Georges Rouault

"This instinctive movement was not inspired by the influence of the moderns, but by an inner need not to make a conventional religious subject." (Rouault)

Georges Rouault's iconic portrayal follows the Christian tradition in both composition and title, "La Sainte Face," the holy face of Jesus Christ. The work was created in 1939, when Rouault was a mature artist and his art had reached a level of simplification and refinement, where forms were purified and reduced to only the essential. However, Rouault never fully transitioned to abstraction, and his visual world remained figurative and representative. What we see is not an attempt to depict or interpret external reality, but rather we are met with the artist's inner vision of the object, his intellect and emotions.

As a young man, Rouault studied under the symbolist Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts, who made a great impression on Rouault by teaching him to turn to the inner voice; to seek inspiration in religion, philosophy, and spirituality. Rouault remained a devoted Catholic and dedicated artist throughout his life. Art was for him a means of communicating through color and form, and the images were created directly from his imagination and not as a result of observations of the outside world. As a young man, he worked as a stained-glass apprentice and restored church stained-glass windows. The stained-glass window's visual language, with its black outlines and glowing colors, is considered to have influenced his visual language and subject matter, something we can also see in the auctioned work.

Rouault worked contemporaneously with Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism, and although he exhibited with the Fauvists at the beginning of the 20th century, he never joined any movement, but rather worked independently, thus occupying a unique place in 20th-century art. "Art, the art I aspire to, will be the most profound, the most complete, the most moving expression of what man feels when he finds himself face to face with himself and with humanity. Art should be a disinterested, passionate confession, the translation of the inner life, as it used to be in the hands of our admirable anonymous Frenchman who sculpted the figures on the cathedrals." Georges Rouault's own words provide us with an entry into his visual world.

"La Sainte Face" is an exquisite example of Rouault's later artistic career, where the Christ motif became a central part of his creation after 1912, and he created a large number of variations on this recurring theme.