Georges Rouault

(1871-1958)

Georges Rouault was born on May 27, 1871, at the end of the bloody week of the Paris Commune.

In 1885, he learned the trade of glass painter from Tamoni. From the summer onwards, he also attended evening classes at the École des arts décoratifs. The following year, he worked for the stained-glass restorer Hirsch. He passed the entrance exam for the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and joined the studio of painter Elie Delaunay in early December. When Delaunay died in early September 1891, he was succeeded by his friend Gustave Moreau - the other studio heads at the time were Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme. A strong relationship developed between Gustave Moreau and the young Rouault, who in July 1894 was awarded the Prix Chenavard for L'Enfant Jésus parmi les docteurs, 1894 (Musée Unterlinden, Colmar). His fellow students at Gustave Moreau's studio, the crucible of fauve painting, included Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Henri Manguin and Henri Evenepoël. The critic Roger-Marx supports this "hotbed of revolt ignited in the official sanctuary."[1]

A favorite pupil of Gustave Moreau, Rouault assisted him in the preparations for his future museum at 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld in the ninth arrondissement, not far from Ambroise Vollard's gallery on rue Laffitte, where Rouault discovered works by Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Rouault was one of the few to see Moreau's work during his lifetime. Other students had no access to the master's home-workshop, except on the occasion of special appointments. Gustave Moreau's "constant concern was to respect our little personalities."[2] The father of Symbolism died on April 18, 1898. He bequeathed his mansion on rue de La Rochefoucauld to the French state, on condition that his works be preserved there. Following the State's acceptance of the bequest, the museum opened in 1903. Rouault was appointed curator. During the same period, he takes part in the meetings leading up to the creation of the Salon d'Automne.

Following the death of Gustave Moreau, Rouault, who was very attached to him, underwent a profound moral and aesthetic crisis. He felt the need to write, and turned to spirituality. In 1901, he spent over six months (April-October) at Smarves, near Ligugé, with Antonin Bourbon from the Moreau studio and the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, who had also retired there. They led a precarious life, attending services at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Martin de Ligugé. The next fifteen years or so were a period of revolt. Through recurring motifs, Rouault expresses his pain in the face of human decay. Circus scenes, one of the major themes of artistic modernity since the end of the 19th century, appeared in Rouault's work around 1903. Pablo Picasso's Deux saltimbanques dates from 1901 (State Museum of Fine Arts, Pushkin, Moscow, former Morozov collection). Circus subjects are also found in works by Raoul Dufy, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse and others. An emblematic figure of the circus, the clown embodies for Rouault the duality of the human condition. Beneath his parade-like exterior, he displays the pain of the soul. "I have the flaw (a flaw perhaps... in any case, it's an abyss of suffering for me...) of never letting anyone have their glittery garb, be it king or emperor, the man I have before me, it's his soul I want to see".[3] At the same time, he gradually developed an iconography of Girls, and other "types" expressing his tragic vision of the human condition.

In March 1904, Rouault met Léon Bloy, a literary critic and novelist who was close to Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly and Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. His approach is based on the notion of exegesis in relation to reality. Bloy virulently denounces the bourgeois of modern society. "Barbey compared him to a cathedral gargoyle pouring out the waters of heaven on the good and the wicked."[4] In November, Rouault takes part in the fledgling Salon d'Automne, with Clowns, Girls, Acrobats and Landscapes. These works met with fairly negative reactions, notably from Léon Bloy, who did not subscribe to his aesthetic. That year, the Salon presented works by Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, which had a strong impact on young artists.

The following year, Rouault exhibited Circus Scenes and Girls at the Salon des Indépendants. The critics emphasized his darkness, his pessimism, his dark lyricism and his painful soul.[5]. In June, through Léon Bloy, he meets Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, with whom he forms a deep and lasting friendship. Rouault found in the couple a fair and complete understanding of his style. At the now famous Salon d'Automne in 1905, works by Rouault, Pitres, Forains, Cabotins, rub shoulders with those by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Jean Puy, Louis Valtat and Henri Manguin in the famous Room VII, described by Louis Vauxcelles as the "cage aux fauves". Rouault's painting gradually gained critical acclaim. In February 1906, he exhibited Saltimbanques, Filles and petits Paysages at Berthe Weil, 25 rue Victor-Massé. He continued to participate regularly in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne with the same subjects. In 1907, he attends court hearings. He creates his first paintings of Judges, Defendants and Convicts.

