Show Notes
How can looking at the darkest, most broken parts of the world actually prepare our hearts to understand true hope?
In this episode of the Nuance podcast, host Case Thorp sits down with Dr. Wesley Vander Lugt, a theologian, teacher, and acting director of the Leighton Ford Initiative for Theology, the Arts, and the Gospel Witness at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, to explore the challenging and deeply faithful work of early 20th-century French painter Georges Rouault.
Wes argues that Rouault was a true prophet in the darkness. Drawing on Rouault’s focus on marginalized figures—clowns, prostitutes, and judges juxtaposed with Christ—Wes makes the case that true beauty doesn’t shy away from suffering. He believes Rouault’s art forces us to grapple with reality as God sees it, rather than settling for mere sentimentality or brutalism.
From surviving a war-torn Paris that inspired his famous Miserere series to experiencing rejection from both secular and sacred art worlds, Rouault’s lonely journey was sustained by a fierce dedication to his craft and his faith.
📚 Episode Resources:
A Prophet in the Darkness: Exploring Theology in the Art of Georges Rouault: https://www.ivpress.com/a-prophet-in-the-darkness
Additional works referenced in A Prophet in the Darkness: https://ivpress.com/rouault
InterVarsity Press: https://ivpress.com
The Leighton Ford Initiative for Theology, Arts, and Gospel Witness: https://www.gordonconwell.edu/giving/ford-initiative/
Dr. Wesley Vander Lugt’s website: https://www.wesleyvanderlugt.com/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Visit wecolabor.com for resources, events, and more.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
There are artists who decorate the world and there are artists who tell the truth about it. Georges Rouault belongs firmly in the second category. Rouault’s work is not easy. As an expressionist and Fauvist painter during the turn of the 20th century, he focused on portraits of judges, clowns, prostitutes and saints, and even Jesus himself, all rendered with a kind of grave tenderness that refuses to flatter either the subject or the viewer. His paintings feel less like statements and more like encounters. So today is the first of a two-episode conversation about Rouault himself. We’ll focus this first episode on his art, the way he looks at the world. My discussion partner is Dr. Wesley Vander Lugt of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. And then in the second episode, Dr. Lugt will still be with me. And we’re going to turn more directly to his book that brought us here, A Prophet in the Darkness, a book of articles that he edited. And we’re going to discuss the larger question of how faith and art come together. So Wes, thanks so much for being with me here today.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Thank you for having me.
Case Thorp
So Wesley Vander Lugt is a theologian, teacher, and like I said, the editor of A Prophet in the Darkness, a recent volume from IVP Academic, exploring the theological significance of Georges Rouault’s art. He holds a PhD from the University of St. Andrews. I’m so jealous. Wes, I wanna go there so bad. I just really wanna be in Scotland for an extended period of time.
Wesley Vander Lugt
I hear you.
Case Thorp
And he serves as adjunct professor of theology and acting director of the Leighton Ford Initiative for Theology, the Arts, and the Gospel Witness at Gordon-Conwell. So welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. Well, Wes, let’s begin on a personal note. So tell me, why did the artist George Rouault come to your attention?
Wesley Vander Lugt
To be honest, I had not heard much about Rouault or seen much of his work before a friend of mine introduced me to his work. She had a collection of his work and I was just beginning to lead this new initiative at Gordon Conwell. We’re thinking about what exhibits we might want to begin with. And she said, why don’t you try Georges Rouault?
When I began to peruse his work, I was deeply moved and began to read and expose myself more to his work. Now I am a huge fan and have Rouault all over and contemplate his work often.
Case Thorp
Now did she have originals?
Wesley Vander Lugt
So she had prints mostly from his Miserere series, as well as works ranging throughout his career. So it’s quite a collection.
Case Thorp
Well, I know a lot of listeners and viewers are going to know names like Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, and even perhaps their paintings and art come to mind. But Rouault, even though he was with a number of these figures historically, he’s just pretty unknown in a lot of ways. And so I did not know of him, and yet the more and more I looked at the pictures, I’m sure I’ve come across his work before.
Give us a bit of a biography of his life and his contribution to the art world.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, you’re right. He is not as well known as some of his contemporaries like Chagall and Matisse. And that’s partly because his work was too sacred for secular environments and often to what was earlier on deemed too secular for sacred environments because of his honesty, because of the kind of characters he portrayed. But yeah, Rouault was born in the late 19th century. He grew up in Paris, which became war-torn Paris, right? So that was a huge formative experience for Rouault to live through the first war out of which he created his most famous work, The Miserere. And, you know, he was a French modernist and a lot of that comes out stylistically in his work, but he was a deep believer who wanted to portray reality not just as he saw it, which was common among the expressionists, but as God sees reality. And he experimented a lot with the tension or the paradox between semblance and reality, between what we tend to see because of our various cultural grids and because of our perspective and what reality is really like.
Case Thorp
Well, he is known, as you mentioned, for his strong faith. I mean, very, very much a deep Roman Catholic. Tell us about his faith journey and where its influence is most seen in his work.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, he was influenced by his family, of course, but very strongly influenced by his mentor Gustave Moreau. And in Moreau, he saw both artistic dedication and a dedication to faith in a way that could be integrated. And when Moreau died, it was a crisis for Rouault. It’s Moreau and Rouault.
And it got him thinking about what really matters and he dedicated his life and was, you know, he officially became a member of the church at that point later in his 20s and began creating out of a deep honesty and a spiritual vitality that was confronting the really difficult realities of post-war Europe.
