“Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality
in Georges Rouault, 1871-1958″
McMullen Museum, Boston College.
August 30-December 7, 2008
Georges Rouault (1871–1958) has never been a crowd-pleaser. Though he was virtually ignored by the art world for decades, anniversary exhibitions in France, New York, and Boston have reintroduced this challenging artist.
Rouault was born in a cellar during an attack by the Communards against the Germans in Belleville, a working-class district of Paris. As France recovered from the Franco-Prussian war, the country went through a time of intense anticlericalism. Soon afterwards, a cultural reaction against secularism set in; one result was the Christian democratic movement and its push for a socially responsive church. Rouault’s father fervently admired Lamennais, the Breton priest who suffered papal displeasure for his democratic writings, and he passed on this Christian idealism to his son. In fact, the senior Rouault felt so strongly about Lamennais’s censure that he withdrew his son from Catholic school and sent him to a Protestant one.
Against his father’s objections, Rouault began an apprenticeship restoring medieval stained glass. Later, at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, he came under the influence of the Symbolist Gustave Moreau. Rouault venerated his teacher, but ultimately found Symbolism’s emphasis on dreams and the supernatural to be a Romantic dead-end. He said that he preferred “les réalités modestes et simples.” Still, it was in Moreau’s studio that Rouault met the priest from whom he received his first communion in 1897.
By the early twentieth