Mystic Masque : Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, 1871-1958

by Schloesser, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9781892850140
• ISBN10: 1892850141
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-09-15
• Publisher: Boston College Museum of Art

Summary

In the fifty years since Georges Rouault's death, his paintings have fallen from the heights of popularity in the 1940s and 50s to the depths of neglect in recent years. The publication ofMystic Masque, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art, will introduce a new generation to the work of a modern master. This catalogue features lavish illustrations of the outward "masks" that Rouault employedthose of circus players, prostitutes, judicial figures, and even the face of Christ. Rouault's work, as presented here, depicts the human condition as a kind of pageant or guise where outward appearancesfrom those of the wealthiest public officials to the lowliest slum-dwellersmisrepresent and betray deeper realities. Essays by scholars of art history, history, theology, and other fields lend an interdisciplinary context to the striking images, recovering Rouault's rightful place in modern painting.

Author Biography

Stephen Schloesser is an associate professor of history at Boston College. He is the author of Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933.

 

 

Table of Contents

Preface

Voltaire and Veronica, Symbolist-Realist Judgment

1871-1901

1871-1901: Realism, Symbolism, Mystic Modernism

The Refuge of Art: Gustave Moreau and the Legacy of Symbolism

Erasing Time and Place: Rouault and "Medieval" Art

1902-1920

1902-1920: The Hard Metier of Unmasking

Georges Rouault: Action Painter

Rouault and the Dynamics of Self-Deception

Tears at the Heart of Spectacular Paris: Rouault's Prostitutes

1908/2008: Rouault's Whore, Freud's Gender-bent Judge, and Unmasking as Infinite Regression

1921-1929

1921-1929: Jazz Age Graphic Shock

Notes on the Miserere plates exhibited in Mystic Masque

"Spleen and Ideal in Strife": Rouault's Baudelaire, 1918-1927

The Aesthetics of Shock: Baudelaire, Benjamin, Rouault

Rouault's Dying Slave: Being Human as an Unfinished Work

Rouault and Expressionism

Pere Ubu: Archetype of Social Dysfunction

The Mystery of Rouault's Reincarnations: A Sixteen-Year Obsession

The Colonial Scourge: Pere Ubu from the Brazza Mission to the Paris Exposition Coloniale

Technique and Space in the Miserere

1929-1939

1929-1939: Mystic Masque, Hieratic Harmony

Hieratic Grandeur: Weightless World, Hidden Order, Magnifying the Modest, 1930-1943

In Deed and in Need: the Friendship in Art of Georges Rouault and Andre Suares

Andre Suares, Passion (excerpts)

1940-1958

1939-1958: Perpetual Peregrinus: Toute vue des choses qui n'est pas etrange est fausse

French Resistance: Rouault's Partisan History of the Modern

The Mask of Villon: Neo-Medievalist Realism in Rouault's Divertissement

"Pilgrim of art": Artistic Autonomy and Christian Commitment in Rouault's Late Work

Lacrymae rerum: Creative Intuition of the Transapperent Reality

Creating Rouault's Legacy, 1945-1965: Commander in the Legion d'honneur, Artist of Catholic Modernity

Rouault's Faces of Christ: Notes for a Pictorial Contemplation

Rouault in New York: Art and Reputation in the Mid-Century United States

Unfinished Works

1963: Les inacheves: The Donation of Mme Rouault and her Children

Et veronique au tendre lin passe encore sur Ie chemin...

Rouault's Christ: A Call to Aesthetic Conversion

Plates

Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.