Mystic Masque

The following comes from the latest Image Update:

"The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College will host an exclusive exhibition, Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, on view through December 7, 2008.

It marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1958 death of the French Fauvist and Expressionist painter and printmaker, and aims to recover the artist for a new generation. The exhibition will comprise approximately 240 of Rouault's finest paintings, works on paper and stained glass -many never before displayed in North America.

Focusing on meanings preserved in the French word "masque," the exhibition explores the many outward "masks" Rouault loved to paint--those of circus players, prostitutes and judicial figures, as well as the iconic sainte face (holy face) of Christ. Employing a second sense of "masque," the exhibition presents Rouault's representation of the human condition as a kind of "pageant" or "guising"--or as Balzac put it, a "human comedy."

Rouault's world is an often tragic comedy of errors, marked by uncertainty and misapprehension. Outward appearances misrepresent and betray deeper realities. This is true both for society's marginal figures and esteemed ones. Rouault succinctly summed up this vision in his several studies entitled (quoting Virgil's Aeneid), "Sunt Lacrymae Rerum"--"There are tears (of grief) at the very heart of things." Schloesser explains: "Such dark reflections are redeemed for Rouault by the human masque's qualifier -"mystic" - which points to the centrality of Christian iconography for the artist."

Arranged chronologically, the exhibition seeks to demonstrate that Rouault's religious realism as it developed was far removed from any conventional piety. Rouault's human comedy is simultaneously a divine comedy; it is a masque - but one that is ultimately mystic."

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Sufjan Stevens - John Wayne Gacy Jr.