a ‘worker’ he regarded one of his responsibilities as being the support of his family. In a letter of 1913 to André Suarès, Rouault wrote of himself: “The dream of Rouault is to meet by himself the needs of his family without surrendering an atom of his ideas.” [Correspondance p.52]. Although he worked phenomenally long hours at his painting and printmaking, it was not just out of an obsession with making art. Part of his early energetic work as an artist was to earn enough to support his growing family. Their own dedication to him is seen in the way the family maintained his reputation after his death. Isabel especially did much to promote his work throughout her life. The family maintained his last studio as it was at his death, it remains in that condition in the Bastille area of Paris, near the Gare de Lyons. They donated works to a large number of museums including their huge 1963 presentation to the French state, now primarily at the Pompidou Centre. His four children also created the Rouault Foundation to promote and protect his work and create a study centre for his archives in the apartment where he lived during his last years.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROUAULT’S FAITH AND IDEAS ABOUT CHRISTIAN ART
The early years of the 20th Century in France saw a brief revival in Roman Catholicism, in a country that was proudly secular. Several distinguished literary figures and critics were leaders within this movement, including Charles Péguy, J.K. Huysmans, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain and Léon Bloy. It also attracted artists like Rouault, Maurice Denis, Antonin Bourbon, George Desvallières, and influences other more secular artists to experiment with religious themes. Their neo-Catholicism rejected what they considered to be the official French Catholic Church’s superficial, spiritually poor, lax liberal allegiance to the Christian faith. They encouraged a revival of stricter theological and liturgical traditions, spiritual vitality and social and religious commitment and fought against superficiality and weakness in official church art. The movement attracted the young Georges Rouault, perhaps due to Moreau having awakened spiritual consciousness within him. Moreau had encouraged him in his spiritual search. However Rouault moved towards a more orthodox form of Christian spirituality than the more esoteric beliefs reflected in Moreau’s work.
Already, during his study under Moreau, Rouault had sought out and received instruction and preparation for his first communion under a Dominican Father Vallée. At the age of 24 Rouault he developed a longing to discover a deeper, more authentic faith. Moreau’s death had left him without the form of spiritual support which the older artist had provided. Around the turn of the century, when millennial ideas were revived, he began to develop contacts with writers from the revivalist movement and in late April 1901 became part of the group of intellectuals meeting for discussions at the Benedictine Ligugé Abbey, near Poitiers. He had been invited there by another artist, Antonin Bourbon, with whom he had studied under Moreau. The writer J.K. Huysmans, who became a friend, developed the idea of founding a community of Catholic artists at the abbey. They encouraged humility, resisted the idea of artists or writers vainly promoting themselves and encouraged spiritual and artistic integrity. Their intention was to encourage the creation of authentic ‘Christian’ art. This was similar to the aims of the Nazarines, certain Pre-Raphaelites like Holman Hunt, and various other movements like those which developed into Eric Gill’s similar communities at Capel-y-ffin and Ditchling
J.K. HUYSMANS
Rouault met J.K. Huysmans in 1901 and became excited by his idealistic ideas of reforming faith and creating forms of Christian art that were marked by spiritual, ethical and artistic integrity. Joris-Karl Huysmans [1848-1907] had spiritual, social and aesthetic sensibilities which resonated with Rouault. He balanced work worked as a government bureaucrat with art criticism and a love of modern art. Manuy of his artistic and cultural influences had come through Baudelaire, and a major spiritual influence was the millennial teaching of Ernest Hello. Hello also wrote ideas about Christian aesthetics, which influenced Huysmans’ thoughts on art and its aims, like: “Art ought to be one of the forces that heals the imagination; it must say that evil is ugly.” [L’Homme. Paris 1921. .p.19.] Léon Bloy, who Rouault met 3 years later in 1904, had influenced the development of some of Huysman’s early mystical ideas about spirituality but their relationship, once friendly, was erratic. Huysmans was more humble than Bloy and accepted some of his ideas. These included the belief that suffering helped to guide people’s lives and minds towards God. Yet he would not allow himself to be dominated or dictated to by Bloy and had a broader mind. His most famous writing, before his conversion to Catholicism ‘A Rebours’ / ‘Against the Grain’ [1884] was idealistic, influenced by Plotinus, and explored the spiritual aspects of art, which he considered more elevating than reality. It reflected the spiritual aspects of the aesthetics of the ‘Decadent’ movement in French art and literature. Around 1890, like many in the ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Symbolist’ movements, he had experimented with the occult, and describes this in his novel Là-Bas’ / ‘Down There’ [1891]. This fascination with the esoteric led towards his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, about which he wrote in ‘En Route’ [1895]. In the novel the main character from Là Bas rejects Satanism and explores faith in a Trappist monastery. Huysmans wrote: “In studying his conversion, I've tried to trace the progress of a soul surprised by the gift of grace, and developing in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, to the accompaniment of mystical literature, liturgy, and plainchant, against a background of all that admirable art which the Church has created".[quoted in Robert Baldick 1955 The Life of J.-K. Huysmans OUP, revised 2006 by Brendan King, Dedalus, p.288].
As part of the community that Huysmans’ started and inspired at Ligugé Abbey, Rouault became determined not to compromise his art by pandering to flattery or watering-down his message, content or artistic production to accord with public taste and expectations. This built upon the idea of artistic freedom that Moreau had encouraged. In the abbey environment, which encouraged quiet and contemplation, Rouault explored ideas and discussed with Huysmans and others the qualities of a truer Christian art, which would abandon the Art-institutions’ traditional ideas and preoccupations with competition, medals, prizes, money or fame and aim at artistic, intellectual and moral integrity. The Liguécommunity was sadly short-lived. The French government were understandably still insecure after the Commune and various political and social movements and challenges in previous decades. They wanted to supress dissent and all groups that challenged the status quo, including any societies or idealists which they believed posed a possible threat or questioned the existing social order. The government were also strongly anti-clerical. As a result they voted in the 1901 Waldeck-Rousseau Law which banned radical societies, including religious associations, which had any political focus or nature. This led to a dissolving of the Catholic artistic and literary community at Ligugé Abbey and 753 other religious groups [cf. Dyrness 1977 p.66 note 26]. The monks of the community moved to Belgium in late June and all thel members left by the end of October. Rouault returned to Paris where he continued to search for subject-matter and style which would satisfy his spiritual and artistic ideas.
It was not an easy time, and triggered another emotional crisis, which led him to return to Evian le Bans to convalesce. This period of rest allowed him to consolidate the ideas which he had been exploring in the Ligué community and led to an alteration in his subject matter and a renewed vigour in his work. Though Huysmans had recommended idealism in religious art, Rouault was to move to a far more ‘Realist’ expression of the ideals that had been discussed in the community. He contributed some of the ideas of artistic freedom to the group founding the Salon d’Automne in 1903.
LÉON BLOY
In Gustave Moreau's library Rouault had found and read revolutionary Roman Catholic Socialist works by Léon Bloy. Bloy [1846 -1917] was a novelist, poet, essayist and pamphleteer who criticised the hypocrisy of aspects of bourgeois society. He denounced conventional French Catholic Christianity, as mediocre. The directness and independence of Bloy’s writing inspired Rouault to begin to introduce Bloy’s ideas into the subjects of his paintings. Georges Charensol quoted Rouault’s expression of how this new realisation influenced him after the emotional crisis after he left the Ligué Abbey community: “I then suffered a most violent moral crisis. I was experiencing things that cannot be explained in words. And I began to paint an outrageously lyric painting that baffled everyone.” [Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. Paris: Editions des Quatre Chenins 1926 p.24]
Leon Bloy developed friendships with Huysmans, Maritain and Rouault all of whom he attempted to radicalise in developing and intellectualising their faith. Bloy’s own conversion in about 1870 followed by the conversion of his prostitute mistress Anne-Marie Roulet, and their conviction of the imminent end of the world is romanticised in Bloy’s first and semi-autobiographical novel Le Déspéré [1886]. Bloy was fascinated by the encouragements to absolutist faith of Ernest Hello, the millennial prophecies of Eugène Vintras and the reported appearance of the Virgin at La Salette with the apocalyptic message that the end of time was imminent unless people turned to spiritual reform. Bloy's Le Désespéré also attacked the rationalism of the secular literary community, which antagonised former friendships with Zola, Renan and Guy de Maupassaint. He was uncompromising in his diatribes, a very different character from the more reconciliatory, taciturn and solitary Rouault. With a strong temper, many regarded him as a bigot. After Victor Hugo’s death in 1885, when the state was celebrating the author, Bloy criticised what he considered to be his atheism and derided the writer. He accused Hugo of hypocrisy in his championship of the lives of the poor.
Bloy’s polemicism, by contrast, encouraged the poor to endure suffering and deprivation as faith could support them. He regarded God as having arranged history and society as it was, in order to turn people towards true religion. He denounced the indifference of the rich towards the poor. Yet he believed that the poor could find spiritual consolation and sanctity in accepting their situation, not through longing for an alleviation of their suffering and poverty. In fact he taught that since Christ’s death suffering and poverty brought people sanctity in following Christs example. This coldness was very different from Rouault’s longings for social change, justice and equity. Bloy's Le Salut par les Juifs is an apocalyptic interpretation of Romans chapters 9 to 11, challenging the Catholic Church's attitude to Judaism. (It apparently influenced Vatican II’s call for a radical change of approach.). Bloy is recorded as having been impatient with God for tardiness in bringing judgement and destruction; there is not much grace towards others in his ideas. To be fair, Bloy did also recognise the hypocrisy and double standards in himself, confessing in 1914: “I have not done what God willed for me, that is certain, I have dreamed, on the contrary, what I wanted from God.” [Seilliere E. Leon Bloy: la psychologie d’un mystique. 1936 p.253],
Bloy’s attitude to faith was as tough as his attitude to suffering and poverty. Whereas the suffering Christ in Rouault’s paintings and prints evinces and encourages empathy, Bloy’s Christ is rougher. He reflects Bloy’s own bullish character, just as Rouault’s images of Christ reflect his own reflectiveness and humility. This may be seen in the words Bloy gives to the suffering Christ as he addresses the people in Le Désespéré: “I have created you, beloved vermin, in my thrice-sacred resemblance and you have responded by betraying me. Thus instead of punishing you, I have punished myself. It was not enough for you to resemble me. I, the Impassible, felt a great desire to make myself like you, so that you would become my equals. Therefore I have made myself vermin in your image.” [Le Désespéré Paris: Mercure de France 1967 p.375]. Bloy’s use of the title ‘The Impassible’ for Christ is very far from Rouault’s empathetic Christ; it implies that he is in some ways unmoved, impassive, not susceptible to pain or injury, almost an heretical view of Jesus as somewhat beyond humanity. (It has some similarities with the brand of Catholicism that influenced Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of the Christ’, which implies that if we had not sinned so greatly, Christ would not have needed to suffer so much.) This is very different from the way that Rouault’s images of Christ and his sufferings address the viewer visually. Rouault’s Christ is entirely alongside us in our pain and sympathises even with the morally deficient, who Bloy degrades as ‘beloved vermin’. Unlike Rouault, there is very little ’love’ apparent in Bloy’s idea that humanity is made in God’s “thrice-sacred resemblance”. Bloy resembles a condemnatory hell-fire preacher, while the humbler Rouault is more the one who holds a mirror up to our wounds and sins and shows how Christ comes alongside to help in the healing process.
Although Rouault was very different from the cold, dogmatic and bullying Bloy, the quieter Rouault graciously still regarded Bloy as a friend until the writer’s death in the war in 1917. This attitude was maintained despite Bloy’s savage and inconsiderate private and public criticism of the ugliness which he saw in the artist’s works. Rouault particularly admired Bloy’s novel La Femme Pauvre about the miseries of Clotilde, a woman whose committed faith strengthened her to endure many sufferings. She became a symbol in some of Rouault’s painted characters. Despite Bloy’s dubious personality he was a persuasive influence on many, particularly instrumental in Huysmans’ conversion. The painter George Desvallières who had also trained under Moreau became a similarly radicalised active Christian artist through his influence. Like Rouault with whom he trained, he applied his faith to his art, though his work took a different direction into avant-garde symbolism, more like the work of Maurice Denis.
CHRISTIAN REALISM
The social and religious critique of Bloy and the emotional crisis that Rouault had undergone after 1901-2 found expression in the figures and moral and social subjects which Rouault moved towards painting. Around 1907, he worked on images in a new style, which were critical of bourgeois life, the injustice of judges and courts, and the isolated lives of prostitutes, and the sad lives of clowns and entertainers. Their images are often caricatured, with the figures who he was critiquing grotesquely distorted to reflect their moral defects. Many of these new works took on some of the ideas of Symbolism to which Moreau had introduced him and became almost iconic allegories of human sins like lust, pride, arrogance, power and other social vices. He was particularly critical of the indifference of the rich or influential to the misery of the poor, needy, underprivileged or marginalised. Many of the caricatured images unmask figures who regard themselves as socially or even ethically superior, holding up the mirror of truth and reality to the corruptions within society. He transformed observed social situations though his own emotional reaction. As the ‘Naturalist’ writer Zola had written: “Art is reality, communicated through being transformed by the senses.” Rouault’s caricatures and expressionism were not intended to deliberately revolt or distract the viewer by the ugliness of reality, but to convey realism. He felt he could not indulge in escapist beautiful images, which many might have preferred.
Rouault’s attitude to art as a Christian believer, was not to simply create comfortable images to encourage faith. He talked about the beauty painted by romantics or in conventional ‘sublime’ religious art as “the horrible beautiful” because it was disassociated from “nature, life or human behaviour.” Instead, he wanted to “draws forms out of the day by day sights that provide all variety of life, and at the same time release in themselves the power of emotion” [Benoit p.446]. He developed, from Baudelaire’s Fleures du Mal and contemporaries in the ‘decadent’ movement, what became known as the “poetics of shock”. He confronted thinking viewers with the harsh realities of the world as it is rather being idealistic. The world of prostitution, the masks we wear, the horrors of war, thy hypocrisy of politics and justice all became themes for his art. In this, as in his painting technique, he was more of an ‘expressive realist’ than a ‘romantic’. He was criticised for painting the realities of prostitution, yet that had been a feature of the Realist novels of Zola, Balzac and even Hugo and he was not treating it with the delight of Lautrec, Manet or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. [1906-7].
His academic training with Moreau had introduced him to a combination of Romanticism and Symbolism, much of which touched on the Roman Catholic faith in a symbolic rather than a life-committed way, as Moreau’s own work displayed. Many in the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements explored and experimented with occult spirituality, as Huysmans had done. What is now described as ‘esoteric spirituality’ became fashionable. But in the first years of the 20th Century, France also experienced a revival in more traditional Roman Catholicism, into which Rouault became drawn. He was then radicalised in his faith by Huysmans. Maritain, Bloy and others. He wrote about this awakening, renewed Christian spirituality later in his life: “When I was about thirty, I felt a stroke of lightning, or of grace, depending on one’s perspective. The face of the world changed for me. I saw everything that I had seen before, but in a different form and with a different harmony.” His spiritual renewal and deeper commitment to his Catholic faith led him to re-think the subject-matter of his painting, as well as the priorities of his life.
His faith encouraged him to consider those who suffer, the debased or marginalized in society; those Christ reassured were blessed and valued by God’s love, as emphasised in the Beatitudes [Matt.5:3-12]. He embarked on a series of socially-committed works and everyday subjects that reflected the realities of life, which had been features of the works of Courbet, Zola, Balzac, the French Realists and the Impressionists. In his mind, his figures, particularly his paintings of prostitutes, refused to be idealised. They showed the less savoury aspects of human life and emphasised suffering, hypocrisy, indifference and degradation.
Rouault’s relative financial independence due to his employment at the Moreau Museum enabled him to continue in his new direction, despite much rejection of his new work. Sadly he received a lot of negative correspondence and criticism over his abandonment of his previous artistic direction, to follow the less elevating, unconventional style and subject matter of his new painting. He was criticised for the immorality of his subjects, the violence of his drawing, painting and colour and the ugliness of his subject matter. In his search for a new, uncompromising form of realism he lost the support and patronage of several of the collectors of Moreau’s work who had been attracted to his previous work through that connection. His work was also rejected by critics at the Salons and he gradually moved away from applying or exhibiting there. This leads one to consider how much a contemporary Christian artist has an obligation to work within certain conventions or expectations. The best sermons, we are told ‘comfort the uncomfortable and discomfort the comfortable’. Christian art should surely be similarly challenging not simplistic or just follow traditions. But artists with a message also needs to communicate effectively with their audience. Rouault’s coming great series of prints Miserere et Guerre similarly challenged aesthetic expectations but truly communicate..
BLOY’S CRITICISM OF ROUAULT
Rouault’s new emphasis on the unconventionally beautiful and the immoral is society inevitably shocked and disturbed some critics including friends, particularly close friends with religious sympathies like Léon Bloy and Jacques Maritain. They had previously championed him but could not comprehend his change of direction. Rouault’s direction in modernism remained rather incomprehensible to many modern critics both those of secular and religious persuasions. Some did not trust his work as being committed to modernism, others failed to recognise any relevance of Christianity to modern art. Bloy dismissed these works as “pornographic”, “sadomasochistic”, “an embarrassment of modernist art.”, a “leap into utter darkness,” by the artist he had previously encouraged. In arguments, letters, then in print he attributed this change to some “mental aberration.”
