Thus, Rouault matters. And yet for a long time he has been ignored. The harsh judgments of such midcentury critics as Clement Greenberg (Rouault's reputation as "the one profoundly religious artist of our time," he wrote, was "one of the embarrassments of modernist art") left his reputation in tatters, and it's only recently, as stricter historical accounts of modernism have started to loosen up, that attempts have been made to salvage his reputation.
I can imagine no more thorough and impressive salvage operation than "Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, 1871-1958" at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art. Organized by Stephen Schloesser, a scholar long immersed in Rouault, and accompanied by an almost 600-page catalog with 34 essays, the exhibition of about 180 works is a production worthy of a major museum.
Rouault emerges from it as difficult to love as ever (Greenberg's judgments were not entirely off the mark) but suddenly so much more interesting and complex than before.
Given the mournful atmosphere of almost all his later imagery, it fits the legend that he should have been born into suffering, during the final days of the Paris Commune of 1871. This attempt to set up a republican democracy ended with 30,000 Parisians being slaughtered by a provisional French government that had reemerged after recently being crushed by invading Prussians.
Dark days for France - and for Rouault's mother, who, according to Ambroise Vollard, later Rouault's dealer, gave birth to Georges in a state of shock after being rushed down to the cellar during a bombardment.
Rouault's childhood was marred by poverty and despair. He was always a loner. As his interest in art developed, thanks in part to a print-collecting grandfather, he found himself drawn to art history's great founts of compassion - Rembrandt in particular - as well as contemporary scourges of social and political injustice, such as the caricaturist Honoré Daumier.
