The Glow of Compassion

THE 20th Century has known just one great religious artist: the 82-year-old French recluse, Georges Rouault. Moody and mystical by nature, Rouault strives to paint not the pleasing but the sublime, and he scorns the world's opinions. Yet inevitably the world is catching up with him. Far from Rouault's obscure Paris apartment last week, the Los Angeles County Museum was staging a full-scale retrospective of his vast lifework. Included were 50 paintings from an exhibition arranged by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, plus 39 more borrowed from local collectors, and 72 prints. The survey proved that Rouault's powers have steadily matured throughout his life and that he is now painting better than ever.

Trapping the Terrible. Rouault's start was as violent as much of his painting has been; he was born in a cellar during the bombardment of Paris in the 1871 insurrection of the Commune. A poor boy. he started work at 14 in a stained-glass factory. The experience helped shape his art. in which the world gleams like colored bits of broken bottles. At 20, Rouault quit his job to study painting at the feet of a sympathetic academician named Gustave Moreau, who gave him solid training and a word of hard advice: "Give thanks to God that you are not successful until as late as possible. Only thus will you be able to experiment freely and without restraint."

Rouault, who had been a highly academic student, started experimenting with a vengeance, trapping lumpish whores, leering judges and miserable clowns in slashes and fat smears of hot dark paint. Outrage seemed his inspiration and Daumier his master. He sold practically nothing until he was past 40; even his friends found him unbearably perverse. Writer Leon Bloy, who had converted Rouault to Catholicism, put it bluntly: "You have a hideousness in your head."

Then Dealer Ambroise Vollard began promoting him and Rouault's reputation grew. His art was growing even faster; it lost the taint of caricature and took on the glow of compassion. Religious paintings became his most important work. At first, pure torment was what they conveyed. Then slowly Rouault imbued them with infinitely weary, infinitely tender peace. The same peace flooded his harsh landscapes, and his clowns ceased to be merely pathetic; they became almost Christlike.

Painting the Dawn. As the years lengthened, Rouault's palette brightened. A precarious-seeming serenity is now his prevailing mood. Some of his most recent figures, such as The Dreamer (page 69), even dare the beginnings of a smile. "I have spent my life painting twilights," Rouault says, "so I ought to have the right now to paint the dawn."

Whether Rouault's art will be honored in future as it is now is obviously anyone's guess. His deceptively coarse technique smacks of archaism; it derives partly from Romanesque sculpture and partly from Gothic stained glass. He has not enlarged the bounds of art but only formed an eclectic, intensely personal method of expressing himself. Rouault's paintings are as rich in color as Byzantine mosaics, but less clearly conceived, and as deep in human feeling as Rembrandt's illustrations of the Bible, but less fully developed. Yet the fact that such comparisons are possible at all indicates the old man's genius.

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