Rouault Poem by gershon hepner

Reproducing with ubiquity
clowns and prostitutes,
Rouault sees iniquity
grow from religious roots,
and climb the leprous wall behind
the virtues that are hidden
by vices that for humankind
are fatally forbidden.

His lyricism was outrageous,
preferring misfit, vagabond,
to princes, preachers, saints and sages,
seeing in the demi-monde,
like Daumier, Goya, and Toulouse-
Lautrec the source of more
salvation than moral views
that make a man a bore.


Michael Kimmelman reviews an exhibition of the work of Georges Rouault at a Manhattan Gallery (“Georges Rouault: Judges, Clowns and Whores”) (Mitchell-Innes & Nash) (“Revisiting Rouault’s Stained-Glass World, ” NYT, May 29,2007) :
You wouldn’t call it a full-fledged revival, but Georges Rouault is back in our sights. A few months ago some of his work was at the Metropolitan Museum in a show about his wily dealer, Ambroise Vollard. Now a couple of dozen pictures are at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. At one time Rouault’s reputation rivaled Matisse’s, and his clowns and prostitutes were as ubiquitously reproduced as Ben Shahn posters. He had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 and 1953; when he died in 1958, at 87, the French government organized a state funeral. Then he slipped down the memory chute. The French expression “jolie-laide, ” applied to women whose beauty is of the unconventional sort, applies to Rouault too, which half explains his vanishing. He’s an acquired taste. Clement Greenberg called him middlebrow. That was the other half of the explanation. Greenberg had a point. The lesser works are overripe and formulaic. They’re hard to love for generations that have come of age since the 1950s. The art has a sanctimony and sincerity that resonated after the war but came to seem dated in an art world besotted by American Pop and bling. But this gallery show covering his long career invites us to reconsider his virtues. On the heels of the Met exhibition, where he left a vivid impression, its timing is good. Rouault was never chic: he was too moral, too religious, too tender, too popular. But at his best he was touchingly strange, and a model of integrity…
His own phrase was “outrageous lyricism.” With his early, dashing brush marks, he created the appearance of spontaneity — which was partly a lie, since he repeated the same images and emotions over and over — but which gave his work its appearance of raw, expressive energy, akin in fervor to that of German Expressionists like George Grosz or Max Beckmann. He said he saw his role as “the silent friend of those who labor in the barren field, the ivy of eternal misery climbing the leprous wall behind which rebellious humanity hides its virtues and its vice.” His subjects were mostly misfits and vagabonds, and his natural forebears in social commentary were Goya and Daumier. He believed in the impieties of modern art as the most effective language of the day, yet was also deeply spiritual and revered the radical Catholic writer Léon Bloy, who recognized the inherent contradiction in Rouault’s position and didn’t much like his work.

5/29/07