Between 1905 and 1907, under the impetus of Ambroise Vollard, the leading Nabis and Fauvist painters tried their hand at decorating ceramics in the studio of ceramist André Metthey in Asnières-sur-Seine. This unprecedented move, which paralleled Vollard's passionate interest in book illustration, reflected painters' growing interest in the decorative arts, marking a gradual blurring of the hierarchy between the arts. Rouault met Vollard in 1907 in the ceramist's studio. In a letter dated July 3, the first of their epistolary exchanges, Vollard offered Rouault an "exclusive" commission for ceramics (Archives Georges Rouault). The artist accepted. Some one hundred ceramics, including those by Rouault, but also by the Nabis and the Fauvists, produced in André Metthey's studio, are shown at the Salon d'Automne a few months later.

He exhibited regularly at the same salons and in a number of galleries. Galerie Druet, 20 rue Royale, gave him his first solo show in February-March 1910 (121 paintings, 8 drawings, 53 ceramics). He increasingly took part in group shows in France and abroad. The 1910s saw a new departure in Rouault's work. He painted more in oils. His court scenes changed. The condemned and the accused give way to caricatured judges. Poor people and wanderers take up more and more space. In 1911, Rouault meets André Suarès, a regular contributor to the N.R.F. In July, his first letter to the writer marks the beginning of a long correspondence between the two men, numbering over 260 letters. "I carry within me a fund of pain and infinite melancholy that life has only developed and of which my art as a painter, if God grants me, will only be the very imperfect expression and fulfillment."[6] Rouault takes part in the salons. The Galerie Druet held another exhibition in December (45 canvases, 11 monochromes, ceramics) - to mixed reviews - followed by another in January 1912 (ceramics, paintings, drawings and watercolors in an album).

In June, Rouault moves to Versailles with his family. The death of his father shortly afterwards leads to the creation of the Miserere. Throughout the year, he composes Indian ink drawings in a school notebook. In Gil Blas, Rouault publishes "Sur le métier de peindre" (On the craft of painting), a testimony to his primordial research into the material, wanting to make painting like "a solid fresco, of a beautiful matte, deep, powerful, and very colorful if necessary."[7]

While the world of the Judges is still one of his favorite subjects, Clowns acquire a new importance: a traditional image of the artist and poet since Baudelaire ("Le Vieux saltimbanque", Le Spleen, 1869), the clown, hero and victim, becomes for Rouault a kind of double of Christ, his profane equivalent grappling with real existence, and thus a symbol of the entire human condition. Rouault became increasingly open to Suarès. "I believe I have a subject, a subject for which there is no need to look for a qualifier, a real subject. [...] My experiments with different states of color engravings, there too I'm looking for matter."[8] In Soliloques, he confides in this regard, Gustave Moreau "sensed that matter was necessary to me, but I didn't realize it myself very well."[9] At the end of 1913, Rouault, usually rather dissatisfied, was rather confident about his work in painting. "At last, perhaps, I have a material that suits my needs, and an oil painting material, neither shiny nor bright like enamel, nor too matte like fresco, but sober and serious."[10] He felt he was on the right track[11]. In the same year, negotiations began concerning Vollard's purchase of the painter's studio. After the declaration of war, Rouault moves with his family to Saint-Efflam near Plestin-les-Grèves in the Côtes-du-Nord region. He leaves his works at Versailles. In October, he is near Saint-Malo-de-la-Lande in La Manche. The tragic context of the war redoubles his inspiration for the Miserere. In painting, the war leads him to concentrate on the figure of Christ.

