STRASBOURG.- The Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art presents Georges Rouault - Form, Color, Harmony, on view through March 18, 2007. Georges Rouault (1871-1958) trained alongside Henri Matisse in Gustave Moreau’s studio at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts. After a brief and rather strange academic period, Rouault developed a highly personal idiom based on a spiritual understanding both of art and of the world. He was among the founding members of the 1903 Salon d’Automne; however, he kept his distance with contemporary artistic movements such as Fauvism, and explored themes of his own in his characteristic personal manner, all incisive lines and dark colours. His oeuvre is peopled with Girls, Clowns and Judges, a fantastical portrait gallery redolent of social satire and revolt, an exploration of the boundaries of painting and of the human soul.

During the nineteen-twenties and ‘thirties, Rouault collaborated closely with art merchant Ambroise Vollard, the discoverer and champion of Cézanne. Vollard encouraged Rouault to try his hand at etching and the illustration of books such as the Reincarnations of Father Ubu, the Passion and the Miserere, the latter of which is one of the greatest artistic achievements created in the wake of the First World War. By the late nineteen-thirties, Rouault was painting more and more so-called “Christian landscapes”, which are colourful and radiant visions of an ideally harmonious and serene world.

This retrospective hosted by the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is the first major exhibition of Rouault’s works since the one held in 1971 at the National Museum of Modern Art (Palais de Tokyo). This retrospective bears the subtitle “Form, colour, harmony”, a formula with which the artist liked to describe the fundamentals of his art. It will shed some light on an artist whose broad range of pictorial investigation and highly original expressionism had a huge impact on twentieth-century art.

The exhibition features works in all the various techniques and media used by the artist, including watercolour, oils, etching and ceramics, highlighting the dynamism and diversity of his output. Around a hundred works loaned by prestigious public and private collections make up the core of this exhibition; they cover every period of Rouault’s oeuvre. In the first room of the exhibition there is a display of documents, letters, original exhibition catalogues, and photographs, which will serve to introduce Rouault the man. The main exhibition room holds the fifty-eight engraved plates of the Miserere, the artist’s masterpiece. Its subjects are echoed in the paintings hung in the adjoining rooms, each of which focuses on one of the artist’s recurrent themes: girls, courtrooms, circuses, suburbia and landscape. The last room features unfinished works, which were donated to the National Museum of Modern Art by the artist’s relatives in 1963; this section will help shed light on the successive stages of the artist’s creative process.

A 320-page catalogue will be published on the occasion of this exhibition. It will include contributions by Eric Darragon, Emmanuel Pernoud, Angela Lampe, Jean-Paul Morel, Camille Giertler, Emmanuel Guigon and Fabrice Hergott, as well as an anthology of Rouault’s writings and hithertounpublished documents. Both the exhibition and the catalogue were made possible thanks to the support of the Rouault foundation.