Georges Rouault was a French artist and printmaker who represented Fauvism and Expressionism. His works inspired by the art of French medieval masters, depicted clowns, circus performers and religious persons successfully uniting spiritual and secular motifs.
Rouault’s trademark was the use of thick black brushstrokes which contoured the subjects of his canvases.
The artist worked with stained glass, ceramics and wrote poetry and prose as well.
Background
Georges Rouault was born on May 27, 1871, in Paris, France. He was a son of a cabinetmaker Alexander Rouault and Marie-Louise Champdavoine. Alexander worked at the piano manufacture company of a notable composer and keyboard maker Ignace Joseph Pleyel.
Georges spent his early years in a Belleville quarter of Paris. Raised in a family of craftsmen who were art admirers, Rouault was exposed to it since childhood. His grandfather, a post officer, collected reproductions of many known artists, including Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Jean-Louis Forain and Honoré Daumier.
It wasn’t strange that Rouault revealed his passion for drawing. The young boy was encouraged by his mother.
Education
Georges Rouault attended a Protestant school.
He began his artistic training at the age of fourteen becoming an apprentice to stained glass makers Tamoni and Emile Hirsch. Rouault worked on the restoration of medieval windows, including those of various cathedrals. He combined the activity with evening classes at the École des Arts Décoratifs. Besides, the young boy developed an interest in classical art and often visited Louvre Museum to explore the paintings of great masters.
Georges Rouault left the stained glass workshop in 1890 and a year later he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts). At first, he attended the course of Elie Delauney but after his death shifted to the class of the artist Gustave Moreau. Rouault became one of Moreau’s favorite disciples. He didn’t stop to guide his pupil even after Georges left the School.
While at the institution, Georges Rouault got acquainted with Henri Matisse and Albert Marquet.
Career
The start of Georges Rouault’s artistic career can be counted from the participation at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1895 in which he participated annually from then. Two years later, through the friendship with his fellows taught by Moreau, Rouault presented his artworks at the Salon de la Rose Croix held at the Galérie Petit. The artist created the canvases on religious themes.
After Moreau’s death in 1898, Rouault, suppressed by the loss of his major mentor and inspirer, stopped painting for a while. He fled to Evian-les-Bains in 1902 where he resumed his painting activity. The canvases of this period showed human vices in caricature manner through the figures of prostitutes, clowns and judges.
On his return to Paris a year later, the artist was named to curate the Moreau Museum which was opened this time. The activity was the only source of constant income for Rouault.
The artist collaborated with his fellow colleagues among who were his old friends from the École des Beaux-Arts, Matisse and Marquet. Along with them, Rouault co-founded the Salon d’Automne (Autumn Salon) in 1903. The following year, the artist presented at the Salon’s exhibition a lot of his watercolor paintings.
Through the artists Georges Rouault contacted with in the capital of France, he became involved in the movement of Fauvism and even took part at their exhibition held at the Salon des Independents (Salon of Independent Artists) in 1905. The show was followed by the exhibition at the Berthe Weill Gallery the next year. Rouault continued his painting series showing judges and politicians he had started at the beginning of the decade.
The year of 1910 was rich in events for Rouault. He had his first one-man-show organized at the Druet Gallery which provided him with the popularity among art collectors. The same year, the painter sent some of his paintings to a group exhibition in Russia. A year later, the Druet Gallery hosted the second personal exhibition of the artist.
Georges Rouault experimented with various materials, including watercolors, gouaches, pastels on paper, and painting techniques. He tried himself as a ceramicist and printmaker.
The First World War influenced the content of his artworks. To illustrate the pain people lived during the conflict, Rouault painted Christ. Later, many of the paintings were used to produce engravings for his Miserere book.
In 1917, Rouault started his collaboration with Ambroise Vollard who became his art dealer and purchased all the works, including unfinished, from his studio. Vollard commissioned the artist to create illustrations for some books, such as Reincarnations of Pere Ubu, The Circus, Les Fleurs du mal, Miserere, and Guerre. Rouault painted less and concentrated on etching, wood engraving, and color lithography during the next ten years. However, the artist worked simultaneously on some paintings for Vollard in order to finish them before the deadline.
