This book considers questions of materiality and painting, focalized through the notoriously obscure work of Georges Rouault, and offers an innovative critical approach to the various questions raised by this challenging modernist. Described as a difficult and dark painter, Rouault’s oeuvre is deeply experimental. Images of the circus emerge from a plethora of chaotic marks, while numerous landscapes appear as if ossified in thick paint.

Rouault’s work explodes the genre of painting, drawing upon the residue of Gustave Moreau’s symbolism, the extremities of Fauvism, and the radical theatrical experiments of Alfred Jarry. The repetitions and re-workings at the heart of Rouault’s process defy conventional chronological treatment, and place the emphasis upon the coming-into-being of the work of art. Ultimately, the book reveals the process of making as both a search for understanding and a response to the problematic world of the 20th century.