Georges Rouault and Material Imagining

Jennifer Johnson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501346101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Künstlermonographien

This book considers questions of materiality and painting, focalized through the notoriously obscure work of Georges Rouault, and offers an innovative critical approach to the various questions raised by this challenging modernist. Described as a difficult and dark painter, Rouault's oeuvre is deeply experimental. Images of the circus emerge from a plethora of chaotic marks, while numerous landscapes appear as if ossified in thick paint. Rouault's work explodes the genre of painting, drawing upon the residue of Gustave Moreau's symbolism, the extremities of Fauvism, and the radical theatrical experiments of Alfred Jarry. The repetitions and re-workings at the heart of Rouault's process defy conventional chronological treatment, and place the emphasis upon the coming-into-being of the work of art. Ultimately, the book reveals the process of making as both a search for understanding and a response to the problematic world of the 20th century.

1

1903–7: Mutilation, Revivification, and Imaginative Play on the Surface

Figure 1.1 Henri Matisse, La Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat), 1905. Oil on canvas, 31 ¾ × 23 ½ in. (80.65 × 59.69 cm) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, bequest of Elise S. Haas. Photograph Ben Blackwell. © Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 1.2 Georges Rouault, Fille accoudée (Minauderie ou l’Entremetteuse) [Woman at a Table (The Procuress)]. 1906. Watercolour and pastel on cardboard, 12 1/8 × 9 1/2 in. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Rouault, Georges, 1871–1958 © ARS, NY.(See Colour Plate 1.)

In 1905 and 1906, within a year of Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (1905) [Figure 1.1], Georges Rouault produced several images of a woman in a large hat.¹ Exemplary of these, Fille accoudée (1906) [Figure 1.2] depicts a woman in a hat as extravagant as that of Mme Matisse in Femme au chapeau. But where Matisse’s figure turns to face the viewer, Rouault’s is in profile, and while Matisse’s subject is a fashionably dressed woman, Rouault’s subject is of a lower class (indicated by the use of ‘fille’ instead of ‘femme’) and is rendered in exaggerated terms; she is both voluptuous and grotesque in comparison to Mme Matisse. The particular emphasis upon the hat – an object of interest only in terms of exterior appearance – shows a similar impulse towards the decorative, which in each work is extrapolated by the insistent visibility of crudely applied paint, simplified contour, dislocated patches of colour, and empty areas of ground that rupture either work’s claim to be a record or transcription of the artist’s vision or impression.

That is not to say that representation is abandoned, but that the imitative representation of the perceived world or, as in the case of Impressionism, the imitation of the process of the perception of the external world, is replaced by the re-creation or creation of a world in paint. This active creative process represents the disruption between the artist’s vision and what is laid down in paint on canvas. There is, still, an external referent, but its trace in these paintings jostles on the surface of the work with the presence of the activity of painting itself.

Matisse’s Femme au chapeau is dominated by exuberant colour that has little mimetic function. The opposition of the blue-green line on the right of the nose and the yellow mark on the tip of the nose retains something of the use of blue and yellow complementaries to indicate light and shade and thus gives rough shape to the nose. But the patches of blue and yellow to the left of the head have no such relationship and do nothing to form a figure-ground relationship, but instead appear as the extended patch-work of the marks and slabs of colour that make up the figure. Similarly, while the direction of the blue brush strokes on the fan suggests something of its form, they are first and foremost brutish painterly marks. For several years before this work, Matisse had been experimenting with late-Impressionist mark-making, and with Neo-Impressionist idioms, especially Pointillism.² But Matisse’s work is better understood as a taking-apart of the dense logic of the Neo-Impressionist surface, in which the repetitive painted daubs cohere as a representation of optical perception. In Matisse, these daubs become more explicit and individual, taking on, as they do in Femme au chapeau, different directions and patterns that explode the coherence of the surface. What is left on the surface in Femme au chapeau are the remnants of formerly signifying schemas, laid out in a manner that takes the construction of painting itself seriously and, as Alastair Wright has argued, both enables the artist to translate the intensity of his vision of the world into paint and intensifies the viewer’s visual experience.³

Apparent disorder, and the intensification of visual experience, is also key to Rouault’s work, and it is similarly borne out of the explicit presence of painterly activity that threatens to overcome representation entirely. But here Rouault’s version departs radically from Matisse. If the surface of Femme au chapeau is dominated by dislocated colour, the surface of Fille accoudée is a chaos of black marks, bare ground, slashes and patches of white, blue, and red. This dark chaos becomes emblematic of the gritty, socially obscured world that is Rouault seeks to represent here. Where Matisse's subject is a static bearer of unpacked signifiers, the effect of Rouault’s surface is dynamic, but the dynamism belongs to the marks which interrupt each other with no deference to delineations or forms. Thus the marks that indicate the hat merge with those that indicate doorways, posters and a table – a mergence that denies any sense of depth and keeps the whole scene caught in the tangle of dense black marks. At an initial glance, line almost seems to have returned as a guiding principle,⁴ but while there are fragments of line such as the caricatural sweep that defines the arm being leant upon, and the exaggerated curvature of the upper body, this is line at its limits. Line here is fragmented beyond a Cézanne-like outline, thickened, and gestural in the manner of a brush mark or patch of colour. Far from Matisse’s exuberant colours, materially these black marks are, as Matisse’s marks are, colour as matter – densely applied, textured by their own physical properties and those of the materials they are laid upon, and are, in themselves, formless.