By the beginning of the 1920s, the popularity of Rouault reached its peak. In 1921, the first monograph dedicated to the artist was issued. Three years later, the Druet Gallery held an important retrospective dedicated to his art. In 1926, Rouault published the autobiographical book titled ‘Souvenirs intimes’.
At the end of the decade, Rouault tried himself as a set decorator for The Prodigal Son ballet by Sergei Diaghilev at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater in Paris.
Becoming more and more famous as a painter and graphic artist, Georges Rouault exhibited in London, New York City, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C. and San Francisco throughout the 1930s.
In 1947, after the long lawsuit with the successor of Ambroise Vollard who had an exclusive right on all Rouault’s works, the artist brought back the canvases he had did for his main oeuvre Miserere. The project was finished and published after the Second World War in 1948. The book had a great success and was reprinted many times. The 313 of other paintings returned by Vollard’s heirs were burned by the author. Rouault was seventy-six years by the time and was scared he couldn’t finish them. Although, during the Second World War and after, the painter managed to complete the significant part of the canvases.
Between 1940 and 1956 large retrospective exhibitions of Rouault's work took place in many European and American museums and even in Japan. In 1947, the artist published the autobiographical book titled ‘Stella Vespertina’. The following year, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
The paintings Georges Rouault created in the last ten years of his life were full of colors and similar to three-dimensional pieces of art from ceramics or printing. One of the examples of such works was ‘The face of Sarah’.
Not an official artist of the church, Georges Rouault is regarded as one of the major religious painters of the 20th century.
Applying thick black brushstrokes typical for stained glass to his canvases, the artist elaborated a new painting technique.
In 1951, he received the title of a Commander of the Legion of Honour.
Nowadays, Rouault’s art is included in such public collections as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the States Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, the Tate Gallery in London and others.
In 2009, Rouault’s painting titled ‘Pierrot’ was purchased at Sotheby's in New York City for $1,370,500.
Georges Rouault turned to Catholicism at the age of twenty-four.
Views
Taught by Gustave Moreau, Georges Rouault believed that art is made not to simply reproduce the views of nature, but to express one’s inner world.
One of the main sources of inspiration for his canvases was the passion of Christ.
Quotations:
"Painting for me is merely a means of forgetting life. It is a cry in the night. A sob broken off. A strangled laugh."
"A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it – the artist's thought, sensibility, and intensions. They take away his strength, just as Delilah took away Samson's. They have no gift for nuances, and they have an instinctive aversion for everything that is beyond their reach and baffles them."
"The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas."
"The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy..."
"The painter who loves his art is ruler in his own kingdom, even if he be in Lilliput and a Lilliputian himself. He transforms a kitchen maid in to a fairy, and a great lady into a brothel matron, if he wants to and sees them so, for he is a seer. His vision includes everything that is alive in the past."
"Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical..."
"Often pagans, with their eyes wide open, do not see very clearly."
"Subjective artists are one-eyed, but objective artists are blind."
"The richness of the world, all artificial pleasures, have the taste of sickness and give off a smell of death in the face of certain spiritual possessions."
"A tree against the sky possesses the same interest, the same character, the same expression as the figure of a human."
Interests
Artists
Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Moreau
Connections
Georges Rouault married a pianist Marthe Le Sidaner in 1908. The artist Henri Le Sidaner was her brother.
Marthe gave birth to three girls, Genevieve, Isabelle and Agnes, and a son named Michel.
Georges Rouault
The book gathers religious paintings, portraits, nudes, and still lifes by Rouault, describes his outlook on life and briefly traces his career
1984
Rouault
The book presents a profile of the artist and analysis of his distinctive style
1997
Georges Rouault: Judges, Clowns and Whores
The book includes the large-scale plates of the work by Georges Rouault and an introduction by David Nash, a biography of the artist, a checklist and several intimate photographs of the artist
