It is time to look back on the last century and the state of the visual arts.
I have argued about art that there are two points of significance. The first is the ability to change the vocabulary of everyone, visual as well as other vocabularies. Edvard Munch did that with his ‘The Scream’ and Marcel Duchamp did it with his bicycle wheel and urinal.
The second is the ability to influence the living aesthetic of homes, offices and public spaces. Just about every prominent 20th Century artist did this. Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Pizarro, Rauschenberg, Frank L. Wright and Rothko. We live with their work embedded in fabrics, wallpaper, furniture and the visual world everywhere including television, fashion, the movies and advertising.
While I have many favorites there is one artist’s work that haunts me. He forms a new third category: He changed how a few other great artists work.
It is Georges Rouault. His painting of ‘The Old King’, has haunted me for over 50 years. What Rouault did was to paint and paint and never stop working on a single painting. He never felt any of his paintings were finished. It is this depth of mental and emotional interaction with his own art that is visible to me. His paintings are layered in a way that human lives and personality are layered.
I think his influence was immense in ways that have yet to be understood.