Artnet News

By Min Chen

In Paris at the turn of the century, Georges Rouault began painting boldly Expressionist canvases of deep symbolism and lyricism. He had been mentored by Gustave Moreau, and his circle would soon grow to include the likes of Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas. He exhibited at the infamous 1905 Salon d’Automne, which set Fauvism into motion. His radiant paintings would be snapped up by the French state and Hollywood stars, inspiring artists from Dan Flavin to Bob Dylan. And yet, today, Rouault has largely been forgotten.

A retrospective at Independent 20th Century hopes to change that. Presented by Nahmad Contemporary and Skarstedt, the exhibition brings together 20 works that span Rouault’s career and trace the development of style and vision. Here, visitors will glimpse the “arc of his medium,” Michelle Molokotos, curator at Nahmad Contemporary told me, as much as his devotion to his subjects.

“He was one of the best known, most iconic artists of his time,” she said over a phone call. “It’s pretty wild for him to be less known today—seems like there’s a mismatch. This is a real opportunity for us to share his work, legacy, and distinct take on Modernism.”

Who Was Georges Rouault?

Rouault was born in a cellar in 1871, after his family’s home was destroyed during the Siege of Paris. He grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Belleville, his family struggling to make ends meet. Still, encouraged by his mother and grandmother, a teenage Rouault developed an interest in art and craft. At 14, he was apprenticed to a stained-glass maker, before taking evening classes at the École des Arts Décoratifs. In 1890, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts.

At the historic Paris school, Rouault trained under Moreau, the leading Symbolist painter of the day. Moreau’s revolutionary pedagogy—encouraging his students’ individual styles, urging them to visit the Louvre—would leave its mark on his pupils, who included Matisse, Albert Marquet, René Piot, and Charles Guérin. Among them, Moreau apparently favored Rouault such that upon the master’s death in 1898, the young painter was appointed curator of the Moreau Museum.

Moreau’s passing, though, sent Rouault into a spiral. By then, he had earned nods for his early Symbolist creations—dark, poetic scenes—including a prestigious Prix Chenavard for 1894’s L’Enfant Jésus parmi les docteurs (later his first canvas to be acquired by a state museum). But the artistic and emotional crisis that followed delivered him into a deep isolation. Rouault would later describe this period as “the abyss.”

Light arrived in the form of religion. Rouault converted to Roman Catholicism at the turn of the century, joining a community of artists and intellectuals at Ligugé Abbey who rejected public fashion in favor of creative integrity. A convalescence in Évian in 1902 further refreshed his vision. What ensued marked a turning point for the artist.

“I underwent a moral crisis of the most violent sort,” he later reflected. “I experienced things which cannot be expressed by words. And I began to paint with an outrageous lyricism which disconcerted everybody.”

Rouault Rises

Back in Paris, in a shared studio, Rouault turned to subjects that would preoccupy the rest of his practice: sex workers and circus performers. Rendered with dense and expressive brushstrokes, they emerged on canvas as dramatic figures, suffused by the artist’s deep empathy and tenderness. Though they were marginalized in society, Rouault’s portraits bestowed on them a quiet dignity.

“He felt like he was one of these marginalized individuals and therefore was painting them at a time when no one else was painting them in that light,” Molokotos explained. “His figures appeared redemptive. They were deeply human. He communicated these themes of vice and suffering with great compassion. There was a sense of insightfulness, spirituality.”

In 1903, Rouault became one of the founding members of the Salon d’Automne, which opened at what is now the Petit Palais in Paris. He participated in select editions, none more notorious than the 1905 exhibition, at which a flamboyant Matisse canvas helped usher in Fauvism. At the 1910 show, a dramatic painting by Jean Metzinger would do the same for Cubism.

But Rouault wasn’t there for the acclaim. While his standing grew after World War I on the back of his Expressionist work—he was appointed an Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1924 and embarked on international exhibitions from the ’30s—the artist remained focused on his craft. He delved into printmaking, introduced oils into his palette, and commenced his opus, Miserere, a series of copperplate engravings that reflected on life, misery, and war. He also grew his body of religious scenes, with bold lines and colorwork that recalled panes of stained glass.

