Georges Rouault (1871–1958).

An interesting, carefully worded letter about his painting, addressed to a lady who was no doubt planning to write about him. Rouault sets out his requirements and gradually opens up. He refers to the article published by Lionello Venturi. ‘I have been given a legendary reputation, or at least some have been able to say that I have a legend and envy me. If this is true, it has cost me dearly, and certainly it has come about more often through my pictorial nature than through the controversies of magazines and cliques. […] I do not believe I have ever wanted to set myself apart. I would loathe to play the misunderstood. […] In fact, all that matters is what we leave behind pictorially, if people are still talking about us tomorrow.” He is keen to distinguish between truth and falsehood and confirms that he is a workaholic, ‘grappling all my life with a much-loved art – quite demanding – and, like so many other pilgrims, with the daily difficulties of a large family to which one remains attached, caught between the intimate vision of a pictorial poetics that one sees as quite elevated and reality’. He attempts to define his painting: “I am not the Obscure One – nor solely and forever the Cursed One – and if I have been called a painter of death and darkness, these are very fine titles […] I love beautiful material. I am not easily satisfied – I do not love it for its own sake exclusively or as a virtuoso’s game. Our pictorial language, though it is spoken and sung of, has infinite resources […] Form, colour, harmony – though nothing is new under the sun […] in these present times so many moving – and subtle things can still be said”… 43601

Enclosed is a handwritten letter dated November 1943 (1 oblong in-8 page, in distorted handwriting): he can no longer paint due to ‘ulcerated frostbite’. ((43601))