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GEORGES ROUAULT
1871 - 1958
Head of a Young Clown c.1937
Oil on paper laid down on canvas.
24 ¾ x 18 1/8 inches: 63 x 46 cms
Provenance: Estate of Artist.
Private Collection.
A Certificate from the Fondation Rouault accompanies this painting.
This poignant work is directly inspired by Rouault’s famous aquatint etching
Qui Ne Se Grime Pas’? [reproduced below]. It is the only clown image to appear in Rouault’s most important graphic work Miserere [Plate 8].
Qui Ne Se Grime Pas has been variously translated as Who Does Not Wear a Mask, and ‘Who Does not Put on Make-up’?
This painting has the same measurement as Qui Ne Se Grime Pas; and may have been painted over its printed image. Rouault similarly painted on other prints, as a starting point for creating a unique, painted image.
Rouault began work on Miserere in 1912 after the death of his much-loved father, a cabinet maker. It portrays man’s inhumanity to man. And the tragedy and futility of war. The 58 plates, reflect the horror of the 1914-18 war, and were completed in 1927.
Miserere is a devastating protest of Goyaesque depth and power. In its particular range of imagery, pathos and emotional intensity it stands, as a graphic work, alone in 20th century art.
‘Miserere’ [Have Mercy] is taken from the Latin version of Psalm 51:
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.
Yet for Rouault, there is also hope. In his poem accompanying Miserere, he wrote:
Tomorrow will be beautiful, said the shipwrecked man before he disappeared beneath the sullen horizon.
And in his poem ‘The Artist’:
Tomorrow will be beautiful he sung tearfully keeping his heart with fervour like a divine host.
Before him the blessed road where the Elect of the Spirit have passed all wounded and dazzled.
He arrived at last! The door of the house is opened without squeaking on its hinges. It was there, the haven of grace.
No one asked him about his last residence, his birth certificate, nor where he ought to go at sunrise.
Rouault loved clowns. He identified completely with them. And many of his clown images are self-portraits. In 1905, he wrote of his encounter with a poor itinerant clown:
That nomadic wagon, parked on the road, the emaciated old horse eating thin grass, the old clown seated on the side of his trailer mending his glittering and colourful costume, the contrast of brilliant, scintillating things made to amuse us and this life of infinite sadness….I clearly saw that the ‘Clown’ was me, it was us… this rich and spangled costume is given to us by life, we are all clowns more or less, we all wear a ‘spangled costume’, but if we are caught unawares, as I surprised the old clown, oh! Then who would dare to say he is not moved to the bottom of his being by immeasurable pity. It is my failing (a failing perhaps…..in any case it is for me an abyss of suffering…) ‘never to allow a person his spangled costume, whether he is a king or an emperor. The man that I have before me, it is his soul that I want to see…and the grander and more exalted in his person, the more I fear for his soul.
And to André Suarès in 1926
My clowns are not so much disposed kings, their laughter is familiar to me, they touch on the insanity of repressed sobs and bitter resignation with which I am well acquainted…Empty gestures and virtuosity with an unfeeling heart are alien to me. What we are we expose so well, without meaning to, or knowing it.
Sometimes one has to smile or even laugh at oneself in order to keep one’s balance. Certain people have often reproached me for this smile, for this internal smile as they call it, which seems to originate from men of the church and from the clown……
I take no pride in stating that I am not of my time, it is not my fault, others are proud of regarding themselves as modernists, but are they? It is easy to stick a label onto goods, in fact only too easy. Form and colour, that is our language….
Much has been written of how Rouault’s apprenticeship to a stain-glass window maker influenced his colours and often heavily outlined forms. But less on how deeply affected he was by the medieval, light-intensified stain-glass images whose artistic, spiritual beauty and power helped inspire faith and hope through the centuries.
The Qui Ne Se Grime Pas clown – created years before this painting – is world-weary, resigned to life’s sadness. His young ‘Descendant’, reflects that sense of tragedy but remains uncrushed. His still unblemished youth; and the beauty and richness of the colours, communicating a quiet hope.