In an extensive printed diatribe L’Invendable (‘The Unsaleable’), Bloy publicly lambasted his friend’s work in the Salon d’ Automne, in the popular Mercure de France. Rather than critiquing Rouault’s work with understanding, it betrays Bloy’s bullying character, and shows his false, self-obsessed belief that he was the sole arbiter of Christian truth. This open immoderate address to the artist must have hurt the quiet Rouault more affectingly than most other criticism. He was young as a Christian, sincerely seeking to integrate his faith and his art. The ill-considered diatribe was hardly an authentic Christian response and sorely damaged the artist’s emerging reputation among intellectual and ecclesiastical circles, as well as critics and collectors: “I had the grief in understanding nothing of the sketches of my friend Rouault, who probably had as great a future as any modern painter, but who has been pulled down by some weird vertigo. The miserable man began with Rembrandt, only to throw himself into outer darkness… The artist that I thought was capable of painting seraphim seems only to be able to imagine the most atrocious and avenging caricatures. The meanness of the bourgeois works in him such a violent reaction of horror that his art seems to be a mortally wounded creature… Not for all the money in the world would I accept this ‘illustration’.” (This referred to a work illustrating one of Bloy’s own writings) “Today I have only two things to say to you, only two, the last! After which you will be no more to me than mere ‘acquaintance’. First, you are attracted exclusively by the ugly; you seem to be enthralled by the hideous. Secondly, if you were a man of prayer, a ‘eucharistic’, you would not be able to paint such terrible canvases. A reflective man would feel a little fearful at this point. I have told or written to you several times that your obsession grieves me. That has not seemed very serious to you, has it? You have thought of it as a rather amusing whim without suspecting for one minute that it is a question of a very real grief, of a man of the absolute, and that is a serious thing, It is time to stop.” [L’Invendable Paris: Mercure de France 1904-07 publ.1909 pp.43; 132; 290].
Bloy was himself a polemical social critic, very much more likely than Rouault to deliberately offend by expressing his ideas in shocking ways. Yet Bloy could not accept that the artist had had the temerity to not followed his advice. He failed to recognise the true spiritual intention within the nature of Rouault’s recent work. Rouault was aiming to be moderninst in his subject matter, but not deliberately aiming to be avant-garde in shocking the public visually, unlike many of his contemporary modernist artists. He wrote in 1945: “I have respected a certain internal order and laws, which I hope are traditional; removed from passing fashions and contemporaries – critics, artists or dealers – I believe I have kept my spiritual liberty.” [quoted in Soby p.129]. The artist was using visual means to encourage contemporary society, Catholic and secular, to become more sensitive and socially committed. This was close to the aims of the Realist artists and Naturalist writers who Bloy and Huysmans had admired. Rouault later stressed that he was not moralising. He claimed that he believed art to be ‘above the ethical’. [Dyrness 1971 p.70]. What Bloy considered ‘ugly’ was a rather more sensitive visual representation of the Bloys’ own literary comments on society (in Bloy’s case ‘diatribes’). For Rouault humanity was not ‘ugly’; only mediocrity, narrowness and hypocrisy were ‘ugly’, because they damaged the potential of light and life in human beings: “… the real ugliness, the absolute ugliness. And this is the mediocrity of spirit, short-sightedness that is enamoured with the vulgar… the stupid anecdote, baseness of spirit or heart, these are the truly ugly.” [Rouault ‘Enquete’ Caihiers d’Art 1935. No 10. p. 12]
Raïssa Maritain wrote of Rouault: “The religious inspiration is constant in his work… One feels he is perpetually watching over the evangelical values of human life” [Les Grandes Amitiés 1941 vol.1: p.227]. Rather than just painting conventional religious ‘elevating’ subjects, Rouault took religious visual art into the realms that Liberation Theology and the art it inspired, would challenge the Catholic Church towards socially and politically much later in the 20th Century. The conventional Church could not accept that direction either. As a result of misunderstanding like this, although Rouault had links and friendships with a number of clerics, he remained largely independent of the Church in his development of his ideas about Christian art and the application of his Catholic faith.
EARLY RECOGNITION AS AN ARTIST & FRIENDSHIP WITH MARITAIN
Despite recognition and a little success with his first one-man show at the Druet Gallery in 1910 Rouault’s income was low and his regular salary from the Gustave Moreau Museum was insufficient to support his growing family, which included his parents after their return from Africa. In 1911 Rouault and his wife moved to the then-cheaper old quarter of Versailles, where their home has been described as ‘squalid and rat-infested’. The philosopher Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa were neighbours, who he had first met in November 1905. The Maritains recollected that the artist was struggling internally at this time, recognising that if he returned to the academic style and subject-matter of ‘The Child Jesus among the Doctors’ which had won him the Prix Chenavard, he might be more able to sell his work. Yet he felt prompted by a desire to follow a different way, which he believed had more integrity. If he pandered to popular fashion he believed that he would have been betraying the high ideals that Moreau had fostered in him before his death. In a letter of 1913 to André Suarès, Rouault wrote of himself: “The dream of Rouault is to meet by himself the needs of his family without surrendering an atom of his ideas.” [Correspondance p.52]
In 1909 the Maritains had moved to Versailles where the Rouaults followed them two years later. Rouault had known Maritain previously through the Catholic revival movement. They had first met at the home of Leon Bloy, who became their godfather, and to whom they were very committed. Both of them wrote affectionately of Bloy in ways that make him and his opinions on life, suffering, art and faith seem less harsh than his relationship with Rouault sugested. [cf. J. Maritain "In Homage to Our Dear Godfather Leon Bloy," in Untrammeled Approaches . Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, pp. 37-39 and ‘Quelques pages sur Leon Bloy’ in J. Maritain Ouvres Completes, vol. III, p. 1022.]
Maritain was already gaining respect as a philosopher: he was to become one of the most influential Catholic philosophers and intellectual spokesmen on faith and culture of his time. He grew to influence both the French government, French culture and also became an influential cultural and philosophical advisor of the Vatican. Under the influence of Bloy he and his wife had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1905. Rouault attended their baptism in mid-1906. Maritain also befriended the painter Maurice Denis and was a friend of the politician and writer Peguy who had similar cultural sensibilities.
In Versailles the Maritains and Rouaults met frequently. The Rouaults were invited to their home for meals almost weekly and the two men talked for hours, discussing religion, mysticism, social justice, the philosophy of beauty and artistic practice. Rouault and Jacques and shared and interest in the purity of childlike innocence, as well as a sensitivity to truth and the beauty that they recognised in the world. They also felt a solidarity with the poor and disadvantaged, and longed for social justice. Their religious sensitivity was also close, though Maritain became more conservative in his practice than Rouault. Maritain added intimacy and warmth to Rouault’s reserved character. He understood and encouraged the artist. Rouault helped Maritain to clarify his aesthetic ideas and sensitivity towards art as well as helping to liberate him from the dominant spiritual and intellectual constraints that had burdened him through the guidance he had received from strict spiritual directors during his conversion to the Catholic faith.
Soon after the move to Versailles, Rouault’s father who lived with them, died and Rouault received much support and companionship from Jacques Maritain in particular. Maritain and his wife’s friendship with Rouault strongly increased Rouault’s commitment to his Catholic faith and practice. Their discussions deepened Rouault’s application of his faith to the world and to art. Rouault’s enriched ideas through this friendship proved vital in helping the artist understand subtleties in his faith and feelings. This in turn led to his art becoming more specific in its religious content. Georges and Jacques remained friends throughout Rouault’s life from the first decade of the 20th Century. So close was their relationship that Rouault gave Maritain a full set of his treasured prints of Miserere, which the writer admired..
Maritain’s writing on aesthetics and faith were greatly influenced by his friendship with Rouault, and he mentioned the artist and his ideas particularly in ‘Three Painters’ [] ‘Frontiers of Poetry [1935] Art and Scholasticism [1947] and ‘Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry’ [1953]. Rouault became one of his favourite painters, as well as a friend, and Maritain wrote about him in his lifetime with more understanding then most critics. Before Jacque composed any of his writings on philosophy he was asked by Rouault to write the introduction to the catalogue of his first exhibition at Galerie Druet [Feb.-Mar. 1910]. At Rouault’s suggestion Maritain wrote under a pseudonym and chose ‘Jacques Favelle’ for its working-class connection with those who built the cathedrals of France. Jacques' grandfather had been Jules Favre. Maritain wrote of Rouault in the catalogue as ‘a true primitive who was a popular or people's artist, for his frank and naive inspiration is very close to that of the happy artisans of days gone by, those of Romanesque and early medieval times’.… Rouault's "naive images, made by a patient workman who loved his tools and the matter he was working on… who loved his craft … with a serious and obstinate passion and with a constant need to perfect his technique." He wrote that Rouault "finds his inspiration, not in some abstract system or some literary emotion, but in what life itself, the life of [his own] time and of [his own country], makes him, so to speak, touch with his finger."
Later, in reference to Rouault’s thoughts Maritain wrote “a philosopher could study in him the virtue of art as in its pure state, with all its demands, its mystery and its purity." [Jacques Maritain, Frontieres de Ia Poesie (Paris: Rouart, 1935), p. 133.] … "What he sees and knows with a strange pity, and what he makes us see, is the miserable affliction and the lamentable meanness of our times, not just the affliction of the body, but the affliction of the soul, the bestiality and the self-satisfied vainglory of the rich and the worldly, the crushing weariness of the poor, the frailty of us all."[ Cahiers Jacques Maritain, no. 12 (November, 1985), p. 24.] Maritain published a more considered monograph on the painter and his works, which showed a deepening in understanding that had come through further reflection.
The distortions ("defonnations," and "gribouillages") which Bloy so disliked did not disturb Maritain as much. He wrote of Rouault’s aim to "reproduce as much as he possibly can the-truth of the things that move him," with a kind of "naive frankness"…"He knows that truth is never found in the copy. He does not see things in their banality. He has an imaginative vision of things, he contemplates them in the world of their greater reality and it is in this world that he paints them." [Cahiers Jacques Maritain, no. 12 (November, 1985), p. 26.] Later, in ‘Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry’, Maritain wrote: “Saint Thomas (Aquinas) insisted that art imitates nature in her operation-not in respect to natural appearances, but in respect to the ways in which nature herself operates .... Such a genuine concept of "imitation" affords a ground and justification for the boldest kinds of transposition, transfiguration, deformation, or recasting of natural appearances, in so far as they are the means to make the work manifest intuitively the ‘transapparent’ reality which has been grasped by the artist." [Jacques Maritain. 1953. ‘Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry'. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 224-5].
ROUAULT’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CHURCH.
Rouault’s subject matter during this period of his art can sometimes still feels uncomfortable to some religious people, though his subjects are often no different from Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ or Beckmann, Dix or Grosz’s images of war and sexuality. His work was neglected even in the 1930s Dominican review of sacred aspects in modern art ‘L’Art Sacré’ though they included mention of works by Picasso and Surrealists, which had no direct Christian content. This neglect of the artist by the Church was publicly challenged by the defender of Rouault’s art Waldemar George between 1937 and 1938: “The Church is accustomed to an art rather more governed and conventional. It mistrusts mystical effusions” [La Renaissance October-December 1937: no.5. p.10]. The committedly Catholic painter Maurice Denis was also critical of the contemporary Church’s attitude to art, believing that sacred art at the time was dead due, not to the lack of faith of the people, but from the indifference of the Church to visual art’s potential. It was rather too common that throughout the 20th Century and even today, churches or church leaders have often attempted to be ‘contemporary’ or aspired to seem culturally enlightened by commissioning or lauding well-established secular artists who sometimes merely produce art with a religious subject. They have frequently neglected to encourage artists with specifically Christian commitment, who might imbue their work with more committed and profoundly thought-through faith. Lack of artistic and spiritual sensitivity by Church leaders has often too often led to the commissioning of mediocre works or art by well-known secular artists without sufficient sensitivity to the Christian message which could potentially be conveyed. What it needed in art for ecclesiastical settings is both fine artwork to glorify God, and a depth of specific Christian content which can challenge those with or without belief to authentic Christian spirituality and discipleship. Rouault would have been able to produce this. Imagine for example what a set of Stations of the Cross or Meditations on the Nativity might have been like if commissioned at the time of his artistic and spiritual maturity, or after he had created his Miserere cycle of prints.
Maurice Denis wanted to create a school to encourage the production of new Christian, sacred art but Rouault believed that an emphasis solely on religious subjects would unnecessarily restrict the freedom of artists. In fact, at the time of his early exploration of his ideas about the application of his faith to his art, between 1905 and 1910, Rouault only worked on six paintings of specifically religious subjects. He is reported to have frequently stated that he believed that “there is no such thing as sacred art, only an art made my artists who have faith.” Speaking of how his focus in art changed from academic subjects towards less orthodox ways of representing faith, Rouault said: “this instinctive moment, this turn of the helm, was not under the influence of… the moderns. It was rather by an inner need, and the wish, perhaps unconscious, not to fall into the mould of conventional religious subjects.” [quoted in Charensol Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. Paris: Editions des Quatre Chenins 1926 p.23]. He was to write later “It is not always the subject that inspires the pilgrim, but the accent that he puts there, the tone, the force, the grace, the unction. That is why some so-called ‘sacred art’ can be profane” [Soliloques p.53].
For most of his life of faith church-leaders largely neglected or rejected Rouault’s work as too dark or unconventional and did not recognise the spiritual sensitivity and significant Christian meaning within it, or recognise that it could have intense value for contemplation. He only ever received one ecclesiastical commission. This was towards the end of his career between 1945-9 when Rouault was commissioned to create stained glass windows, which his art most immediately reflects, for the church at Notre Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d'Assy, in Haute-Savoie. By this time his energy and the challenging aspect of his work were declining, so the church commission is far from his finest work. He was unable to achieve the potential which his work for the church might have achieved.
Notre Dame de Toute Grâce is itself an example of ‘too many cooks…” Built between 1937 and 1946, partly to serve the local sanatorium and spa, of which Canon Jean Devémy was chaplain, it was an attempt, particularly by Devémy, the Dominican friar Marie-Alain Couturier and the architect Maurice Novarina, to show its cultural relevance and enlightenment of the Church. They commissioned big names in modernist art, regardless of their spiritual affinities to contribute artworks. Glass, mosaics, paintings, sculptures, tapestries, metalwork and ceramics were commissioned from Jean Bazaine, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Constant Demaison, Ladislas Kijno, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Lurçat and his apprentice Paul Cosandier, Claude Mary, Henri Matisse, Germaine Richier, Georges Rouault, Carlo Sergio Signori, Théodore Strawinsky and others. Together they make for a confusing whole. To my mind, the artworks, particularly the clumsy mosaics by Léger at the entrance, supposedly representing the litanies of Mary, and Lurcat’s Apocalyptic tapestries that dominate the chancel, largely distract from worship, liturgy and contemplation. The stained glass window by Rouault on the theme of the Passion of Christ was apparently not even specifically designed for the church. Devémy had seen the glass at an exhibition in Paris to which he was invited. On his return he supposedly measured the windows of his church and found that Rouault’s ready-made design would fit the dimensions precisely. He called it the "miracle of Assy", but whether one believes the tale is open to debate. The story does imply, however that the choice of Rouault for a design may have been a last-minute decision. As well as the Man of Sorrows, Rouault also contributed windows of Veronica and a vase of flowers to accompany her, bearing words that relate to the Suffering Servant “He was mistreated and oppressed” [Isa.53:3-5]. There is little sense in the disparate designs in the building and its contents of the ‘harmony’ by which Rouault sought to convey the spiritual. However Rouault’s windows are beautiful, vibrant, harmonic and spiritually significant.
Several religious writers and clerics mistrusted the fact that Rouault’s paintings were unconventional and did not conform to what they considered as traditional Christian Art. They did not recognise that Rouault’s aim was precisely to go beyond conventions. Many found his subjects dark, gloomy and depressing and his technique too rough for religious contemplation. Just 5 years before he died, Pope Pius XII eventually acknowledged and honoured him as a significant Catholic artist, but by this time his full potential was in decline.
ROUAULT’S REACTION TO HIS FATHER’S DEATH AND WORK FOLLOWING IT
When Rouault’s father, who had returned to France and had been living with the artist’s family, died in 1912, it led to a new sense of responsibility in Georges. He had a family to support yet was no longer able to be reliant on an adult more mature than himself other than the busy Maritain. IN the future ne never had a mentor as close as Moreau had been. He wrote meaningfully of his father to Suarès: “this poor man, uneducated in worldly terms, gave proof of such humility, such gentleness and such goodness during his final moments that I can find no words to express what I felt. It was as though I had discovered and unknown and misunderstood work of art. This man, silent and uncomplicated, withdrawn almost, throughout his life, blossomed forth at the time of his death; he was a child…”
As in the aftermath of Moreau’s death and the dissolution of Huysmans’ community at Ligué Abbey in 1901, the loss of his father triggered a dark period of crisis in Rouault’s emotions. This is reflected in the sketchbook which eventually developed into the Miserere cycle of prints. He recalled this preliminary album to Jacques Rivière in a letter of 13 Oct. 1912: “I have an almost religious respect for it, regardless of its artistic value.” It was to provide him with subject matter and compositions that became foundational to his mature work.
Between 1913-14 new developments in his work and ideas arose through a move to become more personal in his art and through continued technical, formal and compositional experimentation. His painting became less didactic more personal in its expression and spirituality. During the Great War Georges was declared unfit for service and moved with his family to the countryside in Normandy where he managed to paint relatively undisturbed physically by the bombardments of warfare nearer the coast. However the news of the war all around him and his feelings about the horrors and injustices of wartime led him to return to more politically committed images, culminating in the profound Miserere et Guerre prints. The personal commitment to his images contributed to his growing maturity, both as a man and in his art, leading to far more personally intense imagery.
SPIRITUALITY IN ROUAULT’S APPROACH TO SUBJECTS & TECHNIQUES
This verse written at the height of Rouault’s maturity as an artist shows how he sought unity in his work:
“Form, colour, harmony, mark,
Not so simple their borders.
Beauty is not always
so easy to distinguish.
But how the blind
love to speak of colours
in the light!
And the deaf
of subtle sonority
as each one knows how.
Where language
no longer is prostituted
neither beauty is trapped
in worn out formulae
or monopolised “
[Rouault ‘Art et Beauté” in L’Intransegent, 8 Feb. 1932. p.5]
From an early date in his work Rouault’s use of materials was treated with almost as much sense of value as he attached to his subject-matter and the harmony of his colours. This relates back to his father’s own valuing of the qualities and beauty of the materials with which he worked, as well as George’s academic training and the technical influence of Moreau. Rouault regarded his technical work as an artisan as of almost equal importance to his subject matter and its expression, as all were integral to his communication of significant meaning and feelings. His paintings of prostitutes are worked in a combination of vivid layers of watercolour combined with gouache and pastel for expressive effect. He mounted the paper equally carefully onto canvas for quality and permanence. From about 1910, he developed the potential of stronger colour, which he had already explored in his Fauve phase 5 years earlier by returning to paint in oils. Oil-painting came to dominate his painting over mixed media work, though he also worked later in ceramics.
