Up in Smoke

Georges Rouault, the 77-year-old French modern whose paintings glow like hot coals, burned up 315 of them last week. He had gotten them back, along with 400 others, from the heirs of Dealer Ambroise Vollard, on a legal technicality (TIME, July 22, 1946). His argument: the dealer was entitled only to his finished pictures, and since he had never signed the pictures, they were unfinished and therefore his own property.

Rouault has a habit of keeping his paintings locked up in his studio for years on end, signing them only when he is sure he cannot improve them by so much as a single stroke of the brush. He thinks of himself as a misunderstood traditionalist in art (his training was both academic and thorough), and he has been heard to complain that the younger modern painters "don't begin at the beginning."

Now the master had gone back to his own beginnings, match in hand. The 315 pictures he burned, mostly youthful efforts, failed to come up to the old man's standards.

The execution took place in the furnace room of a hat factory. Wearing a grey business suit and black bowler hat, Rouault stood by the open furnace door, tossed each painting singly into the flames. Now and then he would pause to pronounce one of them "not so bad," but in an hour and a half every picture (some worth up to $2,000) was reduced to ashes. Driving back to Paris in his lawyer's black limousine, Rouault looked overcome with gloom. "Bad or not," he said, "they were my children."

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