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Born into an impoverished Parisian family, Georges Rouault was apprenticed to a glass painter and restorer at the age of only fourteen. It has been plausibly suggested that the leaded outlines and vibrant colours which Rouault became accustomed to seeing in stained glass production were the source of the heavy black contours and glowing colours which he often adopted in his mature paintings and prints. In 1891 Rouault entered the École des Beaux-Arts where his tutors included the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau who had an early influence upon his work.
In 1905 Rouault exhibited at the Salon d’Automne with several leading artists who collectively became known as the Fauve (Wild Beast) Group. Their leading light was Matisse but the group also included Marquet, Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, Braque and van Dongen. Amongst the distinguishing features of Rouault’s work and Fauvism were vivid vibrant colours, often applied from tubes of paint in broad flat sweeps and spontaneously executed. It was during the decade before the Great War that Rouault developed several distinctive themes in his art including depictions of the circus, prostitutes, law courts and religion.
In 1913 the renowned Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard purchased the whole of Rouault’s artistic output and four years later became his sole agent, setting him up in a studio. During the 1920s and ’30s Rouault received several major commissions from Vollard to provide illustrations for works which have become amongst the most highly regarded of the twentieth century including Les Réincarnations du Père Ubu, Miserère and Passion. In the inter war period Rouault was probably better known internationally for his prints than his paintings, attested by the fact that he held an exhibition of his prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1938 several years before his pictures were shown there. Rouault’s Passion illustrations have been described as having … an intensity of feeling usually equalled only in medieval art, which these plates often recall. |
There is 1 article on Georges Rouault:
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