Up to and beyond 1912, his major theme had largely followed the Realist theme in art and literature of the degradation of human life, though he also painted landscapes and less anguished figure-studies. He was not purely criticising his subjects; rather he was showing that they were redeemable and worthy of value. Between about 1915-17 his approach and subject matter gradually evolved. There was less emphasis on the dark underbelly of society, like its prostitutes, and more figures who could be allegories of the human condition – clowns, circus dancers, courtrooms and judges. He also represented more social and spiritual struggles and produced 17 works on specifically religious subjects (though he would say later that “all” his subjects were “religious”.)
Stylistically his work also altered: The subject of the image itself became less dominant than in his prostitute paintings and the overall emotion conveyed by the image became more important to him. “For me it is only a matter or trying to transcribe my emotions in plastic form.” [quoted in René Huyghe ‘Le Fauvism’ in L’Amour de l’Art, 1933 no.14. p.131] One wonders whether in his more mature work he had considered Bloy and others’ condemnation of his darker works more closely, and decided that attracting his viewer, in order to communicate to them was more important than expressing or evoking visceral emotion. This did not prevent the rawness of his Miserere imagery from triumphing. The experience of the Great War around him could not be ignored yet he focused it to speak to the whole of society, not just recording specific horrors as Expressionists like Dix and Grosz did. Rouault is gentler in his imagery, viewing the problems in society with a similar empathy to that with which he painted Christ on the Cross in 1913.
He was fascinated by technical experimentation. He wanted to create various forms of expression that were relevant to his subjects and conveyed his feelings towards them. His painting of the ravaged ‘Head of Christ [1905Crysler Museum Collection] was intensely expressive. His prints were equally intensely worked using varieties of experimental techniques of engraving and etching, some of which were developed alongside master printmakers. He spoke of valuing the touch of materials and developing his thinking about work through touch. In this emphasis on technical refinement Rouault was further from the looseness of the Fauves and closer to Cezanne, who he admired, though Georges had a greater desire to convey spiritual content through the use of figures. Touch was an important aspect of Rouault’s way of discovering truth through physically working and meditating on a piece. In Miserere plate 32 a blind man recognises Christ through reaching to touch the figure of Jesus standing beside him on his journey of life: “Lord, it is you, I recognise you.” Rouault’s work could be similarly thought of as a painter who, though he could not physically see God, felt that he found God’s truth and sensed the presence of Christ through exploring the subjects of the physical life around him with the gifts and materials which he has been given.
Later, Rouault wrote of “a certain harmony of rhythm and colour that I have long been seeking”. He wanted his art to have the truth of ‘realism’, rather than the ‘idealism’ of some modernism, including the Fauves… “there is no respite from anguish for the dreamer who clings to reality and does not allow himself to be enslaved by the deceptive dream.”.
Painting became the extension of Rouault’s life where he felt most able to express his thoughts and reactions. However his works were not just spontaneous and intuitive. It took hard labour to realize and express his ideas to the full, and it often took a long period of time, and many revisitings to refine the image before he felt satisfaction with his results. He wrote: “I am mad about painting and like any child I dream of and hope for I know not what wonderful garden. It is a promised land, one that I shall not be permitted to enter in my lifetime.”
SOCIAL COMMENT AND FAITH
The social content and commentary in Rouault’s work is more often a lament than a political or socially radical manifesto. He was creating visual metaphors as mirrors of reality for others to recognise and act upon. Unlike revolutionaries, he emphasised that he was not motivated by ‘hate’ or uncontrolled ‘anger’, even when portraying the inequitable, unjust or painful subjects that most distressed him. He was presenting the iniquities as he saw them, inviting positive response and change.
The Miserere series is perhaps his most all-embracing social and religious visual commentary. A large number of the subjects in the prints show the falseness in society:
Alone in this life of pitfalls and malice
Are we not slaves/convicts?
Believing ourselves kings.
in the old quarter/district of Long Suffering.
The hard task of living…
So-called ‘Daugher of Joy’ / or So-called ‘joyful good-time girl’.
In the mouth that was sweet, the taste of gall.
The high-class society lady believes that she has a place reserved in heaven.
The emancipated woman cries midday, when it is two o’clock
The prisoner is led away…
his counsel, in hollow phrases, proclaims his complete indifference…
Street of the lonely.
“Winter, scourge/leprosy of the earth.”
Jean Francois never sings Alleluia…
in the land of thirst and terror.
“Morality weeps her tears…
“Even the ruins have perished.”
Man is a wolf to man
We are mad.
Face to face
“War hates mothers “
“We are doomed to death, we and all that is ours”
My sweet land, what has become of you?
“Out of the depths…”
In the winepress the grapes were crushed.
The nobler the heart the less stiff the collar.
Tooth and nail
Far from the smile of Rheims
The Law is the law
Onward the dead!
Sometimes the blind have comforted those who see.
At the same time, a large number of the prints also show the potential of a spiritual and loving response to the predicaments and sufferings of the world:
“Have mercy on me O God, according to your loving kindness” {Ps.51:1},
Jesus reviled, forever scourged, takes refuge in your heart poor wanderer.
Sometimes the way is beautiful in the old quarter/district of Long Suffering.
Tomorrow will be fair, says the castaway / the one lost at sea.
to love would be so sweet.
under Jesus forgotten on the cross.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. [Isa.53:71]
In so many different places, the noble task of sowing in a hostile land.
“He who believes in me, though he die will live” [Jn.11:25].
Sing Matins, for a new day dawns
“we,.. it is into his death that we have been baptised” or “his death is our baptism.” [Rom.6:3]
“Love one another.” [Jn.13:34]
Lord, it is you, I know you.
And Veronica with her compassionate veil walks once more mong us on our way…
“Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world “ [Pascal Pensées 553-5]
The just, like sandalwood, perfume the axe that strikes them down.
Sometimes the blind have comforted those who see.
In these dark times of vainglory and unbelief, Our Lady of the Ends of the Earth keeps watch “Obedient unto death, even the death of the cross”
“And with his stripes we are healed”
The poor had been common subjects of art from the Dutch genre scenes and landscapes to Daumier, Millet, the Realists and Van Gogh. Many had used them to convey religious meaning. Rouault created images of them more often than he did the wealthy, and often represented them with greater gentleness and compassion. But he did not idealise them as some of the artists mentioned above did. He saw many as victims of social ills more than as creating those ills themselves, which in a way over- idealised their plight by emphasising their innocence. Zola was more true in recognising that people were not just trapped in poverty but could also be the cause of their own downfall or deprivation. Bloy regarded suffering and poverty as a means by which people could approach redemption. Like Zola, Rouault saw social deprivation more realistically as an indictment on the leadership of the nation, and believed that inequity was inescapable without substantial social change. He spoke of those who suffer socially as ‘exiles’, ‘wanderers’, ‘captives’, ‘pilgrims’, ‘fugitives’, ‘fellow sufferers.’ He saw them as exiles from the Kingdom and life that God intended, in which all human beings are meant to be able to flourish. Rouault’s paintings of the Holy Family on their Flight into Egypt became a metaphor for this wandering of the innocent or dispossessed in search of security. ‘Motherhood: Run-Down Neighbourhood shows a child being sheltered by his mother from the ravages of the world.
Some of Rouault’s landscapes represent the poor industrial suburbs, like that in which he grew up, which he referred to as ‘the old quarter/district of long suffering’. ‘Realist’ artists and ‘Naturalist’ writers like Zola and the de Goncourts had written about the social conditions, needs and evils of such environments. As a visual artist Rouault could not represent the same amount of detail as literature could represent. Nor could he present a clearly reasoned argument in a single image. (The Miserere series came closest to enabling him to do this.) A painting may include many references and have much underlying profundity but it conveys this by feeling and contemplative qualities, rather than an excess of physical content. The qualities of the deprived areas are represented in Rouault’s paintings by the bleakness of the environment and the expressions and gestures of loneliness and social entrapment of the people. At times this also reflected his own loneliness as in ‘Street of the Lonely (Miserere plate 23). Others titles like ‘The old quarter/district of long suffering” represent the anguished lives which are often hidden behind the suburban facades.
Into some of these landscapes Rouault introduced the figure of Christ as though faith can offer and bring light and hope to the people: Christ in the Suburbs [1920]; Christ and the Poor Man [1937] depict him identifying with their suffering and standing alongside them, as he is shown to do in the Miserere series, through suffering and his Passion.
Even those who in the ‘Miserere’: “believe themselves kings” or “believe they have a reserved place in heaven” are trapped by their false, deluded ideas of themselves. In Rouault’s eyes the complacency or disinterest of the bourgeoisie towards the difficulties of other sufferers reduces their humanity. So did their pride, self-righteousness and smug attitude to wealth and position. Rouault portrayed them as haughty, culpable, untrustworthy and rather’ ugly’ in moral terms, but he did so with more of a sense of pity for the humanity that they had lost or denied themselves, rather than an attitude of condemnation. They are as pitiable as the suffering poor, though in different ways. His faith taught him that the Kingdom of Heaven was easier to reach by the despised, the poor and harlots than the rich, powerful and self-righteous [Matt.19:23, 21:31; 5:3-12]. In his painting ‘Poulots’ Rouault illustrated the distorted features and bodies of two arrogant characters from Bloy’s novel ‘La Femme Pauvre’ who deludedly considered themselves privileged and superior by birth.
Both the rich and the poor are treated as individuals in Rouault’s works, though they may stand for others. They are victims in different ways of the sins that penetrate, damage and corrupt society. As the wisdom books of scripture suggest we are all equal in our responsibilities and our end. Several similarities could be drawn between Rouault’s work and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Rouault’s imagery of the circus reflected this, where he stated: “The rich and the poor bend towards the earth, where they will be sleeping tomorrow.” [Cirque p.16]
JUSTICE AND THE LAW AS RELIGIOUS THEMES
Rouault was never explicitly politically involved, but had a strong social conscience. He emphasised that he did not condemn judges; rather he was ‘perplexed’ by seemingly double standards in the judicial system. The subject of the law and lawyers was common in Daumier’s work, which Rouault had known well since a child. Around 1906-7, when Rouault was exploring new subjects for his art, he had a friend among the judiciary, Deputy Prosecutor Granier, who invited him to attend court sessions. One of his first works based on these visits to trials was ‘The Condemned Man’ [c1907] based on the trial and execution of the rapist and murderer Joseph Vacher in 1898, which disturbed the artist. Rouault was not so much worried that injustice had been done in this case, as Vacher’s crimes were similar to those of Jack the Ripper in England. Rather, through his times in court the artist was struck by the differences between the ways that lawyers and the law treated the rich and the poor.
About two decades later he wrote a poem, published in 1929, using some phrases that he had used in sequence in the Miserere series, which highlighted indifference to justice and the way responsibility for social ills is often laid on others rather than accepted by leaders or those who implement the law: It is probably that the last Phrase about Jesus ‘forgotten there’ on the cross intentionally contains a variety of meanings: Faith and its obligations are forgotten in the contemporary world, as our the moral responsibilities which Christ aid upon us. But primarily the presence of Christ and the saving work of the Cross and the consolation of faith are often forgotten in the ‘district of longsuffering’
The condemned man went away
indifferent and weary.
His lawyer in hollow/empty
pompous phrases
had proclaimed his innocence.
A red robed prosecutor
held society blameless
and indicted the condemned man
under a Jesus on the cross
forgotten there.
[in ‘Paysages légendaires’ 1929]
The Three Judges c.1937-8 is almost a Trinitarian image with the head of the central frontal figure surrounded by a halo. He seems to be consulting and contemplating the law, while the right hand figure appears to be moving off to put the law into action. The stern nature of their expression, however, is a contrast to the care and activity of God. Rouault said of his court imagery: “If I have made of the judges lamentable figures, it is no doubt because I was betraying the anguish that I feel at the sight of one human being having to judge another. I would not be a judge for all the wealth and happiness in the world.” [quoted in Jacques Guenne ‘Georges Rouault’’ in Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Nov.15. 1924. Vol.3. No. 109 p.5]. By contrast to the limitations of human judgement, of God was able to perceive and act in all things with omniscient, compassionate, , loving and pure understanding and judgement.
Like Rouault, one of his religious heroes, Pascal, had been fascinated by the law, and had also spent much of his time in legal circles. Rouault drew parallels between the contemporary justice system and courts and the trial and condemnation of Christ. ‘Men of Justice’ [c1913 show a lawyer and a bespectacled judge in front of an image of Christ on the Cross. Plate 6 of Miserere‘Are we not all slaves/ convicts’ shown a naked man looking to heaven, seemingly for mercy, with a mother and child looking on. In the distance is a church, the place where forgiveness and reconciliation, rather than condemnation, should be available.
In many of the images that refer to the law, Rouault highlighted the contrast between the negativity of legal and religious condemnation and God’s grace towards us, as represented by Christ’s cross. The recurrent theme of ‘Christ before the Doctors’ gave the artist a theme that contrasted the arrogance, self-satisfaction and indifference of the administrators with the humility an love of Christ and his willingness to endure suffering on behalf of others. He painted images of ‘Christ Mocked’ nine times between 1912 and 1942, as well as several images of ‘Ecce Homo. Rouault used the iconography of the ‘Man of Sorrows’ to emphasise the damage that false human judgement can produce. The frequent interspersing of the imagery of the suffering Christ through the Miserere series also emphasises how the miscarriage of justice in Christ’s case enables him to identify with others who suffer injustice. The one who himself suffered from injustice, created and fulfilled divine law and will be entrusted to judge and redeem the world. This recalls the example of the understanding judgement of Christ, described in Heb. 4:15- 5:3,
On a simpler, aesthetic level, it is not surprising that French judges became one of the artist’s themes, found in 23 of his paintings, as the bright red of their robes provided him with a vivid subject that suited his style and love of colour: “The black bonnet and red robes make pretty splashes of colour and that is all that is necessary…” [quoted in Michel Puy. Georges Rouault p.16].
A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE - PROSTITUTION AS A THEME
On the surface it seems strange that a young Christian artist searching for themes should choose images of prostitutes. Rouault produced only 20 paintings on this subject, from 1902 to 1912 did not return to it, apart from Plate 14 of the Miserere: ‘So-called Daughters of Joy’ or ‘So-called joyful good-time girl’. Yet the images of prostitutes are among the artist’s strongest and most memorable early realist/expressionist paintings. They were also the most controversial, as I have discussed. The theme, however, is not so surprising for a young artist exploring modernism and seeking contemporary ethical subjects for his art. Several modern artists had or were using the theme – Lautrec, Manet, Constanin Guys, and Degas preceded him, Picasso was to work on the same theme perhaps having seen Rouault’s images at the Salon d’Automne of 1904 and 1905. Naturalist literature also explored lives that included prostitution: Zola, the de Goncourts, Dostoevsky, who we know Rouault read, and even Huysmanss and Bloy (Le Désespéré) . One of the ironies of Bloy’s criticism of Rouault’s subject is that the writer had himself been living with a former prostitute and mistress Anne-Marie Roulet, who had converted to faith a few years after him.. In the double standards of the time, many young men’s first sexual experiences were with prostitutes.
Young artists must have mixed with prostitutes regularly as they were often the models in the academies and then became affordable models to employ in their own studios. Working from the figure was still a key requirement for any artist working in academic traditions and also for many modernists. Most of the young artists lived in poor districts where many prostitutes also lived. It was apparently not uncommon for prostitutes to frequent the young artists’ studios to warm themselves at their stoves. When Rouault was living in Belleville, Montmartre and the poor district of Versailles they would have been a common sight. Rouault apparently was moved to adopt the theme through seeing a prostitute offering herself while shivering in a doorway near his studio. It bought home to him the difficulties of such a life: “For me it was the shock, the suggestion. I saw this bluish lady just as anyone else can, though more clearly since I am a painter. When I returned home it began to work on me… The spectacle I happened upon was transposed, a transposition or perhaps a call frim the inner world. Nothing was premeditated… The woman standing in the door is not the one I painted. That one and the others corresponded to the state of mind I was in” [Roulet ‘Souvenirs’ p.188-9].
There are conundrums in Rouault’s images of prostitutes. Partly he was valuing the people themselves, partly perhaps fascinated sexually, though his figures rarely seem to be objects of desire. Partly he felt sorry for their condition and needs while his beliefs were against the practice morally and he felt protective on grounds of security and health. There were probably many other associated feelings, some of which he sought to convey in the images. He was still in a vulnerable state emotionally and financially at this time, so he was probably more empathetic towards the individuals whose profession was officially regarded as degraded and sordid. He recognised the hypocrisy of those among the bourgeoisie and others who commonly exploited the women privately yet might publicly criticise the profession. It is probable that Rouault’s attitude reflected what his friend André Suarès wrote of prostitutes in The Passion, illustrated by Rouault: “You are sacred for those who are willing to understand. You are not sinner but victim, the receptacle of all our sins. Nor are you the guiltiest. Rather you are the cesspool of our sins and lies. Al other women, your sisters – the rich, the fashionable, the married, the highly esteemed, the very moral – you are the ransom for them all. Not one of them would possess the jewels and the gold she is so proud of – nor modesty, purity, nor vain plumage, nor the aigrette of her fair name, nor the hand-kissing and other marks of respect – if you, the victim, were not on the auction-block for all women” [quoted Dyrness 1971 p. 142].
