Georges Rouault (1871–1958) was born with a bang. A shell struck Rouault père’s home during the Commune, and Madame went into labor. Of his birth, Rouault said, “In the faubourg of toil and suffering, in the darkness, I was born. Keeping vigil over pictorial turpitudes, I toiled miles away from certain dilettantes.”
Here is Rouault’s flair for the theatrical, as well as his stringent sense of morality—qualities that appeared through his art as melancholy clowns and joyless prostitutes, or as corrupt judges and profligate society types. In Miserere et Guerre, Rouault unleashed the full force of his faith, his sense of drama, and his unsparing critique of man in a series of 58 prints made from 1922 to 1927 (three of the prints are not on view here).
A painter, printmaker, and stained-glass artist, Georges Rouault was a deeply introspective man of faith and fearlessness. He enjoyed cultivating the public persona of the solitary genius, whose work defied categorization and baffled the critics. His originality is undeniable but his willfulness often led to his being ignored: This master of stained glass did not receive a commission for church windows until he was 74 years old.
Absorbing the expressive austerity of Miserere et Guerre makes it all the more startling to recall that Rouault studied at the atelier of the decadent symbolist Gustave Moreau. Yet Moreau proved, as a teacher and friend, to have an enormous influence on Rouault. Moreau taught his students—who also included Matisse—to prize their inner lives as the only constant, as a reality given by God and thus the only aspect of life in which to put one’s trust. Rouault quoted Moreau’s confession of faith: “My inner consciousness (sentiment intérieur) alone appears eternal and unquestionably certain.” Moreau taught that inner sensitivity should lead not to egotism but to spiritual humility, and to an independence of spirit, an artistic integrity won through sobriety, diligence, and, unavoidably, solitude: “the quality of being yourself is granted to a very few people.”
The quality of being Rouault is not something easy to love. His work is dissonant, dark, macabre, full of conflict. Critics have called it ugly, unpleasant, and tumultuous. Scholars debate whether he was an expressionist (he would have detested such a tag), a Fauve (plausible given his savage colorism), a neomedievalist (art should glorify God), or, with his focus on the subconscious, a surrealist (a very unsatisfactory label indeed). Undoubtedly, his technical and formal affinities lie with expressionism, but as Moreau counseled, he makes his own way. The idiosyncratic choice of imagery and themes found in Miserere et Guerre sometimes follows a logic that only Rouault could fathom.
For various reasons, Miserere et Guerre remained unpublished until 1948. As Stephen Schloesser has noted, this allows us to assess “the differences between contexts of production and contexts of reception.” To these we might add a context of exhibition. Thirty-six of the images hung at Duke Chapel during Lent: Grouped in six sets of three along each side of the nave, these prints made for a bracing Lenten pilgrimage toward the altar. The gothic splendor of the chapel, with its deep shadows and soaring space, underscored the series’ themes of darkness and hope.
Rouault appended his own captions, drawing primarily on the Bible as well as Pascal, Plautus, Lucan, Virgil, and Horace. He also canvassed some of his characteristic social themes: the abuse of power, bourgeois complacency, the plight of the poor and alienated, the evils of war. The variations in technique give these prints a kind of cadence, from the brushy “and Veronica with her delicate linen still goes her way” (plate 33), a tender evocation of the imprint of Christ’s face on the saint’s veil, to “In all things, tears” (27), an extensively reworked image in which a monumental, faltering figure is burdened by a strange knapsack. Is he a soldier, a refugee, or the Lord struggling on the road to Calvary?
The series title pages, Miserere (“Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness”) and Guerre (“They have ruined even the ruins”), have the appearance of gravestones or decorative emblems, the former elaborate and symbolic, the latter ordered and severe. Taken as a diptych, these two images ground the series in the dichotomies that Rouault returns to again and again: mercy/war, sacred/profane, seen/unseen, and Christ/man. Likewise, Rouault the mystic coexists with Rouault the ruthless chronicler of man’s ridiculousness. The medieval sovereign with a rictus grin in “We think ourselves kings” holds court with a doleful clown in “Who does not paint himself a face.” Satire pure and simple animates “We are insane,” featuring two bourgeois men with rolling eyes, while in “Auguries” a woman is caught between two fortune-tellers.
The curatorial decisions about the chapel groupings are generally well considered, but at times one feels that Rouault’s social conscience gains ascendance over his spirituality. For example, one grouping is described as emphasizing “the injustices of various power structures and the helplessness of its victims.” These images—on one side “It is hard to live,” “It would be so sweet to love,” and “Jean-François never sings alleluia,” and on the other, “The condemned man is led away,” “His lawyer, in hollow phrases, proclaims his entire unawareness,” and “Face to face”—do indeed depict corruption and the impossibility of earthly justice. But behind them is the ever-present idea of Christ, whose humiliation, and by extension our own, is not the end of the story.
At the nearby Nasher Museum, where the exhibition continues, the introductory wall text describes these 19 works on view as representing “the plight of the suffering refugee, the devastation of the land, and the cruelty and corruption of the powerful.” Much of Rouault’s work in the early 20th century was influenced by his own experiences of poverty and his participation in the Catholic activist movement. But to reduce his work to concerns for immigrants and the environment is to overlook the central fact of his artistic motivation: that man’s tragic fate can only be reconciled by coming to terms with Christ on the cross.
In fact, being a Catholic in France in the early 20th century called for a particularly tenacious and robust form of faith. In 1901, as part of a larger move to separate church and state, the French passed a law making religious communities illegal. The Roman Catholic resurgence of the late 19th century were cut short by the Great War and the socialist forces taking root in Europe. “As a Christian in such hazardous times,” Rouault wrote, “I believe only in Jesus on the cross. I am a Christian of olden times.” His words show his instinctual unity with believers throughout the ages and an essential humility and moral strength that require no cultural prevarication.
As works of art, these images are fierce and marvelous, remarkable for their line, depth, and lambent tonalities. Their resplendence lies in the artist’s unshakable faith and his equanimity about man’s plight, continually offering pity rather than denunciation, hope in place of despair. How does he achieve this? As he wrote in the series preface, “Jesus on the cross will tell you better than I.”
Leann Davis Alspaugh is managing editor of the Hedgehog Review.
