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Art Review | Georges Rouault
Revisiting Rouault’s Stained-Glass World


By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 29, 2007

You wouldn’t call it a full-fledged revival, but Georges Rouault is back in our sights. A few months ago some of his work was at the Metropolitan Museum in a show about his wily dealer, Ambroise Vollard. Now a couple of dozen pictures are at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.


Georges Rouault’s “Fille (Femme aux Cheveux Roux)” (1908) More Photos »


At one time Rouault’s reputation rivaled Matisse’s, and his clowns and prostitutes were as ubiquitously reproduced as Ben Shahn posters. He had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 and 1953; when he died in 1958, at 87, the French government organized a state funeral.

Then he slipped down the memory chute. The French expression “jolie-laide,” applied to women whose beauty is of the unconventional sort, applies to Rouault too, which half explains his vanishing. He’s an acquired taste.


“Three Judges” (1908-9) by Georges Rouault, who started out as a restorer of church windows.


Clement Greenberg called him middlebrow. That was the other half of the explanation. Greenberg had a point. The lesser works are overripe and formulaic. They’re hard to love for generations that have come of age since the 1950s. The art has a sanctimony and sincerity that resonated after the war but came to seem dated in an art world besotted by American Pop and bling.

But this gallery show covering his long career invites us to reconsider his virtues. On the heels of the Met exhibition, where he left a vivid impression, its timing is good. Rouault was never chic: he was too moral, too religious, too tender, too popular. But at his best he was touchingly strange, and a model of integrity.

He was born in 1871, a child of the Paris Commune, the son of an artisan who built pianos. His grandfather, a postal worker and art collector, introduced him to pictures by Courbet. He apprenticed as a teenager to glaziers and never denied the obvious connection between the thick black outlines in his paintings and the leaded church windows of medieval stained glass that he helped to restore. Those outlines flattened and broke up his work into fissures and shards of glowing color (deep purples, reds and blues) against a generally gloomy background.

This became his signature mode. The technique was partly a response to Cubism — a strategy for looking abstract, fracturing space and fudging three dimensions, which he never mastered — at the same time that it stressed frontality, gesture and light. You can see in the show, which consists mostly of minor works but has a few very good pictures, the luminosity of his palette and the awkward elegance of his line. He was the classic beefy-handed butcher who’s incredibly deft with a knife.

His own phrase was “outrageous lyricism.” With his early, dashing brush marks, he created the appearance of spontaneity — which was partly a lie, since he repeated the same images and emotions over and over — but which gave his work its appearance of raw, expressive energy, akin in fervor to that of German Expressionists like George Grosz or Max Beckmann.

He said he saw his role as “the silent friend of those who labor in the barren field, the ivy of eternal misery climbing the leprous wall behind which rebellious humanity hides its virtues and its vice.” His subjects were mostly misfits and vagabonds, and his natural forebears in social commentary were Goya and Daumier. He believed in the impieties of modern art as the most effective language of the day, yet was also deeply spiritual and revered the radical Catholic writer Léon Bloy, who recognized the inherent contradiction in Rouault’s position and didn’t much like his work.

The best pictures here depict a redheaded nude; a trio of fat, goggle-eyed judges; and a kind of swashbuckler in profile, the paint in that case slathered on as thick as plaster with a palette knife. Elsewhere, scratchy, slashing lines pin down the contours of fleshy prostitutes with grave, swollen faces. Sallow clowns with red noses glower under peaked hats, symbols of humiliation.

There are a few felicitous watercolors — of a Japanese warrior, others of dancers and landscapes — and several static heads, heavily impastoed, centered and silent like Byzantine icons. Rouault could be academic and graceless, and he invented nothing in particular. But a work called “Acrobates XIII,” all elastic line and warm color (it was once owned by Matisse) is sheer loveliness, like a jeweled mosaic.

For years people only occasionally saw his work. Vollard made a deal with him, snatching up hundreds of unfinished pictures in 1917, and in return providing financial security and a studio on the top floor of his own house. Rouault illustrated Vollard’s sequels to Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu” series (there are three related works in the show) and he did other engravings for Vollard’s lavish books, in exchange for which Vollard financed “Miserere,” Rouault’s own great project and masterpiece.

It was a useful arrangement until Vollard died suddenly, in 1939. Rouault found himself locked out by Vollard’s heirs, having to sue to get back his own pictures, hundreds of which he still hadn’t finished.

He was a perfectionist, a tinkerer and a dreamer. Increasingly he had been working in an obsessive style of thin, layered colors, building dense, encrusted pools of reds and blues — divine, uncanny patches of light emanating as if from inside the images. This devotional process took forever. The swift savagery of earlier work gave way to greater harmony. But this method insured that he never felt truly done with anything.

He won the lawsuit against the Vollard heirs (it became a landmark in artists’ property rights), although he failed to recover the paintings they had already cashed in on. Rouault was 77 by then. He knew he could never complete all those pictures. So he burned 315 of them, before the bailiffs of the court, as a matter of principle. He was the master of himself. No one would have control over his work except him.

The immolation was in keeping with the religious-moral side of his art. He let a potential fortune go up in smoke but spared his honor. The market puts a price tag on art, but its true value has nothing to do with money: that was Rouault’s lesson.

It’s not a bad one for today.

“Georges Rouault: Judges, Clowns and Whores” continues through June 9 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue, at 78th Street; (212) 744-7400 or miandn.com.

Descobri recentemente o site Wordspy, que cataloga e dá a definição de novas palavras e expressões em inglês, a partir de textos jornalísticos ou literários. É um pré-dicionário, bem informal, mas que faz sentido. Exemplos desse trabalho são a já não tão nova "metrosexual", ou, na mesma linha, "retrosexual", que, para o Wordspy é um "homem com um sentido estético mal desenvolvido, que gasta o mínimo possível de tempo e dinheiro com sua aparência e com um estilo de vida". É o que popularmente já chamamos de "troglodita". Aliás, a comparação dos casos me leva a uma hipótese: enquanto o inglês cria palavras, nós damos apelido em português, quando não importamos as novidades anglófonas. Termos como "yuppie" são plasmados e recebidos no idioma, enquanto os apelidos passam com seu tempo. Os primeiros marcam a época e o contexto cultural em que nasceram - e ficam sendo essa marca por muito tempo - enquanto os apelidos dependem ou da sua atualidade ou das aspas, isto é, a sua função de apontar um significado se esvai com o tempo, com a mudança natural do contexto. Curioso é que a expansão do léxico em inglês muitas vezes recorre ao latim, como nos termos ~sexual, o que gera palavras perfeitamente brasileiras, mas mostra que ao invés de ficarmos só no simpático hábito dos apelidos, poderíamos ser uma comunidade de falantes - e escreventes - mais aberta à expansão vocabular, com menos medo de nos distanciar da língua de origem, porque, de todo modo, esse distanciamento é irreversível e inevitável. Que venha a novilíngua (!)