Rouault’s paintings, however, were more immediate; they were probably not intended to convey such a moral statement. The women are not painted in any way idealistically or romantically, unlike the images of Lautrec or Degas. Rouault painted their awkward proportions, strange poses, attempts to make themselves alluring, sometimes filthy or over-made up bodies and faces, as well as the dissatisfaction some felt in a profession which was supposed to be about ‘love’. There does not seem to have been misogyny, fear or dislike of the women in his attitudes, despite the sometimes grotesque images. Nor does the artist seem to have been stressing as a religious or ethical message that purity is a greater quality to strive towards. He often emphasised that he was not being self-righteous, and criticised hypocritical or self-righteous attitudes in society. The artist claimed: “No, I never had the intention of being an ‘avenger’ or a moralist. There is such an emphasis in the heads of my ‘filles’ that some thought I wanted to show off the shame of these creatures. This dishonour I did not even notice until after they pointed it out to me. Actually I could only pity them.” [Guenne. Jacques Guenne ‘Georges Rouault’’ in Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Nov.15. 1924. Vol.3. No. 109 p.5]. Pity is also a key feature of the poor subjects in the ‘Miserere’ prints, particularly heart-wrenching in ‘The hard task of living’’ Rouault’s aim seems to have been to present the images of prostitutes as realistic characters, like those in French Naturalist’ literature, representing society as it is. He was holding a mirror up to society just as ‘Fille au miroir’ [1906] shows a prostitute arranging her hair and posing in a mirror, either aware or unaware of the irony in the idea of her allure.
CLOWNS AND THE CIRCUS AS MEANINGFUL IMAGERY
Images of entertainment were very much a part of modernism. Circus entertainers were painted by Lautrec, Seurat, Degas, Renoir and other artists. Picasso’s Saltimbanques and Harlequins [1905-6] were being painted around the same time as those of Rouault. Daumier had also represented the sadness of life beneath the joyful exterior and make-up or mask, as both Rouault and Picasso later used the imagery to suggest.
As with Rouault’s adoption of the prostitute motif, his writings imply that this theme came to him through a specific encounter, where the significance of the people made a visual, mental and spiritual, impact upon him: “The gypsy women stopped along the road, the emaciated old horse grazing on the thin grass, the old clown sitting on the corner of this wagon mending his bright, many-coloured costume. The contrast between brilliant and scintillating things made to amuse us, and their infinitely sad life, if one looks at it objectively, struck me with great force. I have expanded all of this. I saw clearly that the ‘clown’ was myself, ourselves, almost all of us. This spangled costume is given to us by life. We are all of us clowns, more or less, we all wear a ‘spangled costume’ but if we are caught by surprise, the way I caught that old clown, oh then; who would dare to claim that he is not moved deeply by immeasurable pity? My failing (if it is one, in any case it is the source of immense suffering for me) is never to let anyone keep on his ‘spangled costume’. Be he King of Emperor, what I want to see in the man facing me is his soul, and the more exalted the position, the more I fear for his soul” {Rouault Letter to Eduard Schuré 1905 quoted Dyrness 1971 p.149].
This quotation is significant in many ways. It demonstrates how Rouault was constantly looking at the world around him to glean ideas and how physical encounters could imprint themselves on his mind, vision and work. It shows the artist’s personal identification and empathy with his subjects, which in some ways became representations of his inner self, as well as of contemporary society. In this case the clowns’ make-up and costumes are reflections of the masks and false images he assumed were adopted and worn by the world around him. They expresses his pity for the inauthenticities in society. This is illustrated in his poignant, rhetorical ‘Miserere’ print “Who does not also wear a mask?”, also translatable as “Who does not also wear make-up?’ In the letter to Schuré cited above, the artist also expressed his feeling that it might be a failing in him to be so sensitive to the predicaments and sufferings of others, as it often caused him personal anguish. He wondered if the very ability to see through the masks and hypocrisies of others might also be a disadvantage. However, this was what made Rouault a sensitive, perceptive artist with so much to communicate. Rouault wrote: “We are fallen, it is true, but my clowns are really only dispossessed kings; their laugh is familiar to me; it reaches the realm of a million stifled sobs “[Souvenisr Intimes] p.14].
Some of Rouault’s paintings of circus figures show groups and families, but more often they are represented as solitary individuals. The figure of Pierrot is the most common theme among thecircus images. This is probably because the melancholic figure more closely resembled Rouault’s personal character than other clowns, acrobats or circus dancers. Interestingly Georges often gives the circus girls, squires and dancers specific names: Carmencita, Carlotta, Douce Amère. Most are probably invented characters, though some may be based on real characters. The names are important, since they emphasise that these are not generalised representations, but have individual characters and personal characteristics. Though they may stand for social situations, they show that every person is an individual who is capable of a personal relationship with God. There is a sense of mystery about the real person behind their masks, make-up and costumes. Some may be tragic, some representing the more joyful aspects of human life, but all are redeemable individual characters and souls.
The clown is not just a symbol of sadness, escape from reality or an expression of joy. In one of Rouault’ poems he attributed spiritual reflective aspects to the clown. This may be similar to the reflective side of the prostitute, suggested in the painting ‘Fille au miroir’ [1906]:
I prefer to be the court jester
and say freely,
laughingly
to immortal courtiers
that I am not their servant
in spiritual things.”
He showed the spiritual side of the clown in “The Reflective Pierrot’ / Le Pierrot Sage’ [1943] where the clown looks down at his book, which he holds in an almost prayerful manner. Behind him is a framed picture of another figure of a clown, perhaps a muse or an ancestor from whom he has inherited his role. The image is not unlike the iconography of Christ as the ‘Man of Sorrows’. It may also reflect the mediaeval idea of the ‘fool of Christ’, revived by the Franciscans, and the more modern idea of the ‘foolishness of God’ in giving so much for our redemption
Despite Rouault’s recognition of what might be hidden behind the clowns ’make-up or masks, there is also a simplicity of spirit in the visible joy that some of them show. Though the artist was a serious, quiet man, play, like painting was part of his spiritual freedom.. “The laugh is good to hear and to see, for it delivers us from so many miseries, real and imaginary:
He who no longer knows how to laugh
or smile
is only waiting to die”. [Rouault Cirque p.52]
Some of Rouault’s clowns have a spirit of peace and contentment as well as joy in their faces. Others wear the melancholy features of the ‘sad clown’. These can represent the difference between the circus world of appearances and the sadness of the realities of the world in which we all live. “Dream or reality, the wan child from the poor neighbourhoods will still find his way to the circus midway. One way or another, he will find there new and better ways to forget the long winters, the gloomy days, the hard and hostile faces, the depressed spirits and the callused hearts.” [Cirque. p.105} This may reflect Rouault’s own visits to the circus as a child from a poor neighbourhood. From his use of the term ‘midway’. the Circus seems a liminal place, partly for a moment secure form the hard realities of the world, where one can decide whether to move forward on a path of joy or melancholy.
In 1938 André Suarès published an essay on clowns which may reflect an allied aspect of Rouault’s ideas: “He who can mock anything has the ability to hold himself above the world and himself.” Rouault was not personally mocking anything in these paintings or his social critique. Yet by standing apart and viewing the world through his metaphors, emotions and reasoning, he was able to comment on difficulties which he perceived within reality. The circus entertainers partly lifted people out of reality for a while, but they too lived and experienced a very different reality in their personal lives. Suarès wrote in a 1917 letter to Rouault “The clown is the victim of life, especially city life/. As such he is a serf; he is miserable… he is an object of compassion and you have seen him with loving eyes” [Correspondance p.151].
WORK WITH VOLLARD
In 1917 the maturing Rouault gained further financial and artistic security in the patronage of the significant Parisian art-dealer Ambroise Vollard. Georges had been acquainted with Vollard previously, through visiting and studying the works of other artists in Vollard’s gallery from 1907, which was when they first met. They had begun to discuss terms for Vollard to deal in his work as early as 1913, when Vollard bought Rouault’s entire output and offered to finance his printmaking and experimentations. We do not know Rouault’s initial reaction to this offer of patronage, but it must have been an encouragement to one who had ten year before been severely criticised and felt less secure. Vollard wanted exclusive rights to George’s works in return for supplying the artist with a fixed salary. He also offered Rouault a studio on the top floor of his private home where he insisted that the artist could work at his own pace. In 1917 Rouault accepted the offer with the main proviso that he was himself in charge of the decision as to when a work was finished and acceptable for sale. The artist stipulated that he was to be allowed to work on his paintings at his own chosen pace, without pressure from the dealer. The arrangement brought Rouault and his family greater financial and career security, as he would be able to focus his energies into his art. It also promoted Rouault: In 1917 Vollard persuaded the French state to buy Rouault’s prize-winning ‘Child Jesus among the Doctors., which went to the Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar and became his first picture to enter a museum.
However, Vollard was controlling patron who liked to monopolize the work of his artists and was jealous in wanting to maintain their sense of responsibility towards him. It was largely due to the dealer’s passion for publishing books that Rouault’s painting decreased and his printmaking increased’ Rouault often became frustrated with his dealer. He wrote to Suarès: “I have an infinite patience when it comes to spiritual matters. But patience can still be used up and human energy sometimes has a limit.” [Correspondance p.307].
This patronage arrangement gave the artist greater financial security, supplementing his small salary from the Moreau Museum. It allowed Rouault far greater personal and artistic freedom, including freedom to experiment and innovate, rather than simply satisfying a patron’s expectations. Vollard did, however put other pressures on Rouault. He was a keen publisher of high quality, limited edition portfolio Fine Art books and commissioned illustrations for many volumes. Among these were commissions for Chagall’s illustrations for Gogol’s Dead Souls, Picasso’s etchings and woodcut illustrations for Balzac, and Maurice Denis’ woodcuts for Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. His sponsorship of Rouault’s own massive Miserere et Guerre and the Passion, produced two significant advances in publication because bot h were so experimental. Other illustrations from Rouault included: Alfred Jarry’s Réincarnations du Père Ubu (1927), Cirque de l'Étoile (1938) and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1928), which was eventually published in 1966, several years after the deaths of both Vollard and Rouault. In 1928, Rouault and his "brother in art", the poet and critic André Suarès [1868-], had completed a book project on which they had worked together for several years. Vollard, who harboured a petty grievance against the poet, refused to publish Suarès's writings. Though frustrated, Rouault agreed to replace Suarès's poetry with his own writings, naming the finished book Cirque de l'Étoile / The Circus of the Shooting Star [1938].
Ambrose Vollard was a major impresario in the promotion of modernist artists. He developed a patronage relationship with many major artists including Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Vuillard. Chagall, Redon and Denis. However, he often attempted to monopolise the work of artists who he patronised and exhibited Suarès described Vollard as “a slave merchant” [quoted by Timothy Mitchell ‘The Passion’ intro. p. v.]. This led to several challenging situations in his relationship with Rouault, who, though he was quiet and insular had a strong sense of justice and integrity. It came to a head after Vollard’s accidental death in a car crash in 1939. Rouault found himself suddenly released from his contract with his dealer. However, Vollard's estate sealed the entrance to the dealer’s house and refused Rouault permission to retrieve sketches, notes and unfinished works from his studio and store. Vollard’s heirs claimed ownership of Rouault’s works and the artist was forced into legal action which lasted for 8 years. It was delayed partly through Rouault and his family having been forced to leave their Paris home for the South of France during the war but Vollard’s heirs fought determinedly for their rights. Finally a landmark court decision in 1947 affirmed the artist’s rights to the ownership of his own work "provided that he had not given them away of his own volition". This secured the return of over 700 unfinished paintings.
After the years of legal wrangling with Vollard’ heirs, Georges wrote in a reconciliatory fashion in his Preface to Miserere: “If injustice has been shown towards Ambrose Vollard, let us remember that he had taste and passion for making beautiful books, regardless of time; but it would have taken three centuries to have completed the works which he wanted, without considering our human limitations, to entrust to the artist.” All Rouault’s works in printmaking, as in his painting, are the result of many years and elaborate processes of experimentations and perfection of techniques. He rarely simply repeated his techniques in the various series he produced. As the subjects were so different, he aimed to find the imagery, medium and techniques which would best reflect them expressively..
MISERERE ET GUERRE
In 1912 Rouault began a series of Indian ink drawings in a sketchbook, which metamorphosed into the 58 Miserere engravings on which he worked for almost the next 15 years. The original title was intended to be ‘Miserere et Guerre’ but he later refined this to the simple yet resonant title of ‘Miserere’. This focused on and emphasised the religious connotations of the word, based on the opening of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me O God, according to your loving kindness / steadfast love” which was part of the Catholic liturgy of repentance: “Miserere mie Deus”. The psalm is a prayer for cleansing and pardon, pleading for a healed, righteous form of religion, so is very relevant to Rouault’s attitude to the ills of war, society and the Church:
Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.
Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco: et peccatum meum contra me est semper.
Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum judicaris.
Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum: et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.
Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti: incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi.
Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam: et exsultabunt ossa humiliata.
Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis: et omnes iniquitates meas dele.
Cor mundum crea in me, Deus: et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.
Ne proiicias me a facie tua: et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me.
Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui: et spiritu principali confirma me.
Docebo iniquos vias tuas: et impii ad te convertentur.<
Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae: et exsultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam.
Domine, labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.
Quoniam si voluisses sacrificium, dedissem utique: holocaustis non delectaberis.
Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum, et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies.
Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion: ut aedificentur muri Ierusalem.
Tunc acceptabis sacrificium justitiae, oblationes, et holocausta: tunc imponent super altare tuum vitulos.
Full English Translation:
Have mercy on me, O God: according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy: blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity: and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned: and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence: and blameless when you pass judgement.
Indeed, I was born guilty: a sinner when my mother conceived me.
You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Let me hear of joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins: and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God: and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence: and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation: and sustain in me a willing spirit.
Then I will teach transgressors your ways: and sinners will return to you.
Deliver me from blood-guiltiness O God, O God of my salvation: and my tongue will sing of your deliverance.
O Lord, open my lips: and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you take no delight in sacrifice; if I were to present a burnt-offering, you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Do good to Zion through your good pleasure; rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
then you will delight in right sacrifices, in burnt-offerings and full burnt-offerings; then true sacrifices will be offered on your altar.
Rouault interpreted the psalm as far more than a plea for the forgiveness of an individual’s sins against God. Personal confession was how the words were most often used liturgically or in private. The artist regarded the cause of Christ’s sufferings and death as much broader than the sins of individuals. Christ’s Passion could offer healing to all for all the earth’s sins. Rouault applied the title and longings of psalm to the suffering and evils of the whole world, including the causes and horrors of war. The title Miserere and the whole series of prints became a visual plea for God’s forgiveness for the sins of the whole of society, especially the oppression and neglect of the poor, the weak, the marginalised and all who suffered as a result of war.
The extremely large copper plates became a focus for his feelings about more than the war, social ills and faith. Work on them focused the artist’s sense of spiritual responsibility towards the world. His daughter’s notes to the series state that she believed that he only started work on the actual plates right after the war, though the artist’s Preface dates the subjects from 1914-18. Ironically, though printed under the artist’s careful supervision in 1927 the series was only finally published in 1948, after the struggles with Vollard’s heirs and the destructivity and depravations of the Second World War had further delayed the display of what Rouault considered his most significant work. Unsurprisingly Rouault dedicated the works to his former mentor and support Gustave Moreau, who had encouraged him in the freedom to produce such personal work.
The series has been hailed as “a monument of twentieth-century printmaking”…“one of the greatest modernist interpretations of religious iconography”… “Rouault responded to the ravages of World War I by creating aggressive, sparse, and grand compositions, which attain a pitch of tragedy and salvation rarely achieved by his contemporaries.” [O'Shaughnessy West review of exhibition Lines Etched with the Weight of Life: Georges Rouault's Miserere Snite Museum of Art 2013]. Although Rouault’s paintings created iconic images based in his faith and social commitment, printmaking was where his ideas developed in the most accessible ways, particularly his works created in response to the horrors and iniquities of the Great War. Through the 1920s, Rouault worked primarily on printmaking. The drawings and ideas for his series Miserere et Guerre developed during the war, but the plates begun immediately afterwards in 1918 were not completed until 1927. This delay is not surprising; initially quality materials must have been scarce, and he wanted to work on the largest plates that could then be used on the press. Rouault describes meticulously “reworking the plates again and again, sometimes making as many as twelve successive states; for I wished them as far as possible to be equal in quality.” Though many were printed earlier, the full set of fifty-eight prints was only published in 1948, in a weighty limited edition, followed by reproductions from1950. The sheets are extremely large: 65cm. x 50cm / 25⅝” x 19 ¾” and the work weighs over 21 kilos. Miserere was eventually first exhibited to the public in 1948.
Rouault’s reworking of the plates for so many years was not just to achieve his sense of technical perfection. It seems also have been part of his meditative process of exploring the ideas and refining his sensations into expressive images. He also wanted to recreate something of the spontaneity of his original drawings, as well as developing greater feeling in its texture, He initially drew out the images in India ink on paper, creating a spontaneous expressive image. This drawing was then mechanically reproduced as an engraving onto a plate by the heliographic method. But this was only the initial stage of developing the final image. To consolidate and complete it he worked into and reworked the plates with burins, files, scrapers, rollers, emery-paper, brushed-on acid and other chemicals etc. He densened the black areas, enhanced the white unprinted areas and increased the expressive textures of the print. These repeated reworkings preoccupied him for years; he often spent full days at the modest printers’ workshop, only leaving in time to catch the last metro home at night. He enjoyed working with the craftsmen-printers, as he felt that they regarded him as “one of their own” rather than as a rarefied artist. “I am of the people” he often asserted [Dyrness 1971 p.83]. He spent similar energy and thought on refining the texts, to focus clarity and enhance the meanings of the images. Some of the texts were taken from his own poetry, or later became part of his poems. In Vollard’s Memoires the dealer admitted to having been apprehensive at the amount of refinement and extent of ripping-away that went into the plates. But this was all part of Rouault’s desire to explore and refine a work until it conveyed his feelings and intention to the fullest.
As well as considering that “I put the best of myself” into the Miserere, it was also a therapeutic exercise for him in expressing his response to the vicissitudes of life and the horrors of wartime. He wrote to Suarès: “Misery was my tutor, which did not prevent me from singing, for in my childhood we used to sing:
Old songs of France
you were in tune with the people of my region.
Clear, gentle and forthright
you helped along the way
the vagrant, young or old soldier, shrewd artisan,
hardworking or happy-go-lucky, fondly singing.
Miserere became the artist’s personal song - a lament, a plea for chang, a love song to his subjects, many of whom had died in the conflict, as well as a longing for the healing of the suffering earth.
