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255 - Georges Rouault (French, 1871-1958) Harlequin (pink harmony)…
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Estimate €50,000 - €60,000
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Description
Georges Rouault (French, 1871-1958) Harlequin (pink harmony), c.1948-1952 Canvas. Studio stamp on the back of the canvas. Height 40.7 Width 31.8 cm. Pink frame. Provenance: private collection, Arcachon. Georges Rouault. A painting of Harlequin. Canvas, ca.1948-1952. Notice of inclusion in the complete catalogue of works by Georges Rouault, by Jean-Yves Rouault, President of the Rouault Foundation dated 5 December 2013. Art Loss Register, London, 8 April 2024, n°S00243384. Bibliography: Olivier Nouaille and Olivier Rouault, Rouault l'oeuvre peint, Paris, Fondation Georges Rouault, 2021, reproduced p. 299 at n°4427-3185. Produced by Georges Rouault in the latter part of his career, between 1948 and 1952, Harlequin (Harmonie rose) can be seen as a synthesis of the artist's reflections, pursuing a theme dear to him while softening his aesthetic vocabulary. ROUAULT'S LAST HARLEQUINS An unclassifiable painter, not belonging to any movement, Rouault proposed his own reality, without retranscribing the truth, preferring to "turn his back on nature", as André Suarès put it. In this sense, he differs from his nineteenth-century predecessors, such as Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who were renowned for their depictions of the circus. With its tight framing, revealing only the upper part of Harlequin's bust, this work is part of the body of work produced at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s (see Olivier Nouaille and Olivier Rouault, op.cit., p. 299). The artist plays with variations in the figuration of emotions. Here meditative with a barely sketched smile, Harlequin can also be profoundly joyful, as in the 1947 painting (reproduced in Pierre Courthion, Georges Rouault, Paris, Flammarion, 1962, p. 281). It does not convey an "infinite sadness", unlike the paintings of the early twentieth century, but shares its artist's appeasement. Harlequin (pink harmony) betrays a softening of the painter's tonalities and advocates a thick material. It prefigures the paintings of the twilight of Rouault's career, in which the frontier between painting and sculpture tends to diminish. Georges Rouault had been working tirelessly on the figuration of circus characters and the Commedia dell'arte since 1902-1903. This painting is one of the last links in his research into Harlequin, after his many performances, notably in Divertissement, published in 1943. "I saw clearly that the 'Pitre' was me, it was almost all of us", wrote Georges Rouault to the writer and philosopher Edouard Schuré in 1905. These burlesque characters provided the artist with a means of meditating on his contemporaries, the world around him and his own existence. "He was not simply looking for a way to express his plastic or formal preoccupations with colour and movement, but rather the possibility of expressing all the life that might be hidden behind make-up, powder and glitter" (Danielle Molinari, Georges Rouault catalogue raisonné, Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, 1983, p. 31). Harlequin is thus the medium of introspection. Brice Langlois
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About the sale 38th GARDEN PARTY SALE
Auction location
Auction time 06/07/2026 at 2:00 PM
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