Looking In

February in Paris was cold, windless and grey, and its people beset with chaotic politics, strikes and shortages (see FOREIGN NEWS). Last week many a Parisian found a refuge from these storms in the sparkling new Galerie des Carets. There hung the paintings of a man whom some conservative critics have come to prefer to Picasso. He was monkish old Georges Rouault, whose fat, smoldering judges, jeweled kings, whores, clowns and solitary Christs grow richer and stranger year by year. They looked not like paint but hot coals, caked angrily into patterns by a muscle-bound man with a trowel.

Unlike outdoorish Winslow Homer (see above), Rouault has always looked inward, to paint the medieval hells and heavens exploding within the high dome of his skull. Rouault was born in violence when a shell blasted his mother out of bed during the bombardment of Paris in 1871. At 14 he went to work in a stained-glass factory, where he earned a dollar a week and developed his unique inner climate--as sharp and glowing, to judge by his art, as glass.

Life Begins at 50. After four long years, Rouault quit his job to study with famed Academician Gustave Moreau. Moreau taught young Rouault all he knew about painting and did his best to break Rouault's habit of moping about in cemeteries after school. When Moreau died, his house was turned into a memorial museum and Rouault, as the favorite pupil, was appointed curator. The sinecure kept Rouault going; his art sold hardly at all until he was past 50.

Nowadays Rouault's paintings bring up to $12,500 apiece in Paris. Dealers prize them more & more--and have begun to question the eternal values of some of Paris' most publicized avant garde painters (to whom they now scornfully refer as "decorators"). Rouault has a sixth-floor Paris apartment in an unartistic quarter. He walks up; he hates elevators, telephones and other mechanical devices. He also has a country house in Normandy which the Germans raided in 1940, destroying the library and ripping up some of his canvases for blackout shades. Rouault's family includes six devoted grandchildren--whom he loves to take for silent strolls in the country. But even with his grandchildren, Rouault's large, intelligent, apelike face seldom breaks into a smile.

Church & State of Mind. Rouault is a novelty among artists: he goes to church, regularly. During the week he works alone, locked in his studio with sheafs of his barely decipherable poetry and his harsh, thick, color-encrusted paintings, broken--like leaded windows--into black-bordered stabs of color, which he sometimes waits years to complete. He is bad tempered--and painfully shy. "I believe in suffering," he once wrote; "with me it is not feigned; that is my only merit."

Like Poet T. S. Eliot, Rouault is a pioneer in art who calls himself "a believer and a conformist. Anyone can revolt. . . ." The old man (75) sees little of young modern artists, some of whom lack his own highly traditional training. Discussing them recently, he was heard to mutter: "Why don't they begin at the beginning?"

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