The Tongue’s Meaning — On Georges Rouault

Originally published in BRANCHING vol. 08, March 2014. Translated from the author’s contribution to the free paper, with minor corrections to notation and factual details made for the 2026 online publication.

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In his essay “Notes on Rouault’s Recent Work: On Tragic Expression in Painting” [1], André Malraux draws the following contrast between Rouault and Daumier:

…I am always astonished when I see Rouault and Daumier spoken of together, for to my mind these two painters occupy diametrically opposed positions. For Daumier there is only one world, the world of human beings. […] He sets his limits in a particular world, a personal or professional world. He seeks to translate his model. And it is by translating that he conquers. […] For Rouault, the model does not exist. The model is for him a kind of possibility, something that his écriture freely creates.

André Malraux, “Notes on Rouault’s Recent Work: On Tragic Expression in Painting”

Image reference: Georges Rouault, The Old Clown from Cirque, 1930, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: MoMA

Daumier, celebrated as a realist and caricaturist, found in caricature a sharp instrument of political and social intervention. His art was a tool for opposing established power — a “martial art” in the fullest sense, a technique of force supremely effective in the wars of information, psychology, and public opinion [2].

Image reference: Honoré Daumier, Gargantua, 1831. Source: The Daumier Register

Consider his famous image of King Louis-Philippe rendered as a pear, published in Le Charivari. Introduced in countless art and manga primers as a fine example of “deformation,” this image was not drawn merely because the king’s face happened to resemble a pear. It was drawn because the image of Louis-Philippe and the meaning of the word poire — “fool,” “dimwit” — were seen as uncannily, or conveniently, alike. What was performed here was not merely a formal deformation but a transfer of image and meaning; what mattered was the presentation of the substitutability of two apparently distant things — king and pear [3].

Image reference: Charles Philipon / Honoré Daumier, Les Poires, 1831 / 1834. Source: Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Les_Poires_(1834).jpg))

The greater the distance — the potential — between two images capable of being substituted for one another, like the culturally shared images of king and pear, the greater the kinetic energy produced by that difference. Daumier’s light-footed wit derived its popular appeal from exactly this dynamic [4]. To suppress this revolutionary offensive — the caricatures and the counter-attacks they launched — the July Monarchy under Louis-Philippe enacted the September Laws, press censorship statutes. Yet the monarchy fell regardless [5].

Concentrated force generates equal and opposite resistance. The provisional government of the Second Republic, as if fearing precisely this dynamic, proceeded to redistribute power — devolving rights to freedom of expression, to labor, to assembly — among the people [6].

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After the July Monarchy’s repression, Daumier shifted his gaze to the lives of ordinary Parisians. Rouault, too, was a painter of common people — clowns, prostitutes. Both painters had working-class origins in glass: Daumier’s father was a glazier, while Rouault himself spent his early years as an apprentice to the stained-glass painter Émile Hirsch.

Of Rouault, Malraux writes: “…Rouault is not a man who strives to see, but a man who strives to be. […] His work might be called the work of a mute who runs to God in his anguish at being forever cut off from the world’s harmony — or the work of a masochist.”

Rouault’s paintings indeed lack what we find in Daumier: the volubility, the kind of physiognomic description to which almost anyone can relate. The figures Rouault depicts simply expose grotesque bodies. Their eyes are closed, or destroyed — they do not return our gaze. (Even where eyes are visible, the glance is deflected ever so slightly away from the viewer, as though contemplating a doll; the lines of sight never meet.) Unlike Toulouse-Lautrec’s prostitutes and clowns — who are aware of being watched, whose provocative, sensuous gazes internalize and return the viewer’s scrutiny — Rouault’s figures submit, one-sidedly, to the viewer’s gaze, like masochists.

