FAUX or NO?

Our unusual offering is a certified fake Georges Rouault artwork which bears a very strong resemblance to an oil painting in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. The MOMA picture is displayed at top and the work on auction at bottom. Although this work seemed to us to possibly be a prior work on the same theme, it is accompanied by a letter from Mme. Isabelle Rouault, head of the Fondation Georges Rouault, declaring the work a 'bad fake.'

Our offering, almost identical in composition to the 1932 oil painting Christ Mocked by Soldiers in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is in an entirely different medium and is slightly smaller. This work is painted (or inked?) on copper plate over etching and aquatint of the same composition. Not only the medium but the colors are different from the MOMA painting.

This work is 32 inches high x 24 1/4 inches wide and framed with copper or bronze; traces of the same paint/ink appear on the frame as well. The texture of the work on the plate and of the paint applied over top seems very like other Rouault images from the 30s studied in the NGA photo archives.

The work seemed convincing enough to us to prompt several months of intensive research, culminating in the correspondence with Mme. Rouault. Look it over. And the information on the lawsuit over the authentication of the missing Rouault works at the end of this text. What do YOU think? The letter and envelope from Mme. Rouault, suitable for framing, are offered along with the FAUX ROUAULT.

Be sure to read the quotation from Pierre Courthion´s Catalogue Raisonné of Georges Rouault at end of documentation (Abrams, New York, 1962).

The frame has been opened to reveal that the copper plate was glued to a half inch sheet of solid wood (not plywood) with a thin bronze sheet on the back. Nowhere were there any identifying marks of any kind.

The artwork was acquired at an estate sale. It looked very much like a Georges Rouault although the sellers knew nothing about the piece. Information about the work was sought from Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre de Création Industrielle (mam/cci), Centre Pompidou as well as Department of French Painting, The National Gallery, Washington DC, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, owner of the oil painting of the same subject. They gave us the address of Mme. Isabelle Rouault’s Fondation Georges Rouault in Paris. We sent her photos and some computer scans of other photos (as the National Gallery had mislaid the other photos)

Mme. Rouault had no wish to see the actual piece but replied that “cette peinture est une mauvaise copie,” a “faux.”

Excerpted from classified catalogue “Rouault” by Pierre Courthion, pp. 405-406

On the other hand, certain paintings that served as models for woodcuts and etchings based on the same themes bear a later date than the engravings, because Rouault retouched them after he had given his final approval to the prints. In fact, he returned time and again to some of these themes, long after they had been printed, and at different times in his career. ...

With regard to the canvases in the Vollard collection, a special agreement was reached between painter and dealer according to which Rouault considered as finished only the works which he had signed; for these Vollard then gave him a receipt. When Vollard died, 819 unfinished, unsigned works were stocked in his house in the rue Martignac, in the atelier he had turned over to Rouault. The fate of these pictures was decided by lawsuit and, as the result of a decree handed down by the Paris courts on March 19, 1947, Vollard's heirs were ordered to return them all to Rouault, since, not having been finally released by Rouault, the paintings remained his property. When the order was ostensibly executed, 119 paintings were missing.

The result was that, in defiance of the court decision, several of the "undelivered" works appeared on the market, usually with forged signatures which were intended to hide their source.

Mention should be made of the fact that, according to the terms of Rouault’s will, the co-signer of this catalogue, Isabelle Rouault, was given the power to authenticate the unfinished, unsigned canvases that would appear to be sufficiently advanced not to be destroyed. She also has the power of affixing a stamp on the sketches that were in her father’s atelier at the time of his death, and which, after careful selection, were retained. The stamp gives evidence of the work’s origin and guarantees its authenticity.

Because of the great variety of media that Rouault used in the course of his career, it has at times been difficult to give an exact description of his techniques, which were often used in combination. ...charcoal, charcoal and crayon, watercolor and pastel, colored inks, oil paints and monotypes, tempera, wash, gouache and pastel, gouache and oils ... lithographs in black and white and, very rarely, color...as well as a great many copperplates etched with aquatint, in a variety of processes that were both complex and original.