Structure and Imagery

Georges Rouault, Paris, 1957 by Arnold Newman "For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh." "Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart.  The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical." Georges Rouault's Miserere The series of prints known as the  Miserere  by Georges Rouault (1871-1958) was commissioned originally as one of numerous, illustrated book projects conceived by the Parisian dealer Ambrose Vollard (1865-1939), who after 1916 functioned as the artist's sole agent and employer. To be titled  Miserere et Guerre  the proposed two volumes, each with fifty prints by Rouault and text by his friend, the poet Andre Suares (1866-1948), were never completed as planned. Suares, who contended tha...

" Anyone can revolt. It is more difficult silently to obey our own inner promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperament and our gifts. " "Subjective artists are one-eyed, but objective artists are blind." "For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh." "My only objective is to paint a Christ so moving that those who see him will be converted." "The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy." "The richness of the world, all artificial pleasures, have the taste of sickness and give off a smell of death in the face of certain spiritual possessions."