Image reference: Honoré Daumier, The Three Judges, 1858/60, The Art Institute of Chicago. Source: The Art Institute of Chicago

Image reference: Georges Rouault, Three Judges, ca. 1938, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

According to Gilles Deleuze, the masochist’s self-binding law, when applied with the utmost strictness, produces the very opposite of its intended effect. The whip, far from punishing and preemptively forbidding erection, only provokes it further, transforming it into something more stubborn, more robust. The law meant to bind the self is thus deftly overturned [7].

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A similar overturning is often noted in Rouault’s work. It manifests in the space between two figures: the clown or prostitute burdened with human desire, and Christ bearing the weight of human atonement. The “sanctity” and “religiosity” commonly ascribed to Rouault’s painting reveal themselves precisely here. And the condition that permits this overturning — in both the masochist and Rouault’s figures — is the same: both are already being punished under a “law” — original sin, desire — that is by nature beyond resistance; both exist in a state of passibility, of being exposed to suffering.

Image reference: Georges Rouault, Le clown blessé, 1932, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne. Source: Centre Pompidou

Rudolf Otto argues that the core of “the religious” is an experience of the unspeakable holy [8]. In other words, what we call “the religious” is underwritten by the fact that the senses have already accepted what reason cannot — a pre-cognition, an intuition. Because such experience is rationally ungrasped, it must always remain passively open to irrational sensation.

Consider the tongue, among the sense organs. It cannot be closed; it cannot be stopped up. (It can be curled, perhaps, but as a naked organ it touches suffering and, try as one might, cannot help but taste it.) If Daumier’s painting possesses the volubility of the observer, then Rouault’s work — the work of Malraux’s “mute” — is, one might say, the undoing of eloquence through speechlessness. (The word “eloquence,” after all, belongs to utterance — not to the tongue as an organ of taste.) Malraux’s irony, when he says “For Daumier there is only one world, the world of human beings,” is directed precisely here [9]. Daumier’s caricature constructs the human figure out of social generality — a generality that is, more often than not, merely the projected image of the observer (even when that caricature targets social mores or manners, perhaps especially then).

Daumier’s substitution operates by manipulating the elements of a pre-given social consensus — a law — without ever leaving its structure. Rouault’s overturning, by contrast, results from the overuse of the law — exhausting it until the law itself collapses. This is visible not only in his method of depicting “sanctity” through vulgar, grotesque bodies — a theme handed down through the history of painting — but also in the technical dimension of his practice: in the way he paints with opaque, materially dense pigment what ought, like stained glass, to be an image formed by light — insisting, almost willfully, on the technical dilemma of painting itself.

Rouault was, in other words, applying with strict literalness both the conventional law of his subject matter (to paint the miracle of Christ’s resurrection, one must first paint the corpse of Christ) and the conventional law of his materials (to paint light, one produces a raw buildup of paint).

And Rouault teaches us this: that eloquence — speaking at length — is not the only means of doing justice to reality. (Rouault, who was absorbed into neither the “primacy of color” of Matisse nor the “primacy of form” of Picasso, neither pole of one of the great oppositions in the history of painting.)

Image reference: Georges Rouault, Christ in the Courtroom, 1935, Artizon Museum. Source: Artizon Museum

Why, then, is this curled tongue not bitten off? Because this organ, which governs the perception of taste, is irreplaceable — by eye, by ear, by mouth — unsubstitutable. What cannot be substituted cannot be expelled by any force. It is for this reason that the political is, if anything, to be found in Rouault. A mass of flesh, formlessly mutable: a sense organ. Seated in the mouth, it is not bitten off. It simply exists.

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Notes

[1] Hotta Satohiro, “Translation and Commentary on André Malraux’s ‘Notes on Rouault’s Recent Work: On Tragic Expression in Painting,’” Jōsai Journal of Humanities, 1986.

[2] Jigorō Kanō, founder of the Kōdōkan and master of judo, defined jujutsu as “the art of attacking or defending against an unarmed or armed opponent, whether oneself is armed or unarmed.” It is worth noting that in kenjutsu and aikido, the foot — that is, the positional relationship to one’s opponent, the ma-ai or interval — is considered paramount.

