Georges Rouault

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Rouault's residence in Beaumont sur Sarthe

Georges Rouault (born May 27, 1871 in Paris ; † February 13, 1958 there ) was a French painter and graphic artist of the classical modern era . It is difficult to assign a specific school or style, but is generally counted among the artists of the École de Paris . As a co-founder of the Salon d'Automne (1903), he initially belonged to the Fauves , but soon went his own way and became one of the most important representatives of modern religious painting.

Life

education

After an apprenticeship in glass painting from 1885 to 1890 with a restorer for church windows, Georges Rouault attended the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs from 1890 and then the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris . At first he was a student of Elie Delaunay and, after his death in 1891, of his successor, the symbolist Gustave Moreau , whose master student he was from 1892. Around 1901 he stayed for several months with artists and writers around the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans near the Ligugé monastery near Poitiers . The common plan to found a Christian artist community failed due to the secular attitude of the French state.

Years of rebellion

In the first decade of the 20th century, Rouault became one of the leading figures of expressionism in France and in 1903 was one of the co-founders of the Paris Salon d'Automne . His revolutionary painting style was sparked primarily by the eloquent writings of the writer Léon Bloy , who was strongly inspired by Christianity and whom he also met personally. Around 1910, under the influence of the neo-Homist Jacques Maritain and other representatives of the so-called Renouveau catholique , there was a noticeable calming of his painting style, which was also demonstrated by the most recent works at the first solo exhibition in the Parisian gallery Druet in 1910 and by all of his subsequent work Rouaults should shape. In 1913, the renowned art dealer Ambroise Vollard bought all of the pictures in his studio, allowing Rouault to complete the works, which the painter believed were largely unfinished, at his own pace.

The problem of the unfinished / non-finito

However, Rouault, who always struggled with what was accomplished, needed decades to complete the 770 works acquired from Vollard. In addition, in the course of the ongoing close cooperation between painter and art dealer, there were always new, primarily graphic projects, which Rouault also made use of. When Vollard had a fatal car accident on his return from a visit to Pablo Picasso's studio in 1939 , the heirs of the art dealer withdrew the unfinished work from the painter. Rouault subsequently relied on the clause agreed with Vollard on their completion and finally initiated a lawsuit in which he was granted the unrestricted right to these works as his intellectual property in 1947 in view of their special status. The happy outcome of the process, in which the painter compensated Vollard's heirs for the work he had received against the background of his advanced age, marked the beginning of Rouault's late work, which was also characterized by increasing public recognition.

Late recognition

Larger exhibitions and retrospectives took place since the late 1930s and a. in New York , Zurich , Brussels , Paris , Amsterdam , Milan and Jerusalem . After the Second World War , Rouault's productivity experienced another high point. Although the painter destroyed a large part of the unfinished works that had been returned after the trial against Vollard's heirs in a public cremation in 1948, when he died in 1958 there were again over a thousand unsigned pictures in varying degrees of completion in his studio. Almost all of this fund was donated to the French state by the artist's relatives in 1963 and is now in the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris .

To the work

Georges Rouault not only worked as a painter and graphic artist, but also created stage sets, tapestries, stained glass, ceramics and enamel work . His attitude was deeply Christian, and so many of his subjects are determined by Christian themes and issues. After his time at the academy, he initially created religious motifs in the style of medieval church windows as well as based on the works of Leonardo da Vinci , Rembrandt van Rijn and Francisco de Goya . At the turn of the century, like Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , he turned to the subject of prostitutes. The result were expressive images that unadornedly show the viewer the physical and moral misery of those depicted.

Around 1910, following works by Honoré Daumier , court scenes are increasingly found in his pictures. At the same time, his style of painting became calmer in the course of a return from the last used gouache - to oil painting , his application of paint more impasto. Since then, the characteristic connection, reminiscent of glass painting, of powerful, bright colors and the surrounding black contour has been particularly distinctive.

During the close collaboration with Vollard, graphics dominated his work for about two decades from 1917 onwards. Probably the most important work from this period is the graphic cycle "Miserere", whose motifs dealing with the misery of war and refugees were developed shortly after the First World War and were once again very topical when published in 1948 against the background of the experiences of the Second World War . Sheets like " Homo homini lupus " appeared as impressive anti-war images.

When Rouault devoted himself to painting again in the late 1930s, the influence of previous experience as a graphic artist with colored aquatints in illustration works such as “Cirque de l'Étoile filante” (1938) and “Passion” (1939) resulted in one noticeable, almost impressionistic brightening of his palette. The actual late work of Rouault (from 1948) is ultimately determined by an unprecedented material passion, which in literature is often associated with abstract expressionism or its French variety, tachism . The layers of paint, which are often centimeters thick, were founded not least in multiple revisions by the artist, sometimes over years and decades.

Important works by Rouault are now mainly in France , Switzerland , the USA and Japan . Some works were also shown at documenta 1 (1955) and posthumously at documenta II in 1959 in Kassel .

Selection of works

Exhibitions

  • March 19 - June 25, 2017: Alexej Jawlensky | Georges Rouault. Seeing with your eyes closed. Moritzburg Art Museum Halle (Saale)

literature

Web links

Commons : Georges Rouault  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Georges Rouault, Siegfried Gohr, Mia Storch: Georges Rouault: Stadt Köln, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, March 11 to May 8, 1983 , Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle Köln, Kunsthalle Köln, 1983
  2. ↑ To the exhibition Seeing with your eyes closed. ( Memento of the original from October 23, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: stiftung-moritzburg.de, accessed on October 23, 2018 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stiftung-moritzburg.de
personal data
SURNAME Rouault, Georges
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter and printmaker
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 1958
Place of death Paris