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HUM106: Experience of Modern Art

Week3 Discussion Question

Part 1:

Preparation 

At the turn of the 20th century, Georges Rouault’s art underwent profound change as a result of a shift in his moral and religious outlook.

In Chapter 5 of your text:

· Read “Religious Art for a Modern Age: Georges Rouault,” pages 100–101. (see below)

· View Rouault's Jesus Reviled, above, and in Figure 5.17 on page 101.

Please respond to the following in a post of 150 to 200 words:  

· Describe your reaction to Jesus Reviled in light of Rouault's profound interaction with the culture of his time. In your response be sure to consider: 

. How do an artist's religious or moral beliefs affect the art he or she produces?

. How do your religious or moral beliefs affect the way you see Rouault's Jesus Reviled?

In a post of 60 to 75 words, please respond to at least one other post. Choose to respond to those who have few or no responses.

Here are three articles on religion and modern art

Does modern art hate religion?": https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140602-does-modern-art-hate-religion

Religion is alive and well in contemporary art: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/religion-is-alive-and-wel_b_5676134

A brief history of religion and art:https://www.cnn.com/style/article/religion-art-controversy/index.html

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Page 100

Religious Art for a Modern Age: Georges Rouault

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) exhibited three works in the Fauve Salon of 1905 and thus is associated with the work of the group, although his paintings were not actually shown in the room with theirs. Throughout his long and productive career, Rouault remained deeply religious, deeply emotional, and profoundly moralistic. He came from a family of craftsmen, and he himself was first apprenticed to a stained-glass artisan, an experience that would have a lasting effect on his work. In the studio of Gustave Moreau he met Matisse and other future Fauves, and soon became Moreau’s favorite pupil, for he followed most closely Moreau’s own style and precepts.

By 1903 Rouault’s art, like that of Matisse and others around him, was undergoing profound changes, reflecting a radical shift in his moral and religious outlook. Like his friend the Catholic writer and propagandist Léon Bloy, Rouault sought subjects to express his sense of indignation and disgust over the evils that, as it seemed to him, permeated bourgeois society. The prostitute became his symbol of this rotting society. Rouault invited prostitutes to pose in his studio, painting them with attributes such as stockings or corsets to indicate their profession. Absent from Rouault’s treatment of this subject is either the detachment of Degas or the sympathetic complicity of Toulouse-Lautrec. His contortion of the figure and aggressive handling result in a decidedly bleak view of Paris’s demi-monde.

Rouault’s moral indignation further manifested itself, like Daumier’s, in vicious caricatures of judges and politicians. His counterpoint to the corrupt prostitute was the figure of the circus clown, sometimes the carefree nomad beating his drum, but more often a tragic, lacerated martyr. As early as 1904 he had begun to depict subjects taken directly from the Gospels—the Crucifixion, Jesus and his disciples, and other scenes from the life of Christ. He represented the figure of Christ as a tragic mask of the Man of Sorrows, deriving directly from a crucified Christ by Grünewald or a tormented Christ by Bosch. Rouault’s religious and moral sentiments are perhaps most movingly conveyed in a series of fifty-eight prints, titled Miserere, commissioned by his dealer Vollard (whose heirs the artist later had to sue to retrieve the contents of his studio) (fig. 5.17). For years, Rouault devoted himself to the production of the etchings and aquatints of Miserere (Latin for “Have Mercy”), which were printed between 1914 and 1927, but not published until 1948, when the artist was seventy-seven. Some of the images and accompanying text are forthrightly Christian, while others can be interpreted more broadly as commentaries on contemporary social conditions and World War I, recalling Goya’s earlier series Disasters of War (see fig. 1.7). Technically, the prints are masterpieces of graphic compression. The black tones, worked over and over again, have the depth and richness of his most vivid oil colors

The characteristics of Rouault’s later style are seen in The Old King (fig. 5.18). The design has become geometrically

5.17

Georges Rouault, Jesus Reviled, from Miserere, 1914–27. Aquatint, etching, drypoint. Sewanee: The University of the South Special Collections, Permanent

Collection, and University Archives, Tennessee.

5.18

Georges Rouault, The Old King, 1916–36. Oil on canvas, 30¼ × 21¼” (76.8 × 54 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

abstract in feeling, and colors are intensified to achieve the glow of stained glass, a medium with which he was familiar from his early apprenticeship. A thick black outline is used to define the rather Egyptian-style profile of the king’s head and the square proportions of his torso. Paint is applied heavily with the underpainting glowing through, in the manner of Rembrandt. Rouault also captures some of Rembrandt’s mood in this serene image of a world-weary ruler, who clutches a flower in his hand, one of the few traces of white in the entire painting. Although Rouault never entirely gave up the spirit of moral indignation expressed in the virulent satire that marked his early works, the sense of calm and the hope of salvation in the later paintings mark him as one of the few authentic religious painters of the modern world.