In his Preface to Miserere and in a letter to Jacques Rivière of 13th Oct. 1912 Rouault claimed that he began the drawings to express his feelings after his father’s death, The series developed into a far broader reflection on the sufferings and injustices experienced by the marginalised in society and the conditions, inequity and horrors of warfare. A key theme of the Miserere cycle of prints is the search for integrity in the world. Rouault believed that through the Christian faith and the love of God and people, it would be possible to deal with and understand the suffering and injustice in the world. This could lead to healing, peace, equity and comfort for those who despair. The image of Veronica’s veil with which the series begins and ends represents Christ’s face not just watching and suffering with the world, but also showing us our own responsibility to act like Veronica in the legend, offering comfort to the suffering, weary and needy. Writing in 1939 Rouault spoke, as he did in the texts on the Miserere prints of the world as an the “hard business of living”, “the old district of long suffering.” Yet he believed that somehow within the corruption of the world, God was still with us in essence and in loving care. He wrote: “Deep down inside the most unfriendly, unpleasant, and impure creature, Jesus dwells.” The Miserere et Guerre cycle balances details of human suffering with Christ suffering on our behalf and identifying with the human predicament. He believed in the Catholic concept that Christ presence was closest to people in their most intense suffering. He suggested that we should reflect that presence by ourselves bringing comfort to the needy. This is one reason why the image of Veronica’s veil became so significant in Rouault’s art, right to the end of his career.
Rouault’s personal feelings were an essential part of his painterly expression. He wrote: “All I seek is the plastic transcription of my emotions.” This is particularly true of his Miserere cycle and his paintings of the crucifix, in which his feelings with suffering injustice and corruption are vividly expressed both in the images and the pains which he took to convey both meaning and feeling with expressive techniques. Perhaps the most expressive of the images is “The hard work of living” showing a frowning, naked, half-length of a man bent in sorrow. Like Christ, the artist was not just observing and recording the problems of the world, but also identifying and feeling with people’s needs and pain. He wrote: “I carry within myself an infinite depth of suffering and melancholy, which life has only served to develop and of which my paintings, if God allows it, will only be the flowering and imperfect expression.” His print “Christ will be in agony until the end of the world” shows Christ in his crucifixion identifying physically with the despair of humanity. More texturally ravaged images are the first crucifixion plate “Beneath a forgotten Jesus on the Cross” and the third image of the series of the Man of Sorrows: “forever scourged.” To Rouault Christ’s Incarnation and Passion was key to understanding God’s continued knowledge of and care for the world. Another print showing a refugee father reaching down to comfort a despairing child is labelled: “(Jesus.. forever scourged) takes refuge in your heart poor wandering soul / vagabond of misfortune.” Rouault had himself been brought up in a poor area of Paris and had experienced poverty and seen displacement. The bleakness of some of his landscapes do not literally portray the suburbs and factory-areas which he knew well, but are more universal. They represent the bleakness and poverty of both those areas and so many environments in the wider world. Rouault was expressing both his own social commitment and care for people’s predicament, as well as the care of Christ himself.
The texts printed below the images seem roughly written, and have unfortunately been cut off a number of prints in framing. Yet their simplicity and almost awkwardness was intentional; they seem spontaneous, just as he worked to make the images appear. Rouault was very careful over the words which he added to the images; they had to reflect and lead the viewer deeper into the meaning of the image, as part of the overall page. Rather than distracting from the picture the viewer or reader was intended to imbibe the feeling created by the entire page and contemplate its meaning as a whole. Writing to his friend the poet André Suarès he called the texts ‘omens’ and said that some people, critics and friends, complained as soon as he had added them beneath the images. They interpreted them as making the images “belong to literature or worse yet… to ethics , and therefore it has nothing to do with painting.” [Correspondance p.322] The criticism of his art being closer to literature must have been particularly irksome for Rouault, as he was proud of the separate language of visual art: “Art is not subject to explanation, for it is a marvellous language in itself.” [Enquête’ 1936 p.5]. For Rouault in Miserere the image and text were inseparable for conveying the meaning of his work, especially as the texts combined to present a narrative link between the images. Originally Suarès was intended to provide the words for Miserere but for various reasons, including Vollard’s hostility to Suarès, Rouault eventually provided his own texts, which made the work more personal. Though brief, so as to not distract from the power of the image, he combined his own words with significant quotations from other authors relating to war and humanity’s responsibilities to one another. Together the writings beneath the prints form a sort of narrative poem about the nature of the sinful world and Christ’s suffering alongside that of his people, as seen below: (Items in square brackets [] explain the reference, items in rounded brackets () explain the image. Occasionally I have included a potential variant translation which reflects the intended meaning of the title):
‘MISERERE’ “Have mercy on me O God, according to your loving kindness” {Ps.51:1},
Jesus reviled,...
forever scourged…
takes refuge in your heart poor wandering soul / vagabond of misfortune.
Alone in this life of pitfalls and malice
Are we not all slaves/convicts?
Believing ourselves kings.
Who does not wear a mask/make-up?
Sometimes the way is beautiful…
in the old quarter/district of Long Suffering.
Tomorrow will be fair, says the castaway/the one lost at sea.
The hard task of living…
to love would be so sweet.
So-called ‘Daugher of Joy’ / or‘So-called joyful good-time girl’.
In the mouth that was sweet, the taste of gall.
The high-class society lady believes that she has a place reserved in heaven.
The emancipated woman cries midday, when it is two o’clock (ie she has lost her bearings on life.)
The prisoner is led away…
his counsel, in hollow phrases, proclaims his complete indifference…
under Jesus forgotten on the cross.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. [Isa.53:71]
In so many different places, the noble task of sowing in a hostile land.
Street of the lonely.
“Winter, scourge/leprosy of the earth.”
Jean Francois never sings Alleluia…
in the land of thirst and terror.
“Morality weeps her tears…” [Virgil, Aeneid I]
“He who believes in me, though he die will live” [Jn.11:25].
Sing Matins, for a new day dawns
“we,.. it is into his death that we have been baptised” or “his death is our baptism.” [Rom.6:3]
“Love one another.” [Jn.13:34]
Lord, it is you, I know you.
And Veronica with her compassionate veil walks once more mong us on our way…
Beginning The ‘GUERRE’/‘War’ Section: “Even the ruins have perished.” [Virgil; Pharsalia IX:969]
“Jesus’ agony will continue until the end of the world “ [Pascal Pensées 553-5]
This will be the last time little father (a son saying farewell to his father before going off to war, as a skeleton of death awaits them both).
Man is a wolf to man (a skeleton dressed as a soldier).
The Chinese invented gunpowder, they say, and made a gift of it to us.
We are mad.
Face to face (a fat proud general facing an emaciated naked man. Rouault repeated this composition later in a painting of Christ and the Pharisee/Doctor, so this print may be intended to draw a religious parallel).
Auguries (three women like the Fates in modern dress discussing the war.
“War hates mothers “ [Horace. Odes I: !:24-5] (a sorrowing mother with a child on her lap).
“We are doomed to death, we and all that is ours” [Horace. Ars Poetica 63]
My sweet land, what has become of you?
Death took him as he rose from his bed of nettles.
The just, like sandalwood, perfume the axe that strikes them down.
“Out of the depths…“ [Ps.130:1]
In the winepress the grapes were crushed.
The nobler the heart the less rigid the collar. (An arrogant stiff-collared moustached general pointing as if unbending in ordering his troops forward to their deaths).
Tooth and nail (an arrogant socialite woman looking on indifferently, with arms crossed
Far from the smile of Rheims (an indifferent bishop)
The Law is the law (an indifferent lawyer)
Our Lady of seven sorrows. (a sad crowned Madonna who looks more like a secular queen than Mary)
Onward the dead! / “Arise ye dead! (skeleton soldiers rising to march, being called and led forward by a uniformed skeleton leader. They form almost a Dance of Death. It is not clear whether they are already dead or represent a foretaste of their fate.)
Sometimes the blind have comforted those who see.
In these dark times of vainglory and unbelief, Our Lady of the Ends of the Earth keeps watch. (a sad Madonna standing against a bleak landscape holding her Child who appears to be praying for the earth, the peace and harmony of which has been destroyed by its people.)
“Obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” [Phil.2:8] ( A crucifix.)
“And with his stirpes we are healed” [Isa.53:5] (Veronica Veil).
Rouault’s poem, which completes the Preface to Miserere sums up the theme of this narrative. In it he suggests that his role or aim as the artist was to give form to the suffering of the world, which Christ and the famous and less famous saints have also suffered, and which the neglected and suffering people of the earth still endure:
Form, colour, harmony
Oasis or mirage
for the eyes, the heart or the spirit.
Towards the surging ocean of the call of art
“tomorrow will be fair” said the castaway / the one lost at sea.
Before disappearing below the hostile horizon
Peace hardly seems to reign
in this anguished world
of shadows and pretences
Jesus on the cross will tell you better than I,
and Joan on trial in brief and glorious phrases,
as well as the saints and martyrs
obscure or hallowed.
The last stanza repeats a theme that recurs throughout the series of prints and allied texts, that Christ, “as well as the saints and martyrs obscure or hallowed” and St Joan, patron of France, have all suffered as the land and its people have done through war and deprivation. Monet gave his Nymphéas series to the nation in thanksgiving for the end of war. Rouault’s Miserere could be seen as a similar offering and response to the needs and sufferings of his people.
‘PASSION’
During the 1920s Rouault was also working on a very different series of prints of Passion which were eventually published in 1939 by Vollard. Suarès and he had worked together on a similar project Le Cirque de l’Étoile Filante, which was planned and written before the concept of the Passion. Rouault had already completed 70 wood engravings and 8 colour etchings for Le Cirque…, but publication was delayed until 1938, with Rouault’s own text rather than that of Suarès. It is probable that, to Rouault, the importance of the theme of the Passion meant that it took priority after the completion of the Miserere plates in 1927.
The Passion consists of 82 wood engravings and 17 colour etchings, and again reached a height of technical achievement, using very different media and approaches to those of the Miserere. The theme of the Passion of Christ was at the heart of Rouault’s faith, as he emphasised when he wrote “I believe only in Jesus Christ on the Cross. I am a Christian of olden times” [Charensol Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. 1926 p.8].
The prints were accompanied by texts written by the poet André Suarès, who had been a friend of Rouault for about 30 years, when the book was published. They corresponded regularly [their letters were published in 1960 as ‘Correspondance’] and Rouault called André ‘my brother in art’. Suarès was also entrusted with writing the preface to Rouault’s memoirs ‘Souvenirs Intimes’ [1926] and they collaborated on a publication on Moreau. [Rouault and Suarès’ article ‘Moreau’ was printed in L’Art et les Artistes. April 1926 p.240]. Suarès had originally been intended to provide the texts for the Miserere, but after this had been vetoed by Vollard, who also published Passion, the poet was probably involved in this new project at Rouault’s insistence. Rouault regarded Suarès as one of his closest friends, Vollard was ore regarded as a business associate. The publication eventually occurred just before Vollard’s sudden accidental death. It is interesting that Rouault had trusted Suarès to accompany his major expression of his spirituality in the Miserere and that he promoted his text for Passion. There must have been something in their spirituality which was shared, despite important differences in emphasis.
Suarès was not as committed to Christian belief as the artist; he did not belong to a church or accept the orthodox creeds of Christianity. But Rouault did not see this as precluding their collaboration on a religious project to which he was so committed. The artist trusted his friend’s writing and knowledge of himself to do justice to the subjects: “If he did not believe as I did, I was not proud of the fact. I thought we would be able to treat together one of the great themes that had always occupied me, the suffering and death of Christ. And I felt that we could work together without either one having to sacrifice to the other his personal convictions or his interpretation of certain words or facts reported in the Gospels. I did not know if Suarès believed in the resurrection of Jesus or not, a fact which I never doubted. In any case he did not make any allusion to it in the work, while I celebrated it in one of the last plates.” [Letter in L’Art Sacre March to April 1965 p.25]
Suarès’ 24 sections of text for the Passion combine prose and poetry. They are far from conventional religious meditations on Christ’s Passion. Challenging and unorthodox theologically they concentrate on the theme of suffering rather than on Jesus; they even fail to mention ‘salvation’. Emotionally the words reflect Rouault’s feelings of empathy with suffering and the significance of suffering to human beings throughout history. With the publication, Rouault was not creating the prints to ‘evangelise’; they were artistic expressions responding to the central story of his faith. He trusted Suarès to create his own verbal responses to the theme as a work of literary art. Both of them recognised the significance of suffering in human life, and the emotional tone of the prints and the written text is similar. Christ as the ‘Man of Sorrows is seen to stand for and reflect the suffering of much of humanity.
The printing techniques for Passion were again meticulous, combining strong expressive acid etching in the large dark brushstrokes of the drawing and colour prints with the precise hatching more common in the wood-engraved plates of 19th Century publishing, which form the mid-tones in the black and white prints. Initially I personally found this a disconcerting mixture of techniques, then grew to recognise the subtleties and spiritual sensitivity within the images. The bold black marks provide a visceral reaction to the scenes; the refined hatching makes one’s continued contemplation calmer and more profound. Rouault ensured the technical excellence of the printing of the book by using the finest paper, binding, typography, inks and technically excellent engravers and printers.
In the Passion the wood engravings and colour etchings communicate together with the text. The images do not illustrate the text, nor do the words illuminate or describe the image. Some plates seem closely relevant to the text which they accompany, others simply complement the words thematically and emotionally. The colour etchings often more directly relate to the text which they accompany than the wood-engravings. Some of the imagery in the prints also relate to other works by the artist. The colour etching ‘Sainte Pute’ is very similar to the figure entitled Our Lady of Seven Sorrows print in the Miserere. This showed a sad crowned Madonna looking more like an image of a queen than the Virgin Mary. But ‘Sainte Pute’ means ‘blessed whore’, so the comparison of subject matter is closer to Rouault’s paintings of prostitutes 30 years earlier. The comparison makes the interpretation of both prints enigmatic. Sainte Pute may possibly be a reference to Mary Magdalene, but is more likely to refer to Rouault’s belief that all have the potential of redemption. She is represented with far more grace than the quartet of women portrayed consecutively in Miserere:
- So-called ‘Daugher of Joy’ / or ‘So-called joyful good-time girl’.
- In the mouth that was sweet, the taste of gall.
- The high-class society lady believes that she has a place reserved in heaven.
- The emancipated woman cries midday, when it is two o’clock.
The colour etchings, which were so innovatory and complicated, are very close to Rouault’s paintings of the 1930s. The requirements of the printing process meant that they must have been far more meticulously planned and designed initially than his works on canvas, which were altered continuously during the painting process. The intensity of colour is striking, due partly to the quality of the inks employed. Yet Rouault also managed to vary the hues, tones and shades subtly, by using multiple inkings and pulls of the print. He creates images on paper that almost reach the quality of luminosity of the the stained glass that he admired, yet they have the subtle variations and textures of his painting. At least four plates were used for each colour print, one for black and three for the primary printing colours. As with the Miserere plates, the artist worked in close collaboration with a master-printer. In the case of the colour plates it was Roger Lacourierre, with whom he also worked on the etchings for Le Cirque de l’Étoile Filante. Georges Aubert worked with him on the wood engravings. With the colour etchings Rouault worked the plates himself. For the wood engravings Rouault initially painted the images in oils, then Aubert, translated them into hatched prints, with the skills of a master engraver, which would have taken Rouault an entire career to master, Rouault personally and carefully supervised the whole process of engraving and printing, to ensure the production reached the high qualities that he required for the expression of his ideas and feelings.
The engraver, Aubert did a masterful and difficult job in aiming to convey the spontaneity of Rouault’s painting into the more rigid and rigorous linear technique of engravings. The wood engravings are masterpieces technically and interpretatively. None of the wood engravings have quite the same spontaneity of touch and emotion as the etchings, which were worked into over a long period of time by the artist himself, until, like the Miserere prints, they expressed his feelings. But the engravings’ slightly reserved nature and their quality mean that the black and white prints are quieter and suited to prolonged contemplation.
There is a strangeness in the arrangement of the plates that seems to have a symbolic significance or meaning in itself. They are not grouped in order of narrative, and initially seem random, yet there is also a sense that they are intended to evoke feelings through the book and direct the viewer through certain emotional and spiritual feelings. Certain symbols are significant: Figures carrying the beam of the cross recur, suggesting both the movement of a narrative and the fact that we and all humanity carry a cross of suffering in many ways, and, like Simon of Cyrene, we have the chance to help carry others’ loads. The book ends with this enigmatic image of a figure (of Christ?) with the beam of the cross leaning on his shoulders, as though he is still carrying it for the suffering world.
Fairly often Rouault included the three crosses of Golgotha, not just a crucifix, which had been the dominant theme of Misrere. The three crosses do not just represent the Gospel narrative the Passion; they deliberately showed Christ suffering on behalf of others and accompanying others in their own suffering. Neither Christ nor we are alone in suffering. At the end of the book wood-engraved images in the same design as the colour plates, are grouped together to form three crosses, reflecting the imagery at the beginning of the book, The heart is also a common theme, representing the sacred heart of Jesus and the love of God, but they also encourage the viewer to align their own love with that of the Trinity and learn a more authentic love of God and humanity. Images of the cross itself are central to the book’s theme and also are grouped centrally in the volume, as well as being interspersed among the other scenes, as in the Miserere.
LOVE AS AN ASPECT OF CHRISTAIN ART
Rouault spoke of love being a major element of his motivation as an artist as well as a man: love of the subjects of his art, love of the world, love of the act of creating, love of materials, love of nature, love of detail: “Any artist worthy of the name loves the merest atom of life” Despite the darkness of much of the Miserere series, Georges wrote in a letter to G. Cabot at the time of the completion of the plates: “The secret of fervour: love in the midst of sorrows and the fiercest torments, is still love for all that lives, for all that dies… The secret… is to love in secret and in silence and then to speak of it as well as you can, whether it be a serene visions of the finest gilded palace or a tragic vision of death at Gehenna, having first contemplated it then closing one’s eyes in order to see it more clearly.” This ultimately is how Rouault created many of his works of art: To Suarès he wrote in 1913: “Live in love with nature from now on… We are artists in order to affirm, that is, to create a beautiful form… Our business is to be and not to deny.” [Correspondance p.65].
