PUBLIC FAVORITE

GEORGES ROUAULT, at 83 the eldest of the living French masters, is coming to the end of his career in a swirl of glory. His heavily larded oil paintings seem to glow with ever brighter colors. His reputation is steadily increasing. Because Rouault himself stood apart from the Paris-born art movements during his time, his work seems to transcend the fluctuations of contemporary tastes; the appeal of his religious subjects speaks more clearly with each passing decade. Rouault's powerful paintings glow in the mind like images in Gothic stained glass. With their strange, archaic quality, one critic noted, "Rouault has taken us back through the centuries to that moment when every image on earth was a reflected expression of God."

Rouault first painted The Old King in 1916, kept it in his studio, reworking and retouching it until 1936, when it was bought by Rouault's taskmaster and agent, Art Dealer Ambroise Vollard. On loan to Pittsburgh's Carnegie International show when Vollard died in 1939, it was bought by contributions of Pittsburgh art patrons and given to the Carnegie Institute's permanent collection. Since then it has steadily grown in popularity, more than three years ago became the museum's public favorite.

A recluse who keeps his Paris address a secret, Rouault rarely offers clues to the meanings of his paintings, probably because, as he once wrote of his famous painting Three Judges: "What had seemed to me so simple pictorially has been thought a curious enigma." Guessing who the old king might be, a former director of the Carnegie Institute says: "He may be a David, a Herod or a Sennacherib, for he is an epitome of Oriental magnificence." Said another critic: "It is as though the whole sorrow of mankind were concentrated on the old king." Whoever the king, he speaks in many languages to many willing subjects. Since the Carnegie acquired the painting 15 years ago, it has been on loan 23 times, including trips abroad to Amsterdam, Paris and Milan, has traveled in all more than 55,000 miles.

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