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Rouault:
"End of Autumn,"(1948-52), Private Collection, Paris;
"Girl at Mirror,"(1906), National Museum of Modern Art, Paris
"Intimate Memories,"(1926), lithography;
"Miserere - The Hard Thing of Living,"(1922), etching
Van Gogh:
"Wheat Field with Crows," (1890), Vincent van Gogh National Museum, Amsterdam |
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Dr. Chen finished this painting in a vehemence of quick expression under the inspiration
of the subject and the new material: the acrylic daylight fluorescent colors.
Taking a photography of Rouault
in his studio to serve as a model, Chen arranged for him to appear in Van Gogh's studio,
together with a woman. Rouault had painted
this model, a naked prostitute, in 1906" "La Fille an Miroir," a work which
announced the artist's newfound concern for the human condition.
Born in a cave during the
bombardment of Paris in the year of la Commune in 1871, Georges-Henri Rouault was an
ascetic hermit in his everyday life and artistic creation.
He studied under Gustave Moreau at l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Matisse,
Marquet, Manguin, Camoin and others - the future protagonists of Fauvism. Yet though surrounded by such inspiring artists,
Rouault single-mindedly pursued his own style, concentrating on Biblical motifs and the
religious themes of original sin and redemption. Rouault
did not participate in the ongoing artistic explorations of new plastic expression and new
vocabulary of colors and forms; he also turned away from the optimistic bourgeoisie
society of the "belle epoque." Rather,
he engaged himself in attacking the injustice and the hypocrisy of the time, through his
selected themes: clowns, pierrots, girls, judges, Christ, the abandoned, the poor, the
miserable, etc. Rouault presented his
marginalized subjects as they strived towards moral aspirations, sometimes with a satiric
touch, but always with a laborious rendering in thick colors and strong black contours to
catch the very essence of an inner light, a spiritual sublime. Even Rouault's landscapes are reduced to their
structural extreme where a few thick black outlines reveal a house, a horse, a tree, a
road, and some figures under a brilliant sun, bathed in holy light!
In "Georges Rouault Using Van
Gogh's Studio," T.F. Chen, also an alummus of l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, poured
fluorescent acrylic colors upon the canvas, designing form s with sketchy lines,
transforming Van Gogh's room into a melodrama. The
austere master is there, dressed in white monk-like robes, turning his head away from the
girl on the bed, who can be said to represent degraded European society deep in the
pursuit of pleasure and power. The acid
colors of the painting seem to fight each other, dominated by the heavy pink whiteness of
the naked body. Behind the lady on the wall,
hangs a portrait of Verlaine, a cursed mystic poet of time , and a distorted figure in
black, both from Rouault's gravure. In the
wide-open window, a landscape of Roualult's appears: "End of Autumn" (1984-52). Beneath the window, a bouquet a la Rouault sits
upon the table near a blazing fireplace. The
reddish flame from the fire-place serves as the igniting point as well as the stabilizing
color-block of the painting. Van Gogh was
absent too, leaving only a duplicate of his "Wheat Fields with Crows"(1890) upon
the wall. Being religious and ascetic of a
sort himself, Vincent perhaps preferred to take a walk outside so as to respect the
privacy that Rouault needed.
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