Rouault: Seeking the Face of Christ
Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art has mounted a remarkable exhibit, “Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, 1871-1958.” To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death, the Museum has assembled paintings and prints from the Fondation Rouault, from Paris’s Centre Pompidou, from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and numerous other collections.
There is an audio tour, available online here; and the written texts, which accompany the actual objects at the exhibit, are among the clearest and most helpful I have experienced. Though Rouault’s great series of prints, “Miserere et Guerre,” is prominently featured, what makes the exhibit particularly noteworthy is the number of works from the artist’s earliest and later periods, showing vividly both the continuity and newness of his artistic achievement and his spiritual vision.
It is that spiritual vision which most fascinates me and which will certainly draw me back several times to its viewing (the exhibit is in place through December 7th). Let me mention three features of Rouault’s vision that I find especially compelling.
First, Rouault probed with great honesty the theme of self-knowledge and self-deception — hence his fascination with and depiction of the masks we assume.
Second, his appreciative and compassionate rendition of clowns and prostitutes who often realize that they are playing a role, and in this sense, are closer to “redemption.”
Third, amidst the haunted and haunting faces he portrays, Rouault is ever on the watch for the true image of humanity and God: Christ. Thus the importance of the motif of Veronica’s veil, the sign of Christ’s continuing presence, who, in the words of Pascal so dear to Rouault, “is in agony until the end of the world.”
Yet Christ, as the Face of faces, is also sacrament of hope that “this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond … is immortal diamond.”
Thanks for these wonderful relections about Rouault and his art . For a number of reasons, I have needed to learn to not get stuck judging myself solely on the basis of whether I am good or evil. Even at my lowest moments morally, I often had a sense that I might need to go through whatever I was going through for the greater good or for my own personal transformation.
I am 63 years old and my health has been problematic for over 20 years. I have needed to reflect on joy and suffering in order to be able to continue with my own religious and spiritual transformation.
The poet Christian Wiman has become important to me. Wiman has a fatal illness that
might kill him next month or in ten years. In his essay Gazing into the Abyss (can be googled), he tells us about how the prospect of death led him back to poetry and a “hope toward God.”
Michael
“‘It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy,’
Simone Weil writes, ‘in order to find reality through suffering.’ This
is certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those
years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our
existence, and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not
fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means
of confrontation, rather than love. To come to this realization is not
to be suddenly ‘at ease in the world.’ I don’t really think it’s
possible for humans to be at the same time conscious and comfortable.
Though we may be moved by nature to thoughts of grace, though art can
tease our minds toward eternity and love’s abundance make us dream a
love that does not end, these intuitions come only through the earth,
and the earth we know only in passing, and only by passing. I would
qualify Weil’s statement somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it
of this world or another, is not something one finds and then retains
for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and newly lost…”
~ Christian Wiman
Mr. Miller,
Many thanks for your comment; and for sharing Wiman’s words. I do not know him, but, on your recommendation,will look for his work.
Fr. Imbelli,
Over the last few years, I have read many articles that you have written. They have been very helpful day.
Each day is a new day. Like the pslamist tells us, each day creation waits at the threshold to be born again.
“Lord open my lips and let my mouth declare your praise.”