The Colonial Governor

Georges Rouault (French, 1871–1958) is best known for his figurative paintings of which the subjects were usually prostitutes, clowns, and Christian scenes. He is also associated with the French Fauvists and Expressionists of his era. He was born in a Belleville cellar, at a time when French troops bombed the Paris neighborhood in an effort to stop the Paris Commune government. 

Rouault attended the Ecole des Beaux-Art and eventually would study under the symbolic artist, Gustave Moreau (French, 1826–1898). Rouault garnered prestige by winning the Prix Chenavard with his religious-themed painting, L’Enfant Jésus parmi les docteurs. Rouault believed that the ultimate purpose of art was personal expression, and that it did not always have to depict subjects exactly as they appeared. Rouault constantly used thick black lines in his works, a style that became identifiable to him. 

The Colonial Governor’ (also known as ‘The Colonial Administrator’) derives from Georges Rouault’s satirical etchings in Ambroise Vollard’s Les Réincarnations du Père Ubu.  Vollard, a pioneering art dealer and publisher, reimagined symbolist writer Alfred Jarry’s anti-hero, Père Ubu, across a series of absurdist vignettes reflecting the disordered realities of war, colonial politics, and authority. In these iterations, Ubu’s bewildered exercise of power, especially in colonial guise, gets mercilessly lampooned. Rouault’s darkly expressive renditions, executed from circa 1913 to 1928, were bound into this limited edition, featuring a remarkable fusion of wood engravings and etchings. This print encapsulates the tensions of a post-WWI-War world and the grotesque nature of power through the eyes of avant-garde satire.

Although Rouault exhibited at the 1900 Centennial Exhibition of French art, the first gallery exhibition for his work was held at the Druet Gallery in 1910. The artist began work on his collection of etchings and lithographs, Le Miserere De Georges Rouault, in 1912. This work would be exhibited in 1948. Much of Rouault's work was completed after Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard purchased the artist's entire gallery and future works. Books printed during this time include Les Fleurs du Mal, Cirque de l'Étoile Filante, Passion, and Les Réincarnations du Père Ubu. There were many retrospectives held during the last decade of Rouault's life, including those at Palais des Beaux-Arts and Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna. France gave Rouault a state funeral when he died in 1958.