Despite being an apparently rather taciturn, reserved and insular individual, he felt internally a love for his subjects, contemplated their situations, reached into the darkness of many and worked hard at depicting them by expressing as much of his feeling and love for them in their situation as he could. This is probably why he claimed that his art was not moralising; it was reflecting his emotions towards the world. Pascal had written: "The grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable… Man is but a reed, the most feeble (thing) in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself in order to crush him; a vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But when (even if) the universe would (were to) crush him, man would (still) yet be more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying (that he dies) and the advantage (which) the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of it (of this)." [Pensées 347] We know that Rouault enjoyed reading Pascal and this recognition of the value of human beings is at the heart of Rouault’s social consciousness and is reflected in his love of the subjects in his art.
Rouault wrote of the people whose lives he was painting: “Be he king or emperor, what I want to see in the man standing before me is his soul. And the more exalted he is and glorified by man, the more I feel for his soul.;” [Letter to Eduard Schuré 1905 quoted in Marquette Bouvier ‘Georges Rouault: expresionista y místico’ [Goya 1958-60 p.19]. Dignity of soul can be seen in his painting of people of different status: it is in his humble self-portrait painting ‘The Workman’s Apprentice’ 1925 as much as in ‘The Old King’ 1937. Considering his empathy towards those who had damaged their souls or had been damaged by life, he wrote “If I speak of myself, fellow sufferer, I am thinking of you; and perhaps even more I am thinking of my faith….” [Rouault ‘Le Visage de la France’. Verve 1940 Vol.2 No.7. p.18].
He also highly valued the materials, techniques and skills which helped him to express and represent his love. It would be false to interpret negatively Rouault’s confession to Suarès “I love my art as much as I loved my father”, especially as it was made soon after his father’s death, about which he wrote so movingly. In fact it was meant positively. Rouault, as we have seen, loved and cared for his father, even looking after him in his household at the end of his life. He greatly admired his father’s skills and love of materials as an artisan. These prompted a similar love of materials and techniques in George’s own art. Rouault’s statement about loving art as much as he loved his father is not confessing to any idolatry towards art or artists. It draws a parallel between his care, love and admiration for his father and his sense of the specialness of his artistic calling and his responsibility to love the world, which he expressed through his art.
He felt sorry for the people who were just ‘lovers of pleasure for whom the function of art is merely to pass the time’ For him “art is (my) sole raison d’être”. [Correspondance p.46]. This again does not meant that his other Christian commitments and his family, friends and wider responsibilities weren’t high in his priorities, but that he expressed his love of all through his art, and he was able to release his pain and passion through it: “I have always been happy painting, crazy over it, forgetting everything else even in the darkest affliction. The critics have not been aware of this because my subjects were tragic. But joy is always in the subject you paint.” [quoted in Henri Perruchot. ‘Georges Rouault: L’insatisfait’ in Le Jardin des Arts. June 1967 No. 151 p.8]
The sensitivity with which he wrote about art and people in his letters and other writings so often expresses this sense of value. Love was a characteristic of Rouault’s approach to art: “The language of form and colour… must be seriously learned, absorbed during a whole lifetime of love and, in addition, of authentic gifts. One spends his life in a spirit of love and humility, deciphering imperfectly Nature and Humanity” [quoted in Louis Leon-Martin ‘Georges Rouault’ in Art and Decoration 1930 vol.57. p.111]. Although Rouault’s images are not naturalistic, he is described by friends as constantly observing the world around him. He explained his love of observed details to Suarès “An ever more loving and precise observation of nature will bring me to a more vibrant art.” [Correspondance p.97]. “There is a child in every artist, for he cherishes the least little creature and every living thing under the sky.” [Rouault. ‘Etequête’ in Beaux-Arts 1936 no.198 p.5.]
Rouault attributed the growth of his love, even for the darker aspects of his subjects, to his faith: “The real nature of man dwells in the about-face of a conversion: He turns his love towards God, nor is his love less strong as a result, but rather the contrary. The emptiness of the creature is so great, the powerlessness of men towards one another so deep, so absolute… that in turning to God everything is transfigured.” [Correspondance p.104]. “The beautiful rhythms are everywhere.” [Rouault:’Stella Vespertina’].
Personal humility and humility towards his subjects was a result of this love: “If God gives us the inner humility, we are saved, for the language of God and his Spirit come to the aid of him who retires sincerely within himself, following the gifts he possesses.” [Correspondance p.11]. Such humility was not characteristic of many of the successful artists who reached fame at this time or today, or of some of the critics who rejected or neglected his work. He was essentially a rather private artist who experimented with the subjects and materials which he loved in the seclusion of his studio. He claimed “Creators are and ought to be solitary”…” Solitude is the natural dwelling place of all thought”. [quoted Dyrness 1971 p.82].
PAINTING CHRISTIAN SUBJECTS
Rouault wrote of faith to Suarès in 1939 as: “the only thing that brings hope to the poor wretches who still retain a great love for those things that cannot be seen, that cannot be weighed – and that is why I paint, not for the learned, for the bosses or the members of the Fairweather Academy.” Towards the end of his life he spoke of his art as a "fiery” or “ardent confession". The artist was able to express his essence and inspiration more effectively in visual form: “We express very clearly what we are: art is an ardent confession.” [Souvenirs Intimes p.14.] .
Between 1917 to 1926, Rouault’s concentration primarily on his printmaking meant that he rather neglected painting, though he emphasised that he continued to paint in his studio for several hours on most days, but left many works unfinished. He returned to painting more intensely after the completion of the plates for Miserere in 1927. From that point he made up for neglect of his painting contract with Vollard by intense work to complete several hundred paintings. These include portraits, nudes, circus performers and landscapes, but the majority of new work represented more specifically Christian themes. This may have been a response to his work on religious themes in the Miserere and Passion. Grotesque qualities in his forms were gradually replaced by more gentle representations, though the social commitment in his imagery remained strong. Yet still he regarded himself in a letter to Suarès as a “painter of darkness and of death…” This was a title given to him by some critics, who he called ‘imbeciles’ for just seeing his work as moral critique. He regarded the critics as blind to the religious meaning within the works: “(it took some) thirty years to see the ‘bite marks of Sin’ in my works… The imbeciles… if only they were a little more artists: everything in my work is religious. They want to make me Lautrec’s heir, put me among the girls… or place me alongside Daumier - to emphasise insistently ‘the overtones of original sin in my work’ – as if I were able to define and dissect myself so precisely in my pictures.” This, he contrasted with the humility of the more simple people of integrity, who were the subjects of most of his work: “such a treasure-trove of modesty, great delicacy, gentle and enduring love to be found amongst those upon whom these pontiffs would not deign to look.” … “I was born with a horror of ugliness and an over-precise analysis of reality” [Correspondance]
Although Rouault’s work was not naturalistic, and used figures which were simplified and honed down, rather as in icons, Rouault was not an idealist in his faith. Some of his images may have been caricature-like, influenced by artists like Daumier who had been formative since his days with his maternal grandfather’s collection. But the caricature for Rouault was in no way intended to debase or be cruel to his subjects; rather it held a mirror up to them. Jacques Maritain, a friend of Rouault’s for many years, recognised that art often needs to ‘de-form’ in order to realistically express the true nature of the world. A ‘naturalistic’ (i.e. almost photographic) representation often falls short of expressing the feeling of reality. Dyrness applies this quotation to Rouault’s approach to realism: “The one who makes a melodious beauty is the one who delivers himself of the object that inspires him, while transforming and transfiguring it.” [Dyrness p.211].
The seeming simplicity and slightly child-like innocence of some of Rouault’s images is balanced by his profound consideration of the inner life of his subjects, which he imbibed from his training with Moreau. He honed down his figures and other subjects to an expressive form that contained within it their inner characteristics. Yet he regarded them with a sense of wonder, even where he recognised corruption. This accounts for the statement mentioned previously. “There is a child in every artist, for he cherishes the least little creature and every living thing under the sky.” [Rouault. ‘Enquête’ in Beaux-Arts 1936 no.198 p.5.] The human figure became the clearest subject through which to expression of his ideas, love and his vision of life. However, his imagery is not naïve, simplistic , escapist or detached from reality. He wrote “It is impossible for me to isolate myself from the events of the day” [quoted in G. Marchiori Georges Rouault. Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts. 1965 p.17]
Rouault’s realism did not derive from broad travel. Much of his knowledge of humanity was drawn from watching the predicament of people in the world around him from his Paris studio, which looked down onto the events in the streets below him. He wrote: “One is never finished seeing and watching”… “Our eyes are the door of the spirit and the light of the mind.” [quoted in Jacques Guenne ‘Georges Rouault’’ in Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Nov.15. 1924. Vol.3. No. 109 p.5]. He prefaced the quote in the letter to Suarés mentioned above: “An ever more loving and precise observation of nature will bring me to a more vibrant art... It is impossible for me to isolate myself from the events of the day.” [quoted in G. Marchiori Georges Rouault. Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts. 1965 p.17]. However, social realism was not enough for Rouault; he approached reality by meditating on the spiritual content and implications of what he saw around him: “Our art finds its equilibrium between two realms, the contemplative (a rather outmoded word) and the objective.” [Stella Vespertina]. Rouault confessed: “I do not feel as if I belong to this modern life in the streets where we are walking at this moment; my real life is back in the age of cathedrals”. [quoted inT. Mitchell p.3] This reference, however, probably related to the orthodoxy of his faith and ethics, and his love of mediaeval art and stained glass, since his social commitment to the people of his own day was always so strong.
Claude Roulet, a friend with whom Rouault took holidays recalled: “Rouault was one of the real ‘spiritualist’ painters of his time, who thought with his hands and in the material, pondering with his eyes.” Rouault had been taught by Moreau to look for the spiritual content within the reality of nature not to merely attempt to make naturalistic art that copied nature. He regarded art as a form of expression of the inner self and the inner qualities and meanings within his subjects. Moreau taught him to listen to an inner voice within him and express what he was discovering. This led him to work for long periods on his images, reflecting, exploring, meditating upon and contemplating their meaning and building up the picture in many layers until it expressed the meaning he found within it. This exploration with the eye and the hand is an important aspect of Rouault’s approach to art. Although he wrote lucidly about his work, he claimed to not like theorising. When asked to explain his faith and discuss the relationship between his art and his faith Rouault was frequently reluctant [Charensol 1926 p.7, Cahers d’Art 1928 no 3.p..102]. “Images and colours for the painter are his means of being, of living, of thinking and of feeling.” [Soliloques p.66]. This is, however slightly disingenuous, because he was so clear when he spoke about his work and equally reflected his faith in his words, Nevertheless he was clear that “My writings are not worth as much as my painting” [Soliloques p.13].
For Rouault, life faith and art were inseparable “My life and my art make a single whole” [Roulet Georges Rouault: Souvenirs 1961 p.71]. Yet “in principle the artist ought to disappear behind his work. O artist, it should defend itself alone” [Soliloques p.107]. This is very different from the self-promoting attitude of many modernists and the contemporary art world, where the artist often aims to become more of a sensation than their art. Rouault’s attitude to fame was founded on the ideas about the Christian artist’s aims and role, discussed with Huygens and others at Ligué Abbey, and the modesty and anonymity that he attributed to mediaeval craftsmen.
The lack of naturalistic detail or portraiture in many of Rouault’s figures may be accounted for in the fact that they represent many people, as much as individuals. The figure of the proud woman, the indifferent leader, the bullying general, or the corrupt judge are generalised caricatures representing sinful individuals and situations, rather than specific people. The sad Pierrot or circus dancer, similarly present figures who we pity for their situation or position. Even his self-portrait as ‘The Workman’s Apprentice’ 1925 in a painting and in a print, shows the artist iconically as a simple artisan rather than celebrating individual features of his particular identity. Many of his figures seem lonely, but Rouault represents them as part of a far wider story of the world’s suffering in which he believed that Jesus identified with them and could reveal God’s presence to their situation. The poses and gestures of Rouault’s figures often reflect their emotion, position in society or feeling of status. Christ at the opening of the Miserere has his head bowed; the bishop and the rich hold themselves erect and aloof.
LANDSCAPES
Just as in his portraits the bleakness of Rouault’s landscapes in the Miserere do not literally portray the suburbs and factory-areas which he knew well. They represent the bleakness and poverty of those areas and the wider world. Rouault often used his landscapes and settings to convey his social and religious ideas: He recognised that all aspects of a painting could be transformed expressively: "A tree against the sky possesses the same interest, the same character, the same expression as the figure of a human."
His landscapes often seem simplified. He used colour to create a sense of depth, though the hues are not as subtly gradated to form aerial perspective ,as in conventional landscape painting. The early landscapes especially often seem cold, though the sun is shown shining, which enhances the impression of the loneliness of figures portrayed in the landscape. Even in several compositions of the road to Emmaus, the figures walking with Christ appear lonely, perhaps lost in thought and conflicting emotions. The road, landscape and inn before them all feel rather bleak and the lowering sun seems dull. They do not yet recognise the identity of the one walking beside them. These landscapes are reflective of his feeling about the Ile de France, where he recognised a sadness, coldness and indifference to the Christian faith. Nature sometimes seems threatening, with lowering clouds.
Rouault had painted a few landscapes around the time of Moreau’s death, like ‘Night Landscape’ [c1898],and ‘The Plain’ [1900] but he had not yet worked out what such scenes might meant and convey, other than mood, or how he might could use landscape symbolically. Around 1913 he began to recognise that landscape could carry something of the qualities of life lived within it. This is something which Millet especially had recognised. ‘Christmas Landscape ‘c1920- conveys something of the magic and hope of the nativity, with the church tower radiating the possibility of hope to a cold, snowy village, whose inhabitants seem to be sheltering indoors.
The landscapes of the 1920s and 30s, however gradually became brighter and warmer. The architecture seems more Eastern and the sun more vivid. From c1935 the sun became a more prominent symbol in the landscape, offering hope. It was perhaps meant as a symbol of the presence of the divine.
There had been a move towards topographical truth in religious painting of the late 19th Century, particularly in the works of Tissot, Holman Hunt and Tanner. But Rouault’s ‘Biblical Landscapes’ make no attempt at topographical naturalism, though the mushroom-topped buildings and towers convey something of the exoticism of the East. A few, like the Flight into Egypt contain figures which can be related to particular scenes from scripture. Characters are often dressed in simple, non-descript tunics. There is little specific reference to these being religious subjects, or traditional Christian iconography, though Christ is sometimes represented with a halo, or a glow of light around his whole figure. The emphasis seems to be that Christ and the scenes are just like normal life today. The presence of God is there in the everyday as it is for us. Some of the Biblical Landscapes simply contain anonymous figures. Autumn: Nazareth [1948] shows a few parents and children in a small grove of trees outside a village. Presumably the artist includes the child Jesus with one or more parents (probably the front two figures on the left, nearest the sun. But it conveys no direct religious message other than the impression that the Holy family were part of the community and gave light to it. The most central figure in the middle distance may be an angel watching over them, or the adult Jesus. It seems an innocent and hopeful scene, but this seemingly ideal landscape was completed not long after the Second World War had disrupted European life, and around the time of the final publication of ‘Miserere’. With bombed towns being rebuilt all around him, might the artist be developing an image of the sort of society that he hoped might be reborn?
The emphasis of most of these apparently simple landscapes seems to be that God is with us in our lives as securely as he was in biblical ties. Christ brings God’s presence alive as clearly as the sun warms and reassures of God’s blessing in the landscapes.
FORM, COLOUR, HARMONY
The poem at the end of Rouault’s Preface to Miserere (quoted above in my section on Miserere et Guerre) begins with an invocation of “Form, Colour Harmony”, terms to which he repeatedly referred as his approach to art. All three need to be integrated to convey meaning and feeling. In Miserere the ‘colour’ by which he chose to communicate feeling was white and black. In the prostitute images it was a greenish blue which added coldness when combined with flesh tones. In joyful pictures it was often a chrome yellow combined with glowing reds, which might sometimes conveyed a sense of danger, pain or the reassurance of the warmth of love. In some of his images of the Crucifixion or Man of Sorrows it combines all three. Such symbolic use of colour may have derived partly from Moreau. Form was conveyed by his dark outlines, heavy shadows, textures, the body of paintwork and the bulk or emaciated nature of his figures. He also used different intensities or tonal qualities in colours to convey form, as in the Passion colour etchings. Harmony was created by the combination of colour, since Rouault had ben steeped in modernist colour theory since before his time with the Fauves. Harmony was also achieved particularly by making the lines, marks, colours, and overall feeling for the painting harmonise with the meaning or emotion which his subjects evoked and which the pictures were designed to convey. When Rouault writes so often about exploring and working physically at his paintings by ‘touch’, he was seeking this harmony.
The emphasis on harmony seems connected to the interest in the interrealtionships of the arts, particularly the parallels between visual art with music which were being discussed at the end of the 19th Century and early 20th Century. Delacroix, Baudelaire, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, the Nabis, Fauves, Expressionists, Kandinsky and Klee all discussed them. Maritain discussed and wrote on their interrelationships, which greatly influenced Thomas Munro’s ‘The Arts and Their Interrelations’ [1949]. The influence of Rouault’s wife, who was an accomplished musician, must also have been strong. But Rouault’s interest in ‘harmony’ is far broader than visual and musical connections. His idea of harmony was a total interrelationship, similar to the idea of harmony expressed in the concept of the Kingdom of God. He wanted all aspects of his work, techniques, aims, faith and subject matter to work together and harmonise.
The innocence and slightly child-like vision that many of Rouault’s mature images superficially suggest is deceptive. Behind them was profound and prolonged thought and consideration of their symbolic significance to contemporary life. The seeming innocence or simplicity of vision may relate to Rouault’s idea of not over-intellectualising his scenes, but aiming to create a work that can be meditated upon and contemplated over time, as he himself had done in the process of painting: “We ought to be nourished on a mixture of classical and pictorial elements. We ought not to lean overmuch on the intellectual. There is an equilibrium, an order, a discipline to find little by little and step by step.” [Rouault, ‘Enquête’ in Beaux-Arts 1936 no.198 p.5]. Rouault’s images are not designed to have their meanings recognised immediately, which would have enabled the viewer to move on without thought or response. He intended them to be contemplated “little by little and step by step.” In the process of painting he had formed his thoughts into a harmony, which he wanted others to discover.
