Rouault’s Mystic Masque 1 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

Usually when my husband and I make our monthly 400-mile trip to play with our granddaughters, we just hang out at their home. But on the last trip, we went a day early so we could visit the special exhibit of Georges Rouault’s paintings at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art (ending on December 7).

I think it was in ImageUpdate that I learned of the exhibit. And as soon as I learned of it, I knew I had to go. Rouault moves me to meditative silence, awe, heartbreak, and gratitude all at once. But in the small city where I live, our museum has only one tiny original painting of his. Otherwise, I’ve had to get to know Rouault through prints in books.

What elicits that complex of emotions from me is Rouault’s profoundly humble, profoundly Christian vision. During most of his career (about the first 6 decades of the twentieth century), Christianity was scorned by the dominant secular society—and certainly by the art world in which Rouault was trying to make his way. Yet he couldn’t paint his figures other than as he truly saw them: all the demeaned prostitutes and sad clowns as figures of Christ himself, reviled and mocked in his own day.

And then there are Rouault’s nearly countless figures of Christ himself. Not surprisingly “Christ Mocked” is a frequent subject. But even more frequent are Rouault’s faces of Christ, the image on Veronica’s veil as Rouault imagines it. Outlined in Rouault’s characteristic heavy black, the faces look at us with an indefinable mixture of sadness, love, and triumph.

Especially moving are sequences where Rouault paints an anonymous throw-away person (in the society’s power structure’s terms)—a criminal or vagabond—then later in the sequence paints Christ in exactly the same posture.

Or the nighttime scenes of a country road with a few small figures, lit by the moon and by the figure of Christ accompanying them.

In one chapter of a book I’m now writing, I pair Auden and Rouault as two grand twentieth century creators who refused to let the era’s dominant secularism pull them away from their solid Christian visions. Auden, as I see him, was the great twentieth century artist to castigate our self-willed isolation from one another and from God. Rouault was the great twentieth century artist to move us toward overcoming this isolation and reclaiming coherence in God’s love.

Another way of putting it might be to say that Auden makes us see how we deny our common humanity in Christ, while Rouault draws us toward a renewal of this common humanity. Rouault shared Auden’s dismay at our human propensity to cut ourselves off from God and from human community. Like Auden, Rouault holds a mirror to our self-imposed human brokenness. But in Rouault’s paintings, something else is mirrored as well: the compassion of an infinitely merciful God. What Rouault manages to do in his art is to move us to look at others’ pain with the eyes of divine compassion—to look at it and see it as our own.

Rouault was articulate in talking about the ground and goal of his art. Here’s a sample from a letter to friend:

Ever since the end of one lovely day when the first star to shine in the sky clutched at my heart, I can’t say why, unconsciously, I have derived from this instant an entire system of poetics. That gypsy wagon standing on the side of the road, the emaciated old horse grazing on the thin grass, the aging clown sitting beside his wagon mending his bright, multicolored costume—this contrast between brilliant, scintillating things intended to amuse us, and this infinitely sad life…. Then, I expanded it all. I saw clearly that the ‘clown’ was myself, ourselves…almost all of us…that this rich, spangled costume is given us by life, we’re all of us clowns, more or less, we all wear a ‘spangled costume’…. Who would dare to claim that he is not moved to his very depths by immeasurable pity.

Amen.