After Jean-Louis Forain and André Derain's refusal, Ambroise Vollard asked Rouault to illustrate "his" Reincarnations of Père Ubu, a text he himself had written after Alfred Jarry. Vollard was passionate about luxury publishing. Rouault set two conditions: that Vollard would publish the Miserere, and that he would be able to continue his painting at the same time. In 1917, after lengthy negotiations, Vollard bought "his studio", comprising 770 works. Vollard agreed to let the artist finish the unfinished works. With this extremely important purchase, Vollard became Rouault's exclusive dealer. The artist works on Réincarnations du Père Ubu. In August, André Suarès publishes "Essai sur le clown ", in the first fascicule of the Remarques series, published by N.R.F. Léon Bloy dies on November 3, 1917. The following year, Rouault proposes to Vollard, who accepts, to devote a book to Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs de Mal ou Danse macabre. He works on Vollard's Ubu and on the Miserere project, confiding to Suarès his intention to execute 50 plates (there will be 58). He switches from gouache and watercolor to oil paint. His palette is more varied and colorful, highlighted by a thick black border. His material is denser, the result of an accumulation of layers of paint. Until 1926, however, his printmaking largely took precedence over his painting. He continued his work for books. Vollard commissioned Ubu Roi from him, and he continued to paint in parallel.

In the early 1920s, religious and circus subjects were the most numerous in painting. The Miserere is Rouault's central preoccupation. At Vollard's request, he paints most of the Miserere's important sketches in color. The gallery, La Licorne, rue La Boétie, created by Maurice Girardin, a great Rouault collector, devotes an exhibition to him in November 1920. In 1924, Vollard gave the painter a studio on the top floor of his private mansion at 28 rue Martignac in the seventh arrondissement. Galerie Druet presented an exhibition of Rouault's work until 1919. In an interview with Jacques Guenne, the artist sets out the three basic elements of his approach: "reference to nature, the search for material and the attraction of composition.[12]. " "Form, color, harmony, a blessed trinity."[13]

Souvenirs intimes, a collection of notes written over time, was published in 1926 by Éditions Edmond Frapier. The following year, Rouault completed the 58 engravings for the Miserere. Like many of his modern contemporaries, Rouault collaborated with Serge de Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the 1920s. He designed the sets and costumes for Le Fils prodigue (The Prodigal Son ), premiered in Paris at the Sarah Bernhard Theatre on May 21, 1929, with libretto by Boris Kochno, choreography by George Balanchine and music by Sergei Prokofiev. This was Diaghilev's last work, and he died three months later, on August 19, in Venice. The same year sees the publication by Éditions Porteret of Paysages légendaires, a poem by Rouault, which he illustrates with six lithographs and fifty drawings.

The following years were characterized by a more peaceful climate, even if the Second World War produced dramatic echoes in Rouault's work. His painting took on more vibrant colors. Bouquets of flowers appeared in the 1930s.

Les Réincarnations du père Ubu was published in 1932 by Ambroise Vollard, with 22 etchings and 104 woodcuts. On this occasion Christian Zervos concludes that "Rouault must be placed among the great artists of today."[14]

Ambroise Vollard rejected the text written by André Suarès (at Rouault's request in 1926) for Cirque, fearing that its violence in certain respects would shock his American clientele; Rouault proposed instead one of his poems Cirque de l'Etoile filante. At the same time, Rouault began a collaboration with Marie Cuttoli, a collector and gallery owner who, from the late 1920s onwards, was behind a revival of tapestry thanks to her commissions from modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger. - This approach parallels that of Vollard, who commissioned painters to create ceramics at the turn of the century, and that of Diaghilev, who enlisted the collaboration of artists to create the sets and costumes for his ballets, and tends to dissipate not only the hierarchy but also the boundaries between the arts. Rouault designed a total of fifteen tapestries for Marie Cuttoli between 1932 and 1938, woven in Aubusson. The first in 1932 was Tête de femme, followed by Clown blessé (carton Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne/CCI, Paris), and La Petite famille (carton Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania).