[3] The very concept of power is said to have emerged in the seventeenth century, against the backdrop of the development of classical mechanics. Perspective, for example, as a manifestation of power, assigns hierarchical order and spatial sequence to distributed things by fixing a single point of view. Paradoxically, this also means that the hierarchical order and spatial sequence of distributed things guide the viewer toward a particular viewpoint. Just as mechanical energy is derived from the sum of potential and kinetic energy, the viewpoint (or the power that fixes the viewpoint) is derived from the disposition of things — the totality of hierarchical order and spatial sequence. And just as the magnitude of potential and kinetic energy is proportional to the magnitude of mechanical energy, so the distance — the drop — between the hierarchical orders of multiple things speaks to the magnitude of the power (the viewpoint) that subtends the view. The existence of unconscious power becomes visible only when this disposition of things is changed.

[4] Insofar as “substitution” is a release of “mechanical energy,” its extraction proves enormously difficult — because the substituted image is already only a “result.” E. H. Gombrich, in Art and Illusion, recounts the following episode: “The French word poire (pear) also means ‘blockhead,’ and the satirical paper run by Philipon kept on ridiculing the King as a poire till its publisher was haled into court and heavily fined. The famous series of drawings was published as a kind of justification, showing the process of caricature in slow motion, a step-by-step transformation into a pear — asking, in effect, at what point the likeness had become a libel.”

[5] In the early 1830s, Daumier published numerous lithographs in the satirical magazine La Caricature and the daily paper Le Charivari. In 1832, he was imprisoned in the Sainte-Pélagie prison and fined over a caricature depicting Louis-Philippe as the monstrous Gargantua. After the September Laws of 1835 imposed sweeping restrictions on political satire, Daumier gradually turned his attention to the everyday lives of Parisians, and to clowns, lawyers, and the bourgeoisie.

[6] With the freedom of expression and press granted by the Second Republic, more than two hundred newspapers were founded.

[7] It is for this reason that Sacher-Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs — whose protagonist gives his name to masochism — begins with the drawing up of a contract (a law) with his partner, as the condition for obtaining pleasure. In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze contrasts the irony of Sade — who seeks to annihilate and transcend the law by manufacturing solutions to it through torture — with the humor of Masoch, who mocks the law through its strictest possible observance. It should be noted that this relationship between “law” and the body connects directly to the image of the judge in Judge Dredd. In Daumier, the law is depicted from outside, as a substitutable social type — judge, bourgeois — with no interior. In Dredd, the law coincides with a body possessed of muscle and armor — and here, too, there is no interior. But this is not the absence of interiority as social type; it is the absence of interiority through the uniqueness of incarnation — “there is only this body.” Rouault and Masoch are positioned between these two poles, as the extreme of a suffering subject who feels. For a visual reference to Judge Dredd as a figure of law embodied, see: Judge Dredd book cover image, Wikimedia Commons.

[8] Rudolf Otto, the German philosopher of religion who was Rouault’s contemporary, subsumed this irrational sanctity under the concept of the numinous (das Numinose) in his work The Idea of the Holy. This irrational element had been suppressed and excluded from “the holy” as Protestant mission work rationalized and theorized piety from the late sixteenth century onward. “Numinous” was coined by Otto from the Latin numen (divine spirit) to mark the primordial dimension of the concept of the holy, separating it from ethical and moral connotations.

[9] Malraux continues, after the passage cited above: “From Don Quixote to Sancho — that is, from those who compensate for the weakness of the gods through their own dreams to those who compensate through themselves (within which judges and the bourgeois are included) — it is this human world that Daumier depicts.” Daumier did indeed paint Don Quixote repeatedly. The satirical rhetoric of Don Quixote derives from the madness of its protagonist, who performs as the embodiment of medieval values (the hero of a chivalric romance). As Quixote engages with reality, various incongruities — solutions — unfold. The behavior of such a protagonist inevitably becomes irony.

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Translation by the author, 2026.