Art: Monk’s Myths

The title of the sombrest painter now alive, which is a considerable distinction, belongs by general consent to Georges Rouault. Born shortly after a shell knocked his mother out of bed during the Paris insurrection of 1871, Rouault was first apprenticed to a maker of stained glass, later became the favorite pupil of the academic painter, Gustave Moreau. Since Moreau’s death in 1897, pale, clerkish Georges Rouault has lived a mystic, melancholy life. Every day he goes to the little Moreau museum, of which he is curator, near the Gare St. Lazare, often lunches violently with his old friend, Ambroise Vollard, returns to a mysterious home to paint, in brutal black outline, with dark glowing reds and blues like medieval stained glass, figures of clowns and sufferers from his imagined ”legendary countries.”

This week this “monk of modern art” was shown in a new aspect to the U. S. public when Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art exhibited 150 lithographs, etchings and wood engravings produced by Rouault in the past 20 years. Many had not been shown anywhere before. Most were done at the instance of Vollard for that publisher’s fiercely faithful and interminably delayed de luxe editions. Several magnificent portraits were included: of Moreau, Verlaine, Baudelaire. In the color etchings art followers found new, bright colors, strange to Rouault, as if medieval gaiety were entering his medieval gloom. But the most impressive etchings were a series, Miserere et Guerre, in which Rouault’s myth-figures expressed the spiritual degradation and agony of War. Typical example: Homo Homini Lupus, “Man is a wolf to man” (see cut p. 43).