In 1933, Pierre Matisse, the painter's son, proposed a Georges Rouault exhibition at his newly opened (1931) New York gallery. He became the artist's dealer on the other side of the Atlantic. From 1935 onwards, Rouault's palette began to rise. He begins to elaborate what he calls the Biblical Landscapes, until 1937. With some forty paintings, Rouault takes part in the Maîtres de l'Art indépendant exhibition at the Petit Palais from June to October 1937. This event, dedicated to living artists as opposed to academic painters, was organized by Raymond Escholier to coincide with the Exposition Internationale des arts et techniques appliqués à la vie moderne. Alongside Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Edouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, André Derain, Pablo Picasso, Raoul Dufy, Maurice Utrillo, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Georges Braque, Rouault was given an entire private room as one of the leading artists. In November 1937, Pierre Matisse again presented a Rouault exhibition in New York. In the autumn of the following year, MoMA honored his etchings. Le Cirque de l'Etoile filante and Passion (with a text by André Suarès), both with color etchings, are published by Vollard in 1938 and 1939 respectively.

Ambroise Vollard dies accidentally on the road on July 22, 1939. A few days later, on September¹, war broke out in Europe. Rouault settled in Beaumont-sur-Sarthe. During the exodus in 1940, he takes refuge in Golfe-Juan, where he continues to work. Matisse is in Nice, Bonnard in Le Cannet. André Suarès spent part of the war in Antibes. In Golfe-Juan, in 1941, he produced the fifteen gouaches for Divertissement, a collection of circus characters. He uses a brush to calligraphy the book's texts.

The Galerie Louis Carré, avenue de Messine, which remained active during the war, presented the Rouault, peintures récentes exhibition in April-May 1942. Tériade publishes Divertissement in 1943, the first of his painters' books.

Rouault takes part in the complete decorative program for the church of Notre Dame de Toute Grâce on the Plateau d'Assy, a manifesto for the renewal of sacred art, of which Father Marie-Alain Couturier is one of the key players. Rouault designed five stained-glass windows, created in 1945 by the Hébert Stevens workshops, later to become the Bony workshops. They were to rub shoulders with works by Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Jean Lurçat and others. In the same year, Rouault was again featured at MoMA in an exhibition of Paintings and prints (April-June). After the war, the inventors of modern art became "sacred monsters". They are celebrated everywhere (Piet Mondrian and Marc Chagall at MoMA in 1945 and 1946 respectively, Henri Matisse at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in 1949, to name but a few).

On March 19, 1947, Rouault won his case against the Vollard heirs. The court ruled that he should retain ownership of his work. The more than seven hundred unfinished canvases are to be returned to him.

The last ten years of his career, between 1948 and 1958 (the date of his death), were marked by a brilliant palette and a richness of material unrivalled until then, at a time when American abstract expressionism and informal art were emerging. The accumulation of layers of material contributed to the variety of color nuances and the richness of light.

In 1948, France sent 26 paintings to the Venice Biennale, including Le Clown blessé (1932), carton pour tapisserie (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne/CCI, Paris) and 12 engravings by Georges Rouault. Le Miserere is published by Éditions de l'Étoile filante. It is presented to the public for the first time in late 1948 at the Odette des Garets gallery. On November 5, 1948, in front of a bailiff at the Chaptal studio in Montreuil-sous-Bois, Rouault burns 315 of the paintings returned to him by the Vollard heirs, believing that he would be unable to complete them.

In 1952, Galerie Louis Carré exhibits the 58 etchings of Miserere. Georges Rouault's work is the subject of numerous retrospectives in Europe: at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, then the following year on a more international scale: in Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Osaka. On November 3, 1954, Henri Matisse, his former Gustave Moreau studio colleague, died. At the end of 1956, aged 85 and physically exhausted, Rouault stopped painting. He died on February 13, 1958.

Christian Zervos has repeatedly insisted in the pages of his magazine Cahiers d'Art on the profound link between Rouault's art and life. In 1960, he again paid tribute to him: "However sincere his religious feelings, Rouault never plunged into the holy water font. He constantly renewed his acquaintance with life, with the man thrown into the face of the world, the man grappling with destiny. [...] Tenderness and violent passion have always been the primary impulse of his works."[15]