The beauty of colour, texture and love of subject with which Rouault painted the figures and scenes intentionally shows their value, and the hope and trust that he expressed that Christ was present in the struggles, changes and challenges of life. Among the glories of Rouault’s paintings are the beauty of the colours he used even in images of grief and pain. Even the poor and suffering are represented in jewel-like images that raise them to the level of saints in stained glass windows. Some of his paintings, especially those of saints, like ‘Joan of Arc’ [1948-9] or Veronica in the Assy window, are painted in radiant light and colour, almost as though they inhabit a spiritual world or dimension far more vivid than our present material world.
The link with painted glass has often been made in references to Rouault, because he trained in early years in a glass workshop. But the significance of stained glass is deeper than this. By creating coloured-glass-like icons, he was raising the status of his subjects and suggesting their eternal significance. He emphasised more often that ‘Form, Colour, Harmony’ was more important than colour alone in conveying emotion and faith. He could express himself equally deeply in black and white, as the Miserere and Passion cycles demonstrate. In one of the many personal poems which he included in his letters he wrote:
“You wold like me to talk about white and black.…
Good heavens, what a rich subject!
Some simplistic souls do their utmost to proclaim
whenever they can
that one thousand different shades make for the richest keyboard.
I’m a stubborn fellow, and I don’t think so.
The main thing for a painter
is not to have one hundred tones at his disposal,
but just a few
which harmonise with his special melody.”
Often in Rouault’s early and mature work colour takes on a symbolic role, creating a sense of hope, joy, sadness or desolation according to mood. This works together with form, line and mark to convey meaning. It can be seen particularly in a work like “The Fugitives’ [1911], where a contemporary poor family trudge through an unwelcoming landscape. The confusion of the marks , unbalance of the composition and weight and ungainliness of the figures adds to the sense of poverty, desolation and unwantedness. In the same year, 1911, he painted his Tragic Clown in a violently expressive impasto and dark gloomy shades, which may also reflect the poverty and want in the society around Rouault’s home in the poor district of Versailles His watercolour of the suffering Head of Christ as Man of Sorrows, in the Crysler Museum collection, painted earlier in about 1905, conveys its meaning by a similar harmonic approach, yet using confused, flayed marks and disjointed, sombre colour and form.
IMAGES OF THE SUFFERING CHRIST
Many of Rouault’s religious paintings represent Christ himself. Several represent his Passion, others his face, either as represented on the veil of Veronica or as an iconic presence, others represent scenes in which Christ is present, either biblical subjects like ‘Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha’, or present in the everyday, as in “Christ in the Suburbs’.. The initial print of Miserere represents Christ’s head, crowned with thorns, with the words “Jesus despised….”. The whole cycle shows that Jesus was ‘like us’, is with us, and knows our situation intimately, having undergone similar humiliations and suffering. The series ends again with the head of Christ on Veronica’s veil: , “And with his stipes we are healed”. This quote form Isa.53:5 represents Christ as the source of healing for the world’s ills, but the veil suggests that we, like Veronica should regard ourselves as responsible for taking his presence and his healing into the suffering world.
In images where Christ is among other figures he is often represented wearing white to distinguish him from other figures, yet he is never aloof, and is always represented as deeply involved in their lives. Christ in the Suburbs [1920-24] represents Christ present with and walking beside all who live in a poor district, feeling their situation with them. In his ‘Biblical Landscapes’ Rouault also represents Christ welcoming children to him, healing lepers and a sick man, speaking with fishermen or debating with the doctors of the law. In Christ and a Pharisee [1937], representing Jesus with Nicodemus, [Jn.3:1-21], a rather sombre Jesus seems to be explaining in wide gestures of his arms how God’s love for the world must entail his own suffering.
Rouault’s images of Christ’s crucifixion particularly explore the combined aspects of suffering and glory in his death. His painted crucifixes are often jewel-like and his prints expressive of sorrow and suffering. The Miserere print “Love one another,” expresses our need to comfort one another in grief as the suffering as Christ’s head bows his head towards the two Marys and John who cringe in anguish as he dies. Miserere opens with the head of Christ observing the world of suffering. In the final print the head of the thorn-crowned Christ on Veronica’s veil, quotes Isa.53:5: “It is by his wounds that we are healed.” The sequence is thus brought to completion by showing how Christ’s submission to humiliation and death like Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, not only identifies with human suffering, but resolves and heals the evils of the world which were so powerfully reflected in both the Great War and the Miserere et Guerre images. Plates of the face of Christ and the image of the crucified or suffering Christ are interspersed and echo throughout the series of prints as a leitmotif, reminding us that Jesus is with us in every situation of damage or distress.
The Cross was central to Rouault’s understanding of his faith. Charensol quotes him as saying: “As a Christian in such hazardous times, I believe only in Jesus on the Cross. I am a Christian of olden times.” [Georges Rouault: l’homme et l’oeuvre. 1926 p.8]. Among the Miserere prints of the crucifixion, ‘beneath Jesus, forgotten on the cross” shows Jesus at his most severely ravaged. This plate was more textured and eaten away than all except Plate 3:“forever scourged”. My favourite print of the crucifix, however, is more serene and seemingly simple: “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world…”. Here Rouault was quoting Pascal’s commentary in a section of the Pensées on ‘The Mystery Of Jesus’ on Matthew 26:36-46. It is a comment on the period of anguish in Gethsemane, where Jesus asked his disciples to remain with him and stay awake while he prayed in severe distress, preparing for his coming suffering. The disciples failed him by not keeping awake and Pascal meditated on the thought that human support could not accompany Christ at the height of his pain and passion. The sentence by Pascal which Rouault quotes continued: “…and we must not sleep during that time… Are you content that it is costing me the blood of my humanity, if you do not give it the least of your tears?” Rouault was reminding us that our own spiritual and physical responsibility is to stand with those who suffer and support, or at least weep in empathy with the suffering world, not neglect them.
The 5 images of Veronica’s cloth which intersperse the Miserere prints appear to carry a similar intention, acting like the crucifixes as significant anchor images linking the series. They are a constant reminder that we are not alone in suffering. God in Christ has walked this way with us and continues to do so. The legend of ‘true image’ imprinted by Jesus on his journey towards the cross may not just be intended by Rouault as a gentler reminder of the Passion than the crucifixion images. Nor are they just a reminder of Christ’s presence suffering alongside us. The veils of Veronica are probably intended to encourage us to ‘bear with one another’s burdens and thus fulfil the laws of Christ’ [Gal.6:2]. In legend Veronica had helped Jesus, as we and the Church are commissioned to love and help our neighbours, particularly supporting them in times of need as Veronica did in the legend, as Jesus encouraged his followerst o do in the Parable of the Good Samaritan [Lk.10:25-37], and as the Maritains had supported Rouault after his father’s death. Unlike the idea of Bloy that we should simply endure suffering to achieve sanctity, Rouault’s message seems to be that we encourage sanctity by imitating Christ in supporting others. Jesus’ self-sacrifice, and Veronica’s legendary humble support of the needy reveal the love of God and act as models for our care for others.
THE CHURCH AND THE BOURGEOISIE
By contrast, Rouault’s paintings of the rich and self-content often express their aloofness and disregard of the needy. They also represent Rouault’s personal distress at the disparity and injustice in the world. He himself led a fairly simple life and felt disgust at the corruption of some of those who seemed to control society. The rich, powerful, influential or corrupt were often represented in his most grotesque caricatures. One of the most elaborate of his Miserere prints represents: “The upper-class lady believes she holds a reserved seat in Heaven”. Like many others her features are more distorted and ugly than his representations of the suffering poor, which are often simple and beautiful.
Even the Church is not spared Rouault’s critique, as in his print of a bishop’s detachment from the plight of Christ’s people in: “Far from the smile of Rheims.” There, the bishop is a bland, almost characterless thick-spectacled figure, showing less humanity than most of the figures. He is grouped with the fat, arrogant general of ‘The nobler the heart the less stiff the collar’, the hard woman of ‘Tooth and nail’ and the indifferent unsympathetic lawyer of ‘The Law is the law however hard.’ The title ‘Sourire de Reims’ refers more specifically to the smile on the face of the famous sculpted angel of the Annunciation on the North Portal of the West façade of Reims Cathedral, sculpted around 1236 and 1245. Rouault employed it ironically to highlight the self-satisfied, disconnected indifference of the cleric. Already well known for its art-historical significance and local folk-teles, the angel statue had become particularly famous through having been beheaded on 19 Sept. 1914 through a fire after German shelling during the Great War. The head had been broken into several pieces after a four metre fall. Abbot Thinot had collected the remains and stored the fragments in the cellars of the Archbishop’s Palace. They were rediscovered by the architect Max Sainsaulieu on the 30 Nov. 1915, then reconstructed and preserved in the Musée National des Monuments Français. During and after the war it was used as a well-known French propaganda symbol of ‘French culture destroyed by German barbarity’. Before the completion of Rouault’s plates, the now notoriously famous sculpture was restored and returned to its place on the West front of the cathedral on 13 Feb. 1926. The title given by Rouault to his plate would have therefore been recognised almost universally as referring to an icon of French wartime propaganda. Rouault’s reference to the angel’s smile thus made the symbol of the self-satisfied, uncaring bishop even more ironic. Those of the church hierarchy who saw the series, reacted negatively to this image particularly, as well as the message of the series, as well as some of Rouault’s other more challenging work. This might partly account for the lack of ecclesiastical commissions for Rouault, at a time when Catholic churches in France were beginning to acknowledge and commission significant modern art. But the artist was being true to his beliefs and his perceptions of contemporary society. His Miserere print ‘Jean-François never sings alleluia… (In the land of thirst and terror). Refers to an ordinary man having doubted or lost his faith through seeing the hypocrisy and suffering around him.
As well as wanting to appear modern and in touch with contemporary trends, the Church as an institution, and its hierarchy, were still primarily interested in maintaining the social status-quo and appeasing the rich and influential in society. Bloy and Huysmans, like Rouault and others in the short-lived group at Ligugé Abbey bewailed this. Maritain admired Miserere, and had been given a complete set of prints by Rouault. But though he was enlightened and aware of the qualities in modernism, he was at the same time part of the system that maintained the relatively conservative ecclesiastical hierarchy. Similar situations occur today: Churches often talk of Christ’s bias to the poor and speak caringly about the needs of the underprivileged in the world, yet words are easy; sufficient activity to bring equity and justice is often neglected . Church institutions still primarily court the privileged for patronage and, despite their charitable offerings and acts, still largely seek to maintain the social status quo. Rouault, by contrast disagreed with the idea that the rich, famous or influential might feel that their status meant that God was working for and blessing them. His own character was relatively humble, and he recognised the privilege which had raised him out of the poverty which so many people shared. Christ’s bias towards the poor and downtrodden seems to have been strong in his social consciousness. In two plates of the Miserere: cycle: “Sometimes, the blind man consoles the seeing ” and “Lord, it’s you. I recognize you.”, Rouault contrasts the spiritual insight of human beings. A bind figure is suggested to truly recognise, find and touch Christ through his understanding and perception. Those who claim spiritual insight are suggested to be more spiritually blind. The implication is that the latter need the blind to guide them. Such a statement seems to have more resonant implications, in coming from a visual artist, to whom sight was so important. Rouault made few high claims for his own spirituality, but offered his art for contemplation of the truths contained within it.
MATURITY AS AN ARTIST
Rouault gained a wider international reputation in 1929 through his sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's ballet The Prodigal Son, choreographed by George Balanchine to Sergei Prokofiev’s music. From 1930 began to exhibit internationally and his works began to develop a different, more majestic or confident form of expressionism, seen in a painting like The Old King [1937}. Exhibiting successfully at the Paris World Fair in 1937 helped to establish his reputation. This success was followed by major retrospectives in the Venice Biennale [1947], the Kunsthaus, Zurich [1948] . Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels [1952]. The Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam [1952], Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris [1952] The Museum of Modern Art, New York [1953], Cleveland Museum of Art..The County Museum of Art, Los Angeles [1953], Tokyo and Osaka [1953] and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Milan [1954],
World War II forced Rouault to leave Paris for the south of where he joined other displaced artists and continued to paint. Working in more solitary surroundings than in his studio in Paris he completed many significant works. In these years he refined his use of line shape and colour, developing in paint upon the work he had achieved in colour printing for the ‘Passion’ and ‘Cirque’ colour etchings. His paintings became rather more dream-like in their reflection of his inner imagination. The harsh realism of his earlier works turned towards creating more meditative figures and images, even though he was often painting the same themes and subjects. The impression conveyed by his paintings and writings is that he was increasing in the sense that the process of painting and the subjects themselves, were spiritual and sacred.
Between 1930 and 1948 in printmaking as in painting Rouault’s work became gradually simplified in form and design. By about 1940 he had refined and reduced many of his forms almost to symbols for his thoughts. The techniques remain intense, carefully considered and worked-through, but several works feel almost as though the idea which he wanted to convey was becoming more important than the physical image itself.
In the 1950s the expressionist realism of Rouault’s painting was gradually replaced by images that are more idealised and icon-like, particularly his heads of Mary and saints. A greater personal security seems reflected in the apparent simplicity, peace, calm and sense of harmony and unity in his works, though they remain intensely painted. His subjects were often less dark and violent, considering that they were produced not long after wartime. Even his paintings of the crucifixion have a greater serenity and sense that this was a redeeming and healing act rather than a primarily barbarous one. The compositions themselves seem calmer and the use of paint and drawing less expressive of negative emotions, even sometimes decorative. Some compositions are surrounded by painted borders or frames that detach the image from us and present the viewer with an iconic image for quiet meditation. This is quite a contrast to the more violently politically or socially emotive images of his earlier painting. He seems to be presenting the viewer with images of greater intensity and serenity, to encourage contemplation.
MATURE USE OF COLOUR AND TECHNIQUE
Rouault used colour as much as line and texture to express feelings and emotions as well as spiritual meanings. From early in his career Gustave Moreau had taught him a mastery of colour and harmony, which Moreau often used symbolically to convey meaning as well as to create a sense of spiritual feeling in his works. Rouault developed upon the jewel-like intensity of mysticism in much of Moreau’s work. Particularly in his later paintings and some of his coloured prints, Georges unites colour and texture to convey a feeling that the image is like a reliquary formed of preciously applied paint or ink and radiant colour to emotively evoke feelings for the subject of the picture.
As his art matured, Rouault’s colours became more luminous. Chrome yellows, crimson reds and Veronese greens dominate his range, with less emphasis on deep blues. This brought colour to the surface of the image rather than receding. Rouault used the intensity of the colours to evoke and enhance emotion. He used contrasts and variations of tone and hue to modify expression, particularly where black created powerful shadows and heavy forms within brightly lit scenes. Rich contrasts of reds, oranges, greens and blues surrounded by black enhanced the impression of colour and light, as in stained glass windows. In some of his mature paintings he managed to create almost iridescent effects with the intensity of his colour.
Rouault used his strong, textured, black outlines to create a sense of form, weight, shadow and solidity in his images. But colour contributed to the form too, particularly in the creation of depth in the image. His late paintings are often very highly textured. The paint was not made more translucent by as much mixing with oils, but with contrasts that made the purity of colours still appear to radiate light. He chose his hues and tones carefully to enhance each other and balance within the contrasting black lines that helped to emphasise form. In his landscapes he used colour to create a sense of depth and perspective, even though the compositions are seemingly simple and the hues not as subtly gradated to form aerial perspective, as in conventional landscape painting.
The overlaying of colours in a variety of keys helped to elaborate these contrasts. Rouault was already highly trained in creating luminosity and expressiveness with colour through his apprenticeship in Moreau’s studio (and also building upon his early training in stained glass. He would have absorbed the colour theories of Post-Impressionism, the science of colour contrasts discussed with the Fauves and the experimentation of other early 20th Century artists at the Salon d’Automne. But by the time of his maturity as an artist Georges’ use of colour must have become almost instinctive by practice. The amount of time he spent refining his paintings shows that he was never satisfied until the image entirely expressed the feelings which he was working to create.
Around the end of the Second World War c1945-47 his palette grew brighter and lighter. The contrasts between cold and warm tones and hues enhance the expression of feeling. His use of paint became even thicker, more expressively sculptural and uneven in depth. The contrasts and broad touches of the brush create a sense of depth of relief. This confident use of paint is perhaps rather surprising at a time of scarcity of materials during and immediately after the war. Rouault must have had good access to suppliers!
From his comments about discovering through seeing and touching, I assume that he did not begin his paintings with a fully-fledged clear idea of what he was trying to convey. Very few artists do. The intention of the image would have developed over the long periods of time, often years, that he spent revising the work. Even though he so often revisited similar subjects in his paintings, each Pierrot, crucifix, Veronica veil, judge or dancer seems to have been for him a new exploration of form, colour, harmony and the feelings emotions and spirituality. The works grew through exploring the ideas that the current piece began to convey under his hands, eye and mind. Those feelings would change and modify as the colours blended and the expression created by the marks altered. So each new work, even variations on well-rehearsed themes, would have been a new and different exploration.
In his mature and later works Rouault did not tend to paint on an easel. His canvas was laid flat on a table like a physical object that he could see from above, turn to different angles and handle as he painted. He treated the canvases that he was building up in layers like a craftsman making an artefact. The treatment was very little different from a potter making his ceramics or his work as an engraver working away at the textures on his copper plates. It is not surprising that he experimented with ceramics, as the firing of iridescent and transparent colours which is a feature of ceramics, suited his feeling for colour, as did work in stained glass.
Rouault was meticulous in his all the techniques that he utilised in painting, printing, ceramics, glass, even his writing of texts and letters, sometimes returning to unfinished works over years in order to perfect them. His published writings Paysages Légendaires [1929], Cirque de l’Etoile Filante [1938], Soliloques [1943] and Stella Vespertina [1945] were worked on as meticulously as his painting. The intensity with which he worked into his art is shown in the layers of paint and multiple reworkings of the marks and textures in his prints. His friend Claude Roulet recalled him saying, like Bonnard, “'The terrible thing in art is knowing how to stop”. I recognise this in my own work as a painter. It is easy to over-work a painting and much harder to regain a feeling of spontaneity. Rouault worked slowly and patiently, often working on several paintings simultaneously. He was critical of the speed, generalisation and occasional insensitivity to technique in some modernist painters. This insistence on technique partly reflects his early academic training. Though he had been free of its constraints since the beginning of the century, he retained a preoccupation with paint and image quality.
