A striking look at a long-ignored modern master

Along with a series of head portraits of Rouault's key literary and artistic heroes - Charles Baudelaire, Léon Bloy, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau - we get to see three series of prints from these years: etchings and wood engravings to accompany Vollard's satire of French colonialism in Africa, "Reincarnations of Father Ubu"; aquatints to go with a publication of Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil"; and finally, a project dear to Rouault's heart over several decades, a series he called "Miserere et Guerre" ("Have Mercy and War").

It was in this series that Rouault set aside his instinct for caustic social satire and macabre, Baudelairean symbolism and let rip with a deeply felt, fastidiously conceived blast of religion. The images, dark and hieratic, are arranged in twos, threes, and fours and accompanied by text. One triptych, for instance, shows a despairing man, a foolish king, and a forlorn-looking circus performer accompanied, respectively, by the words: "Are we not all slaves?". . . "believing ourselves to be kings." "Who does not wear a mask?"

Rouault returned to painting in the late 1920s - look out here for a hauntingly simple image called "Singer With a White Plume" - and worked on a series of circus performers in 1930 that combined centered, static figures with dull primary colors and dark, fluid outlines.

The colors suddenly brightened in the mid '30s with a tremendous series of color etchings called "The Shooting Star Circus." But to suggest any affinity beyond coincidental association between Rouault and Fauves like Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck seems erroneous to me. The quality of color and the purposes to which it was put are fundamentally at odds. Indeed, with his penchant for heavy black outlines, Rouault never really stops looking like a graphic artist, even in his paintings, which become increasingly claggy and encrusted in the late 1930s.

That said, there are some wonderful works - tough yet beautiful, and utterly distinctive - in this last section of the show, and suggestive links between many of them. Several images of a suffering Christ have deliberate associations with the huge painting called "The Wounded Clown." A portrait of Veronica has the same simplicity and sense of contained beauty as another called "The Italian Woman" (shades of Camille Corot's late portraits of Italian peasants) as well as another, extraordinarily radiant image, made two years before his death, called "Sarah" (after the elderly and childless wife of Abraham who became pregnant despite her great age).

Rouault could certainly be repetitive. There is more ugliness in his oeuvre than beauty, more soul-cramping constriction than liberating expansion. But I came out of this show convinced by the authenticity of his vision, and moved both by his tenacity and his genuine originality.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com