Georges Rouault's Sympathy for the Devil
An exhibition of paintings by Georges Rouault at Shin and Skarstedt Galleries
Georges Rouault was born in a cellar during the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. His mother had fled underground seeking refuge from explosives. After his birth, she nicknamed him ‘Obus’, meaning artillery shell. Rouault later lived through both world wars and experienced recurring bouts of physical illness and psychological strain. Despite a secular upbringing, an ‘abyss’ of sorrow and solitude led Rouault to convert to Catholicism at the age of 24 – doubling down on faith in a time when many questioned how God could allow such suffering.
It was faith not only in God, but in ambiguity – the belief that suffering might have a reason, even if it remains obscure. Rouault felt compassion for the underprivileged, the wretched and the damned. An exhibition organised by Skarstedt in collaboration with Shin Gallery, the first in New York since a retrospective at MoMA in 1953, displays the full range of his empathy. His favourite subjects, aside from religious ones, were prostitutes and professional clowns – figures firmly on the margins of society. His paintings seem to include every layer that complicates a person’s life: sometimes creating a finely delineated portrait, at other times an indecipherable mess.
The paint in one Pierrot portrait is so densely layered that Rouault seems to have reworked it endlessly atop previous drafts. The forlorn clown faces us with blacked-out eyes and a small mouth. You can feel the artist’s concern for his subject, but, by the final coat, nearly all life is lost in a game of telephone between the layers of paint. Pierrot’s face sags like a lumpy potato, his arms are stiff as logs and the surface of the painting is like a grainy rock face. Rouault has painted the picture to death.
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