Painterly activity in Matisse’s work means the manipulation of oil paint on canvas; for Rouault in Fille accoudée it encompasses watercolour washes, the application of black ink with a brush, and the use of pastels to draw roughly, to scribble colour, and rubbed to create patches. The media collide, their differing constitutions at odds with each other in places – the rough marks of the pastel drawn across paper intensified over dried wash, and elsewhere pastel under wash that is muddied but refuses to merge with watercolour. J-K Huysmans, with whom Rouault spent several months at Ligugé in 1901, described Edgar Degas’s practice in 1880 in terms that might have been written specifically about Rouault’s early twentieth-century work: Degas, wrote Huysmans, ‘had to borrow from all the vocabularies of painting, combine all the various elements of solvent and oil, watercolour and pastel, distemper and gouache, to forge colour neologisms and break down the accepted organization of subjects’.⁵

This breaking and forging, or what Klaus Dirschel has called ‘the creative-destructive task of finding meaning’,⁶ is key to both Rouault’s and Matisse’s search through practice for new and individually crafted vocabularies – something they had both been encouraged to do by their tutor, Gustave Moreau, at the École des Beaux-Arts. Huysmans’s reference to ‘neologisms’ is right, and the critics’ baffled response confirmed the difficulty the first viewers had in comprehending the terms these painters were proposing. Both Femme au chapeau and Fille accoudée contain the remnants of other idioms, but where in Matisse’s work signification is stymied by those remnants that are eloquently poised between a profound engagement with forms of vision and a celebration of the painted surface laid open in all its working; the dynamism of Rouault’s surface indicates a revivification of the mutilated fragments of other vocabularies.

Exactly what is revivified and mutilated, and to what effect, on the material-strewn surfaces of Rouault’s work, is the subject of this chapter, particularly in relation to contemporary thinking about painting and to other avant-garde practices. I will focus on works made between 1903 and 1907, a period in which Rouault’s work was understood to have undergone a dramatic change from his previous work, in terms of both breaking with a Moreau-like Symbolism and turning to a more contemporary subject matter. It is also the period in which Rouault experiments with this particular kind of engagement with former vocabularies within a chaotic surface – by 1910, his work began to change again, but an understanding of the construction of these early surfaces as a commitment to narrative through the stuff of painting is key to understanding how Rouault reimagines painting in the twentieth century in material terms.

Rouault had joined the École des Beaux-Arts in the early 1890s, following an apprenticeship with Tamoni and Hirsch, makers and restorers of stained glass, and having attended evening classes at the École des Arts Décoratifs. He initially entered the studio of Elie Delaunay at the École des Beaux-Arts, but within a year of Rouault’s enrolment Delaunay was succeeded by Moreau – an appointment that was deeply significant to Rouault, both artistically and personally. Moreau encouraged his students to learn from the old masters, but at the same time to experiment with colour and the application of paint in pursuing their own, individual vision. They also visited numerous exhibitions and were aware of contemporary art and its various developments. Furthermore, Moreau’s own work was increasingly experimental, and this chapter will discuss the importance of his late work – unseen until after his death – for Rouault. Through Moreau, Rouault also encountered Symbolism, which arguably, in its heightened awareness of the split between the painted or written unit and the signified to which it points or reaches, is the background to the kind of experimentation found in the work of Matisse and Rouault. As this and the following chapters will imply, Rouault did not simply break with Symbolism after Moreau’s death (an event which affected him profoundly), but rather went on to have a nuanced and prolonged engagement with the movement.

The works that Rouault exhibited between 1903 and 1907 seemed to the critics to represent a complete change from his work as Moreau’s student. And it is true, that in earlier works such as L’Enfant Jésus parmi les docteurs (1894) [Figure 2.4], Rouault seemed to be working in a Moreau-like idiom that was well-received. As well as the increasingly brutal materiality of his surfaces, it was also the case that Rouault’s subject matter changed from scenes seemingly detached from contemporary life to a dark vision of modernity that included circus figures and prostitutes. These subjects sit somewhere between realism and allegory, and were interspersed with images of Christ treated in the same heavily painted manner. After Moreau’s death Rouault also moved from exhibiting in the official Salons, or at Sâr Péladan’s final Rose+Croix exhibition in 1897, to the avant-garde spaces of the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants.

At the same time, Rouault’s dark works have usually been viewed as distinct from the work of his contemporaries, such as Matisse. In this chapter I want to show that Rouault’s engagement with other forms of expression – from Gustave Courbet’s realist impasto to Daumier’s ironic line and Cézanne’s contour – originated in a preoccupation shared with the likes of Matisse with finding new forms of expression from within painting itself. Viewing Rouault in this light is important because it departs from the common approach to his work as an isolated canon and the tendency to try to understand the vision of the painter independently of his work, and then to apply that vision as a key to the works.⁷ I want to present Rouault first and foremost as a painter whose vision is worked out through practice, and thus what he has to say and how he says it are inextricable. It is, then, his increasing attention to his materials, his experiments in with mixed media, and his brutish laying-bare of the workings of his practice that in themselves speak to a new negotiation between meaning and the matter that must carry it.

All of which is not to ignore what is differently complex about Rouault’s work from that of his contemporaries, including his continued interest in narrative, hinted at even in the subtitle to Fille accoudée, ‘Minauderie ou l’Entremetteuse’, the added detail of which implies that Rouault is trying to lay hold of more than the decorative experiment that is Femme au chapeau. And there is Rouault’s dark palette, which goes against the impressionist and neo-impressionist assumption of light as the organizing principle of painting, and which seemed, for the original critics, to make the explicit daubs and patches of paint matter on his surfaces more objectionable even than the ‘ugly smears’ of Matisse’s materiality.⁸

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‘Oh, you painter of darkness, what a distr...