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Lot Essay
Sold with a photo-certificate from Isabelle Rouault, numbered 309.
"Rouault is able to convey his own religious feelings in painting through colour and pigment along, apart from all representation. Anticipating the redemption of all men through supernatural love, he unites what went before with what is to come after. Certain of his works are stamped with an Old Testament grandeur that is either fiercely patriarchal or cruelly feminine, and the question arises whether we do not have here the remote influence of Gustave Moreau's tiaraed idols. Everything about Rouault is so christian that his choice of one subject or another adds nothing in depth to the uniqueness and truth of his art. 'Everything you do is religious,' Suarès wrote him, 'even your clowns. You present one miserable prositute exactly as she is: she gets only crumbs of sensuality from the banquet table of life... Your faith becomes the less obvious the more ardent it is. You never capitalise on it, never trade on it.'
'This, I believe, sums up Rouault's achievement. He was a painter of inwardness, of the supernatural light that glows in the profoundes depths. He never took God's name in vain. His work is filled with consciousness of God, but also with great pity for his creatures and their unworthiness. To believe is to suffer, according to Rouault, who revealed God in all things - but from within, as a vision, not as an image". (P. Courthion, Georges Rouault, London 1962, pp. 250-1, 348).
"Rouault is able to convey his own religious feelings in painting through colour and pigment along, apart from all representation. Anticipating the redemption of all men through supernatural love, he unites what went before with what is to come after. Certain of his works are stamped with an Old Testament grandeur that is either fiercely patriarchal or cruelly feminine, and the question arises whether we do not have here the remote influence of Gustave Moreau's tiaraed idols. Everything about Rouault is so christian that his choice of one subject or another adds nothing in depth to the uniqueness and truth of his art. 'Everything you do is religious,' Suarès wrote him, 'even your clowns. You present one miserable prositute exactly as she is: she gets only crumbs of sensuality from the banquet table of life... Your faith becomes the less obvious the more ardent it is. You never capitalise on it, never trade on it.'
'This, I believe, sums up Rouault's achievement. He was a painter of inwardness, of the supernatural light that glows in the profoundes depths. He never took God's name in vain. His work is filled with consciousness of God, but also with great pity for his creatures and their unworthiness. To believe is to suffer, according to Rouault, who revealed God in all things - but from within, as a vision, not as an image". (P. Courthion, Georges Rouault, London 1962, pp. 250-1, 348).