Rouault’s disregard for fame, Molokotos pointed out, is embodied in his work for Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet The Prodigal Son. In 1929, the impresario enlisted Rouault to design costumes and backdrops for the Ballets Russes production, only for the artist to endlessly play for time. At some point, however, Diaghilev managed to corral Rouault in a room, insisting he produce something right there. He left, came back, and found the artist had delivered on some loose drawings.

“Rouault left them the drawings and said, ‘Do whatever you want with these.’ He left the room and didn’t even go to the ballet,” Molokotos said. “The guy was really not looking for fame, but he certainly caught it.”

Rouault’s Reach

In the final decade of his life, Rouault continued to be showered with accolades, with retrospectives planned around his 80th year opening in cities from Milan to Tokyo. One such show traveled the United States in 1953, reaching the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—laying the groundwork for America’s embrace of the French painter.

The 1950s saw Rouault collected by actors Gregory Peck, Greta Garbo, and Edward G. Robinson, composers George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, and CBS founder William S. Paley. Replicas of his canvases could be seen on the set of I Love Lucy episodes. Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, who hung Rouault’s Le Saint Suaire (1937) in the foyer of his Bel Air home, apparently found a kindred spirit in the painter, telling François Truffaut in 1966: “Not that I’m comparing myself to him, but old Rouault was content with judges, clowns, a few women, and Christ on the cross.”

Rouault’s fascination with clowns, in fact, might just be why so many performers saw themselves in his canvases, Molokotos said.

“Rouault, as an artist, did see himself as a clown,” she explained. “I do think that aspect of Rouault painting and giving so much of his canvas to these performers had a big sway on why so many iconic figures from the performing arts collected him.”

Artists, too, were beguiled. Dan Flavin was drawn to the religious themes in Rouault’s oeuvre, just as Roy Lichtenstein nodded to Rouault’s compositional strategies in his pre-Pop work. Bob Dylan nursed a long fascination with the French painter—a Rouault poster hung in his Greenwich Village apartment in 1961 (later recreated for the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown)—and his own artworks bear references to Rouault’s techniques.

“Da Vinci paints a blurred picture… An opposing view would be Mondrian and Van Gogh with strict lines that define the volumes of space,” Dylan said ahead his 2016 retrospective. “In the middle somewhere would be Kandinsky and Rouault. And these paintings would probably fall into that category.”

‘An Artist’s Artist’

But from the 1960s onwards, with the art world’s changing tastes and tides, Rouault would gradually be sidelined.

His paintings would see a surge of auction interest in the 1980s and early ’90s—his auction record stands at $1.7 million for the 1938 work Fille de Cirque, achieved in 1990, according to the Artnet Price Database. And his works have recently been exhibited sporadically, including at Boston College in 2008, at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Oregon in 2011, and at the Moritzburg Museum in Germany in 2017. But Rouault’s name today doesn’t have the ring of a Matisse or Picasso; he remains an “artist’s artist,” Molokotos noted.

Case in point: prior to his death in 1958, Rouault set about destroying 315 of his unfinished artworks that he felt he would not live to complete. “My eyes are sore from being awake and from trying to choose the works to burn in front of the notary,” he wrote to a friend.

This commitment to his craft, Molokotos hopes, will be borne out in this latest retrospective, at which Rouault’s delicately drawn portraits will brush up against his dusky landscapes. The outing follows an earlier Rouault show at New York’s Shin Gallery in May and leads into the New York City Ballet’s production of The Prodigal Son, opening in 2026 and featuring the artist’s Fauvist designs. It’s an “excellent cultural moment,” said Molokotos, for a Modern master brushing off obscurity and stepping back into frame.

“He followed his vision, his passion, and this spiritual, humanistic approach. He was so authentic,” she said. “I think that is why these iconic cultural and artistic figures were drawn to him in his day. Today, I would hope that people can taste what those individuals tasted in his lifetime, and pick up on what an impactful, profound artist he was.”

“Georges Rouault” is on view at Casa Cipriani at the Battery Maritime Building, 10 South Street, New York, September 4–7.