ROUAULT’S FAITH
Although Rouault was not a theologian his work appears rooted in considered faith rather than a generalised painting of traditional religious subjects. Many of his themes of course are traditional in Catholic art: The Cross, Mary, saints, biblical scenes and more occasionally the Resurrection. Other works less explicitly suggest the presence of Christ in human beings or his nature as ‘one of us’. I am not sure that I agree entirely with Dyrness’ statement “Rouault conceived of and painted Christ in the same flesh as that of the clowns and prostitutes. His was always a human portrayal of Christ.” [Dyrness 1971 p.185.]. While Rouault is intent on showing that Jesus is ‘incarnate’ and identifying with even the most personal needs of the most deprived and suffering, there is also an ‘otherness’ about his image that sets Christ apart in Rouault’s paintings. He is the healing model and example for humanity not just its representative and saviour, who suffers with and in our sufferings.
The themes of the texts on the Miserere prints reflect much personal thought about faith in concise words, which show that he had considered theologically the key meaning of the images. The image of John baptising Jesus, for example, shows that the artist is doing far more than representing Christ’s moment of initiation inti humanity and his dedication in embarking on his ministry. Rouault wrote: “we,.. it is into his death that we have been baptised”, quoting Romans 6:3, implying that our own mission is to take on the implications of Christ’s death and follow Christ’s example. Like him, we are to feel with and support the suffering world, so that we will also deserve to share resurrection and the newness of life, to which the verse from Romans later refers. How much help Rouault was given with choosing this text and others like the classical writers and Pascal, we cannot be sure. Georges may have found them himself from his own extensive reading and his church attendance. He certainly had key literary and theological contacts with whom to discuss them. Some references, like the mariner on a journey, lost at sea, seem to refer to poems he wrote about his own pilgrimage:
Poor mariner
upon the limitless ocean
I am indigent dust
that is swept by the wind.
I love the Divine Peace
and the light,
even in the blackest nights.
At war for spiritual good
that I would never betray.
[Soliloques p.56.]
Like many in Europe at the time, the Great War had a profound influence on deepening Rouault’s already committed faith. While disillusionment after both World Wars led many away from the conventional Church, Rouault’s faith deepened as he contemplated the implications of the war and the ills of society. After the Great War he fed this into his work on the Miserere plates, and also the quieter prints of The Passion, produced afterwards as a more mystical response. The Second World War led him to paint positively about his faith, expressing a new hope that faith and society could improve.
Although they do not dominate his output, images of Christ’s Passion became one of Rouault’s most profoundly expressed themes. He regarded Christ’s suffering as being alongside us, with us and in us. This is seen in a verse which he sent to Suartès at a time of exhaustion an depression in 1938, when the artist was looking in on himself and on the world:
“So little righteous
and certainly helpless, the poor wretch
with the best of intentions,
trips and falls more than once.
Like Jesus on the road to Calvary
under the weight of the Cross
wanting to take on our sufferings.”
[Corresponadance p.312].
The later heads of Christ whether on Veronica’s veil or alone as the Suffering Servant, are often as restrained in their expressions as Rouault’s crucifixes. They are meant to represent the love for the world, which led to his self-sacrifice and intend no feeling of revenge or hatred. The images of the suffering Christ show him resigned to his suffering, as it will bring healing. This is very different from some more violent images of the Passion created by other modernists in response to war, particularly Picasso’s variations on Grünewald and Graham Sutherland’s and Francis Bacon’s Crucifixes, or those painted after the Mexican Revolution, which focus on the suffering rather than its salvific outcome. The one major exception is the Head of Christ [1905] in the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, which expresses sorrow and the effects of flagellation more horrifically and sadly than most of his other works combined. This was painted in the same period as his watercolours of prostitutes, at a time of preliminary experimentation, when the artist was still exploring the potential of expression to convey spiritual meaning. He never worked so violently again. Even the most textured plates of Christ’s Passion in Miserere have a restraint which encourages the viewer to contemplate the suffering of Christ for them, rather than react over-emotively against it.
Reference to life beyond the suffering of the world is found in a few of the Miserere prints. A cancelled print “Resurrection” shows Christ rising from the tomb, his arms and face raised towards heaven. It was given the alternative title: “In every heart well-born, Jesus rises again”, implying not that the socially high-born will find blessing but those whose hearts are enlivened and renewed by Christ. Another plate in the series; “He who believes in me, though he be dead, shall live,” [John 11:25] shows a charnel house-like chapel of skulls surrounding a niche holding the cross of promised salvation. This is further emphasised in the plate “Arise, you dead!” (or “Onward the dead!”), where the living and skeletons share in a dance of death, both foretelling the death of the living and their shared participation in Resurrection, rather like the vision of Ezekiel 37:1-14. Rouault was to write about 10 years later: “Jesus can always resurrect in any well born heart, if he is lucky.. the hope of seeing a certain beauty born in this world that perspires tedium and smells of death… Everything has a price, force, beauty, grace, and the faith in you, Jesus, a great price. And for all that is valuable, I would prefer, if you feel I am worthy of it, to pay with my flesh.” [Le Cirque de l’ etoile filante. Paris 1938 p.36-7].
Although Rouault does not often portray Christ’s Resurrection specifically, hope is present in the light and coloursof many of his religious paintings and prints. Significantly in a 1936 lithograph of Christ on the Cross, John and the two Marys kneel and raise their heads in worship against a chrome yellow sky, suggesting, (unlike the empathy with pain in the Miserere prints of the Cross,) the light of salvation rather than the horrors of suffering.
Though he often produced art about death and hope, Rouault wrote little of his own death: “One day, when death comes, I shall be bereft of everything that I have loves most here on earth. One has to get used to this idea of mortality, unbearable to the heart of the artist and wait for this hour to arrive with the wise man’s resignation.” (The underlining is his own) But his life and the themes of his work had been immersed in that recognition and preparation for reality of death: “When I see again certain things old or modern, I feel that I am with Orpheus in the resting-place of the dead. I live among them, I think with them, I love and communicate with them through their works, a strange activity for a living person. Life has dipped me in the deep Styx and I shall always be torn between the two.” His painting ‘De Profundis’[1946] shows the death-bed of a man with a cross placed on his chest and a crucifix above his bed being prayed for by a woman, who could be his wife, a nun, a nurse or Mary herself, with a kneeling child by her side. The crucifix has a dominant presence in both the man’s eye-line and over his heart, offering the promise of salvation.
Meditating on his work as a painter, Rouault wrote of how his painting was part of his journey of faith. His comment on a “world of shadows and appearances” probably refers to Plato’s cave and the world of truer reality beyond. Rouault’s land of peace combines the world of present reality with the world of heaven, where he longs for all to be made harmonious by God through the healing work of Christ:
O, Crucified Jesus!
He paints to forget the ‘pursuing weariness’ of life
far from this world of shadows and appearances.
He has departed quietly for the land of peace
which has haunted him day and night,
towards the land of peace
where all is harmonious
to the eyes, the mind and the spirit.”
[Stella Vespertina].
Most of Rouault’s work recognised the duality between the “weariness of life” and the land of peace where all is harmonious. His paintings of holy figures often depict a serenity which he believed had achieved that peace.
TOWARDS THE END OF ROUAULT’S LIFE
During the last 10 years of Rouault's career his work became intense in colour and texture. Whereas many artists, having reached maturity and fame sometimes rest on their reputation, Rouault continued to advance his work and some of his late paintings are among the best of his career. He used less oils to dilute his paint, building up the images in thick layers, sometimes to the depth of several centimetres. The black lines accentuated the form of his subjects. Since the early days of the Salon d’Automne at the beginning of the century, Rouault had freed himself from the requirements of academic art, but these later paintings are even further from formal art and combine expression with a delight in the almost sculptural texture of paint.
He would often leave paintings for months before returning to them to build up their layers and continued to experiment in them. They often have a greater serenity than his earlier work. He spoke of being "torn between dream and reality”. This may be compared to the intensely expressive realism of his earlier works. Now the realist subjects were treated with a greater sense of grace. He continued to use similar themes of the circus and a few of judges, but the percentage of specifically religious subjects increased to a quarter of his whole output during the period from 1941 to his death in 1958.
Such was Georges Rouault’s commitment to his integrity as an artist that towards the end of his life he burned many of the unfinished works with which he was dissatisfied. He recognised that he would not have time to finish them to his own satisfaction. A year after the return of over 700 of his unfinished paintings from Vollard’s heirs, he called in a public notary to witness the burning of 315 of the pieces that he felt unable to complete. He burned more works a few years later.
The success of the struggle with Vollard’s heirs seems to have been far more to him than aiming to achieve material gain by the return of his paintings. By that time he was financially, socially and artistically secure. The return of the works to him was regarded by him as an act of justice, which he needed to pursue legally, due to his preoccupation with the need for honesty. It was also his way of controlling and leaving a legacy of which he could feel artistically and ethically proud. It ensured that works with which he was dissatisfied could not be wrongly exploited by the art market. He did not want them to go out into the world without his personal approval of their aesthetic value. He knew that that his family, executors or galleries could have sold even weaker works for vast sums, but he maintained his integrity of purpose. After his death his children founded the Rouault Foundation to continue protecting the integrity of his legacy.
As the destroyed works no longer survive, we cannot judge whether the burnings were the right decision or not. It would be fascinating to see different stages of his works at various points of completion. But we can still do this through the (presumably) better unfinished works that remained. We now interpret preparatory drawings and unfinished works and even ‘bad’ works in different ways to the past. They can provide invaluable and enlightening insights into further understanding of an artist’s work and aims, as well as being appreciated aesthetically or as thought-provoking images in themselves.
Rouault had been frail as a child and his health declined towards the end of his life, until by 1956 he was too frail to paint. Georges Rouault died in Paris on February 13, 1958 at the age of 86. . He was survived by his wife and three children. He was the first artist in history to be given a state funeral by the French government. In 1963, his family donated almost 1000 unfinished works to the French State
CONCLUSIONS
Georges Rouault was probably the preeminent committed Roman Catholic artist in France during the first half of the 20the Century. He moved from a primarily secular upbringing to an awareness of spirituality initially through the influence of the Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau. Moreau encouraged him to move away from Academic art and taught him to listen for the ‘inner’ in his subjects and in himself. Moreau also advised him to be free and not tallow himself o be restrained by the constraints or conventions in art or traditions in faith, a lesson that he followed throughout his career. Rouault sought a more orthodox Christian faith than his mentor and in his early 20s was prepared for his first communion, deepening his commitment to the Catholic faith. From the first years of the 20th Century Rouault was in contact with many significant Catholic intellectuals and radical Catholic literary figures. They were critical of the relaxed attitude to faith of contemporary French Catholicism and radicalised the young artist. Through them, early in his career, he developed personal ways of applying his Christian faith to his art, some of which were misunderstood and not accepted. They also encouraged his sense of social commitment, which he applied and expressed in some of his most impassioned works like his series of prints ‘Miserere’ and his paintings of prostitutes and other marginalised figures.
The integrity and faith of the artist was not always recognised by the Catholic Church to which he was committed, or by his Christian friends. He therefore developed his work and ideas somewhat independently from the Church, though he had many friends in Catholic circles. His early attempts to find imagery that applied his beliefs and sense of Christian social commitment were misunderstood by some as ‘ugly’ and ‘unchristian’ in subject-matter. At the height of Rouault’s mature art, French churches were renewing their contact with and commitment to the arts and commissioning works from well-known contemporary artists, in order to seem in touch with the modern world. But sadly they neglected Rouault, whose spiritual commitment to the Catholic Christian faith was far greater than that of many of the famous secular artists who received commissions. He received only one ecclesiastical commission during his career, for stained glass, a skill in which he had been initially apprenticed.
Dyrness concluded that the aim of Rouault’s art “was neither aesthetic experience alone or emotion, though it involved both of these. The end of Rouault’s work was to inspire in the viewer the same religious effort towards God, the absolute, that the painter himself felt. This absolute, he felt, was reflected in God’s highest creation, man.” [Dyrness 1971 p.110]. Yet Rouault was not an evangelist in any orthodox Christian sense. His art was often a personal exploration of his emotional and inner response to his faith. It frequently responded to the disfigurement of the image of God in human beings, which he recognised in his contemporary world. He was painting the ‘inner reality’ of what he saw and perceived in the world and in people. He wanted to lift his audience to higher levels of perception, spirituality and behaviour.
When Rouault talked of his art as a “fiery/ardent confession” he expressed the vigour and personal nature of his commitment to his work and his subjects. He saw himself as a labourer on par with the artisans of the past who, with a sense of their own humility, had built the cathedrals ‘to the glory of God’, not themselves, and to inspire others to glorify God in their lives. Rouault wanted his art to elevate others and hold a realistic mirror up to the world but not to moralise. He believed that art was above moralisation; rather he intended to hold a mirror up to society, for it to recognise its needs and failings. Judgement was God’s business; the arts were gifts for uplifting humanity and helping it recognise realities.
He took from his tutor Moreau a visionary attitude to his subjects, by ‘listening to the subjects’ inner voice, listening to his own inner response, and reflecting both in the forms, marks, colours, textures and feelings of his images. His emphasis on ‘harmony’ was intended to bring these together in forming a Christian response to his subject matter. Though his representations of people, especially of those whose lifestyles he did not approve, are sometimes rather caricatured, they are not meant cruelly. He was ‘de-forming’ to use Maritain’s phrase, in order to express inner reality more closely, as his maternal grandfather’s hero Daumier had done. Rouault felt that a Christian should value all, though they might abhor activities and effects of sin. He rejected the idea that his images were ugly; to his mind only the thoughts and deeds of people could be ugly.. All people, even the sinful held something of the essence of the image of God.
After his tutor and mentor Gustave Moreau’s death, Rouault gained greater independence, though a small salary as curator of Moreau’s artistic legacy; between 1917 and 1938 he gained further financial security through a regular salary from the dealer Ambroise Vollard. These meant that he could experiment with his art without needing to pander to the fashions or aesthetic expectations of his day. He had already decided around 1901, through the influence of the community at Ligué Abbey, that a Christian artist should be above ambitions for fame, position and fortune. He aimed for a higher integrity and sincerity. Rouault does not follow the direction of many modernists in moving away from figurative representations into more abstract art. He always remained figurative, because the human figure was the main vehicle through which he felt he was able to express his emotions, ideas and faith.
Rouault loved art and loved the process and technical and physical qualities of craftsmanship, which he first learned to appreciate through his father. Rouault applied his faith to his technical work. It influenced his method of working, his materials, techniques, his use of colour, his valuing of his subjects, the emotion he conveyed, his way of working with clients and the honesty of his business practice, as well as the subjects he chose. Only by harmonising all of these was he satisfied with the integrity of his work. Love of materials and techniques accompanied his love of his subjects, though he did not idolise art. His response of love, whether towards subjects, methods, materials, business, etc. was all part of his faith and called for integrity and committed hard work. He saw himself as a craftsman/artisan as much as an artist, and enjoyed working alongside master-printers and others of skill. He expressed dislike of the sloppy technique of some of his contemporaries. Even towards the end of his career he worked tirelessly into his artworks until they satisfied his high standards of harmony between technique, spirituality ad expression.
Rouault worked phenomenally hard, regarding himself as an ‘ouvrier’ or ‘worker’, like his craftsman father. He repeatedly refined his images, without worrying about the time or energy taken, until he achieved the feeling and aesthetic result that conveyed his intention and emotion about the subject. Though many of his works seem simple or spontaneous, they are often the result of years of painstaking refinement. This is especially true of his plates for the Miserere, his colour etchings of Passion and his finest impasto paintings. The process of ‘touch’ was his physical way of working into and meditating on the meaning and value of the images which he was creating.
Rouault was also a craftsman with words. He was quiet and reserved personally. He expressed a dislike of explaining his art, believing that the medium should communicate enough of itself through its own qualities. But he talked and wrote lucidly about art and the responsibilities and values of being an artist. Similarly he did not like talk much to explain his faith, but the writings and quotations that do refer to his beliefs and his application of them show his commitment and the depth of his spiritual thought. He was not a theologian but read widely and reflected deeply on the meaning and implications of his subjects.
Due to his writings and some of his images, it is possible to read an over-romantic idealism into Rouault’s faith and art, which was not his intent. It derives partly from a more romantic approach to Catholicism which influenced him later in his life. Some of his most serene images of saints, Veronica’s veil, Mary and biblical landscapes, Pierrots and dancers seem to imply idealism. But Rouault’s writing and quotations about his aims insist that his intention was to express the essence and truth about human life and faith in ‘realist’ ways, not to idealise or provide spiritual or artistic escapism. What may be mistaken for idealisation or romanticism in some of his work probably derives from his wish to portray the ‘inner’ and the ‘intrinsic spiritual value’ of his subjects. However people failed, he believed that they were still made in God’s image, loved and valued by God and capable of redemption. That is one reason why he produced so many images of the source of that redemption - Christ’s Passion.
Many of Rouault’s subjects became metaphors for his faith and social commitment. His clowns, prostitutes, dancers, landscapes, everyday figures and portraits all relate human conditions and predicaments to aspects of life and faith. These fictional figures are far more than just generalised metaphors for the human condition. They are often given specific names and certainly had particular characteristics painted or drawn into them by the artist as he meditated on them during the long process of creation. In his mature work certainly, they have personal identities, and we are intended to feel with them as they face their predicaments, just as we might with a character in a good novel. Through them we are meant to learn about aspects of ourselves and the individuals, society and world around us, and act in response.
At different stages of Rouault’s career specifically religious scenes dominate or become less prominent in his oeuvre. When he wrote: “Everything in my art is religious” it meant not that he always painted specifically religious subjects, but that he believed that his faith related to everything about the world within which he lived, and to which he was committed. He regarded everything in life, as related to the Creator. His own life and art were committed to reflecting his faith with integrity.
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