The Acceptance World
ART
By BRYAN ROBERTSON
• THE Rouault exhibition at the Tate, lovingly assembled, presented with scrupulous pre- cision, is one of the big occasions in the art history of London since the end of the war. You are in the presence of a great master and from the moment you enter his world your thinking, and your vision, are involuntarily purged through the power, at once searing and compassionate, of this drily unsentimental humanist. The way he achieved his vision in terms of paint is en- thralling: human beings translated by Rouault into the hieratic terms of a commedia dell'arte. When Christ appears on the scene he is only too human : a creature of circumstance forced to suffer for his precepts and reduced to the same level as the lawyers and judges, criminals and prostitutes, clowns and refugees who inhabit the rest of Rouault's imagination. Performers with a cruel ringmaster: the weakness of mankind. Rouault's self-portraits show an exceptional awareness, not unlike Rembrandt% : wholly in the world, uncensorious, but with an extra degree of perception which does not allow him to con- done what he observes. This is acceptance and not resignation. Given the terse concentration of twentieth-century French painting as opposed to the amplitude of seventeenth-century Dutch paint- ing, the comparison with Rembrandt is not exces- sive : phlegmatic Gallic composure and Dutch stoicism are not so dissimilar; both men were absorbed by religion and philosophy. Rouault's paintings, and his graphic work, force you to consider these issues. The Arts Council, and John Russell as organiser, has given London a unique experience.
I had not expected to find myself writing in this way. Rouault was sealed off in my memory as an early excitement which I'd outgrown : his vision seemed theatrical, in the wrong sense, restricted to a predictably narrow range of com- position and formal invention which argued a corresponding narrowness of sensibility or digested experience of life. With few exceptions, I have little faith in figurative painting: some new and grand synthesis is required before the fragmentations of modern art can regenerate a tired and debased convention of naturalism. And I mistrust expressionism : its grimacing puppets and grotesque allusions can seem gratuitously self-indulgent, pandering to stupidity instead of transcending it. Distortion in art rests, too often, at distortion in a psychotically deranged manner or else, pace Dubuffet, comes from sophisticated infantilism. My spirits rise when I leave the Japanese wing of any museum and move into the Chinese section : the controlled hysteria of a volcanic, earthquake-ridden island gives place to the deep serenity of an ancient and vast main- land. I want to make these distinctions because I'm afraid that the thought of conventional ex- pressionism (and conditioning to what must seem like extreme simplification in recent art with sensation, of one kind or another, as the only alternative) may dull the anticipation of the art public in its approach to Rouault's work.
There is the additional awkwardness of re- ligion, partly because so much modern religious art is an embarrassing answer to those who long for `a return to the figure,' but mostly because it would be idle to pretend that ortho- dox religion plays a vital, instinctive part in the daily lives of those who spend time looking at art. And Catholicism is one of the main- springs of Rouault's work. Which reminds me of Dr Erich Fromm, the Freudian analyst and philosopher, who remarked the other day on television on the new movement of humanism, steadily gaining ground, in which Marxists, Roman Catholics and Protestants had more in common than not. In the meantime, intellectual critical scrutiny of broadly based religions, faiths or political creeds has little reality outside a narrow sphere: impatience with the possibly archaic aspects of Catholicism, which might make one recoil from a painting, is any intel- lectual's privilege, but it does not affect the millions who have that particular bond in common. Intellectuals question authority. Every- body else looks for it.
Rouault's occasional predilection for a strong black contour and his earlier apprenticeship in stained-glass manufacture have combined to create a legend that he deliberately built up an archaic vocabulary of form. Russell demolishes this notion in his very informative catalogue essay. Rouault's formal sense would have been impossible in any century other than our own; his manipulation of paint and his understanding of what texture could suggest, abstractly and emotionally, is of this moment : his affection for Byzantine art is as useful to consider as Bran- cusi's for pre-Cycladic sculpture. But artistically he was a traditionalist: he found himself part of a tradition and added to it, he was not a revolutionary. Like Turner before him, Rouault straddled two centuries: he was thirty in 1901 and lived until 1958, but, unlike Turner, he did not progress towards intimations of cosmic tragedy and the baleful menace of an industrial- ised society. Rouault inherited these burdens : his Night Landscape of 1907, which I've always called Industrial Landscape, is a sad, if highly dramatic, dawn panorama of workmen as pro- tagonists in the real beginnings of a modern society—something Turner did not see, though his Slave Ship is proof of his concern for its grim foundations. Both artists used red in the same extraordinary way: as the colour of the sun, the blaze of the apocalypse, and as a sign of guilt, doom and blood. Red tempered with black : the painter of the Burial at Sea would have apprehended Rouault's grasp of death as an integral part of life.
Rouault quite rightly mistrusted explanations of paintings by critics: his own writings, inci- dentally, are superbly lucid. One possible remain- ing bogey, however, must be demolished. We are living at a time when there is a strong reaction against the well-made, perfectly composed picture. I don't mean that in attempting to disrupt the weight, tyranny almost, of orthodox construction, complete anarchy is put in its place. The reshap- ing, regenerating process yields its own new conventions. What is `artistic,' however, in an over-suave or predictable way, tends to seem uninteresting. Rouault somehow avoids this trap, even when his painting is frankly decorative, as in the flowers and subjects for tapestries. And if any precon- ceived doubt remains, look at Christ Mocked. of 1912, in the light of Tapia, the dread Dubuffet even, and much recent painting. It is not the sumptuous firework display that we find in other paintings near by, but as a monochrome elegy at several different levels it is a supreme work. Else- where, the painting of the seated figure- in a kitchen, wraith-like in a robustly real interior, gives clear indication of Rouault's psychological penetration when away from obvious satire, and the complex range of his painting.
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