Art: Modern with a Message

Just one topflight modern painter has devoted his art to the service of religion. Georges Rouault, 80, is both a fervent Roman Catholic and a brilliant expressionist. "My only ambition," he once said, "is to be able some day to paint a Christ so moving that those who see Him will be converted."

Among Rouault's most moving work is a series of 58 engravings called Miserere et Guerre, which intersperses whores, fools, bullies, soldiers and clowns with pictures of Christ's Passion. Published in book form by London's Trianon Press, the series was on sale last week in the U.S. (Miserere; $5.75). "I rejoice," said Rouault in a preface, "that [publication] has come to pass before my departure from this planet."

He might well rejoice; Rouault conceived the engravings as long ago as World War I, and prepared them for publication by Ambroise Vollard in 1927. Vollard put off publication, but held on to the plates until he died in 1939. Rouault got them back by court order in 1947, and at last had them published.

The prints started as paintings, which were photoengraved on copper plates. Rouault reworked each plate with engraving tools, giving them a depth and richness of black-to-white values that rival even the color values of his paintings.

As a boy, Rouault was apprenticed to a stained-glass maker, and his prints, like his paintings, look rather like sketches for stained glass. Joyless though most of them are, they have a little of the power and glory of the first and greatest Gothic cathedral windows.

In recent years the old modern has turned to writing poems that carry the same simple message as his art. His preface to Miserere concludes with this stanza:

Jesus on the cross will tell you better

than I.

And St. Joan on trial, in short and

glorious phrases,

As well as saints and martyrs

Worshiped or unknown.