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Georges-Henri Rouault
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
In full Georges-Henri Rouault French painter, printmaker, ceramicist,and
maker of stained glass who, drawing inspiration from French medieval
masters, united religious and secular traditions divorced since the
Renaissance.
Rouault was born in a cellar in Paris during a bombardment of the city by
the forces opposed to the Commune. His father was a cabinetmaker. A
grandfather took an interest in art and owned a collection of Honoré
Daumier's lithographs; Rouault said later that he “went first to school with
Daumier.” In 1885 he enrolled in anevening course at the Paris École des
Arts Décoratifs. From 1885 to 1890 he was apprenticed in a glazier's
workshop; his mature style as a painter was undoubtedly influenced by his
work on the restoration of medieval stained-glass windows, including those
of Chartres cathedral. In 1891 he entered theÉcole des Beaux-Arts, where he
soon became one of the favourite pupils of the Symbolist painter Gustave
Moreau, in a class that also included the young Henri Matisse and Albert
Marquet. After the death of Moreau in 1898, a small Paris museum was created
for his pictures, and Rouault became the curator.
Rouault's early style was academic. But around 1898 he went through a
psychological crisis, and, subsequently, partly under the influence of
Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne, he evolved in a direction
that made him, by the 1905 Paris Salon d'Automne, a fellow traveller of the
Fauves (Wild Beasts), who favoured the arbitrary use of strong colour. Until
the beginning of World War I, his most effective medium was watercolour or
oil on paper, with dominant blues, dramatic lighting, emphatic forms, and an
expressive scribble.
Rouault's artistic evolution was accompanied by a religious one, for he had
become, about 1895, an ardent Roman Catholic. He became a friend of the
Catholic intellectuals Joris-Karl Huysmans and Léon Bloy. Through another
friend, a deputy public prosecutor, he began to frequent, as had Daumier,
the Paris law courts, where he had a close view of humanity apparently
fallen from the grace of God. His favourite subjects became prostitutes,
tragic clowns, and pitiless judges.
Without completely abandoning watercolour, after 1914 Rouault turned more
and more toward the oil medium. His paint layers became thick, rich, and
sensuous, his forms simplified and monumental, and his colours and heavy
black lines reminiscent of stained-glass windows. His subject matter became
more specifically religious, with a greater emphasis on the possibility of
redemption than he had put into his pre-1914 work. In the 1930s he produced
a particularly splendid series of paintings on the Passion of Christ;
typical examples are “Christ Mocked by Soldiers,” “The Holy Face,” and
“Christ and the High Priest.” During these years he got into the habit of
reworking his earlier pictures; “The Old King,” for instance, is dated
1916–36.
Between World Wars I and II, at the instigation of the Paris artdealer
Ambroise Vollard, Rouault devoted much time to engravings, illustrating Les
Réincarnations du Père Ubu by Vollard, Le Cirque de l'étoile filante by
Rouault himself, Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, and Miserere (his
masterpiece in the genre), with captions by Rouault. Some ofthis work was
left unfinished for a time and published later. In 1929 he designed the sets
and costumes for a production by Sergey Diaghilev of Sergey Prokofiev's
ballet The Prodigal Son. In 1937 he also did the cartoons for a series of
tapestries.
During and after World War II, he painted an impressive collection of
clowns, most of them virtual self-portraits. He also executed some still
lifes with flowers; these are exceptional, for three-quarters of his
lifetime output is devoted to the human figure. In 1947 he sued the heirs of
Vollard to recover a large number of works left in their possession after
the death of the art dealer in 1939. Winning the suit, he established the
right of an artist to things never offered for sale, and afterward he
publicly burned 315 canvases that he felt were not representative of his
best work. During the last 10 years of his life, he renewed his palette,
adding greens and yellows, and painted some almostmystical landscapes: a
good example is “Christian Nocturne.”
Among the major artists of the 20th-century school of Paris, Rouault was an
isolated figure in at least two respects: he practiced Expressionism, a
style that has never found much favour in France, and he was chiefly a
religious painter—one of the most convincing in recent centuries. Both
statements, however, need qualification. Rouault was not as fiercely
Expressionistic as some of his Scandinavian and German contemporaries; in
some ways his work is a late flowering of 19th-century Realism and
Romanticism. And he was not an official church artist; his concern with sin
and redemption was deeply personal.
Roy Donald McMullen
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b
Paris, 27 May 1871; d Paris, 13 Feb 1958
French painter, draughtsman and
printmaker. Although he first came to prominence with works displayed in 1905 at the Salon
d’Automne in Paris, in the company of paintings by Henri Matisse and other initiators
of Fauvism, he established a highly personal and emotive style. His technique and palette
were also highly personal, and they ranged from watercolour blues to a rich, thick
application of materials. These demonstrate, in their very complexity, not only
originality but also the craft of the artist always in search of a greater form of
expression. Even though he never stopped observing mankind, his deep religious feeling
allowed him to imbue his work with great spirituality. |
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