Case Thorp
I would encourage anyone listening or watching to hit pause, don’t disappear on us, and go Google Rouault, R-O-U-A-U-L-T, and hit images there at the top of Google and get a sense of his work. You’ll find portraits often, deep, heavy, outlines to the subject, and then vivid colors in different angles for the body of the individual or the portrait. Now, Wes, Rouault trained in stained glass or I read painting glass and I didn’t know if that was the same as stained glass in his early days.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Certainly he was involved in making stained glass as well as painting it. He has a couple windows that he did himself, not in terms of the actual fashioning, but of the painting of the windows. The dark lines and the contours in his work is reminiscent of the joining of the glass.
Case Thorp
Well, it is very different and unusual in its work. Now, you had mentioned Moreau. I read how he and Jacques Martin were also very close friends.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yes, they were close friends, Jacques and Risa Martin, and would have dinner gatherings and lots of conversation about what it means to be a Christian in the modern world, and particularly what it means to be a Christian who’s an artist.
Case Thorp
Well, Mary Tan was one of the premier Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century, even friends with the Pope. Do you know if Rouault ever got to meet the Pope?
Wesley Vander Lugt
That’s a good question. So I don’t know if they met, but the Pope dedicated one of Rouault’s works, or purchased one of Rouault’s works for the United Nations in the late ‘50s. And so certainly he was very aware of Rouault’s work, you know, but the Catholic Church wasn’t, they weren’t Rouault’s biggest fans early on, again, because I think they were used to sacred art that was lighter, that sort of encouraged a more, detached sort of contemplative spirituality. And it wasn’t until later that Rouault was really recognized for the prophetic voice that he really was at the time.
Case Thorp
Well, your book, A Prophet in the Darkness, has, I believe, nine different articles here by various scholars. And you’re the editor. Well, on page 99, as William Dyrness writes this, try as they might, many Catholic authorities and even art lovers could not see prayers in Rouault’s work. Even the Dominicans in the early incarnations of the journal, L’art Sacré, referred to modern art as anti-religious, disparaging the work of Rouault as “full of extremes and brutality.” So what a hard spot it must have been for Rouault to have been so close to Méritan and so fully committed to his own faith and yet then reject it?
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, indeed it was. It was a very lonely period of his life. And, you know, in addition to some professional issues in terms of ownership of his paintings, it was really hard going for him. But, you know, he, from what I can tell, he never really internalized that critique. He had a very strong internal drive to portray the world as he felt he was called to portray it.
And part of that was to challenge this common notion that beauty and God’s beauty as seen in the world and through people is a nice or pleasant thing, that sometimes beauty is difficult to encounter and beauty is there in the shadows if we have eyes to see it. And that’s often why Rouault, particularly in The Miserere, is pairing images of marginalized figures or even a figure like a judge who would have been ridiculed in certain circles and juxtaposing those images with the image of Christ to say, you know, Christ identifies with these people that we are tempted to reject. And if we have eyes to see, perhaps we will see Jesus in the stranger and in the naked and in the oppressed.
Case Thorp
So good. I mean, at The Collaborative, our overall concern is the renewal of culture through Christians, and we’ll particularly lean into faith and work. And the arts matter so much to me because of the role they play in the public square and even the role our artists play as they envision or imagine the future as they process and deal with the past. Now, the terms were used extremes and brutality. For some Rouault’s work even harsh and grotesque. But as you mentioned, even compassionate. So those things are really standing in tension in his work.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, and you know, I think the more you get to know Rouault’s work, you get a feel for the kind of realism he’s trying to portray. You know, it seems like there are two extremes, and Rouault avoids these extremes beautifully. There’s the extreme of sentimentality, where you’re only going to tell the truth about the segments of reality that are pleasant or nice, not all of reality, including the cracks and the brokenness. So he avoids that extreme very well.
But then there’s the other extreme of brutalism, and that critique that Rouault portrayed reality and people in a brutal way I don’t think is accurate or fair to the witness of his art, because in brutalism there really is no hope. It’s just, here are the brute facts, deal with them, they’re hard, they’re dark. But Rouault, especially in the way that he juxtaposes images and tells a story through a series of images, will show how there is only hope if we’re willing to go through the darkness to find the light on the other side. And so that true hope emerges like resurrection hope out of death. And that’s what’s so powerful about his work.
Case Thorp
Now you’ve already mentioned his series, Miserere. Now these were a series on copper plates, correct? And my understanding, he didn’t release them for years and years and years, or worked on them over a number of decades.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Copper etchings. Yeah, that’s right.
Yeah. Started working on them after the first great war, but didn’t release them until after the second world war. Rouault had this time where he was just sitting with them, had started several plates and canceled them and rearranged them and was thinking about, you know, the narrative of these. And then finally released the series of 52.
Case Thorp
He said about this series, “I was like a peasant in the field attached to my pictorial soil, like the man hanged by his own hempen rope, like an ox under the yoke. Though terribly restless, I never took my nose out of my work save to ascertain the light, the shadow, the half tent, the curious features of certain pilgrims’ faces. I noted forms, colors, fleeting harmonies, until I was sure they were so indelibly impressed in my memory that they would stay with me beyond the grave.” Do you know why he didn’t release them earlier, or it was just a lifelong pursuit that maybe he never planned to release?
Wesley Vander Lugt
Part of it is that he was doing other works at the time as well and so he would do one and then be working on some other works and then come back and do another. So he’s creating them over a series of many years. But yeah, I think there was a sense in which he didn’t know exactly where to end. One of the canceled plates was actually a plate of the resurrection. And it’s interesting that he didn’t include that in the final series.
Case Thorp
What do mean by “cancelled plate?” One he started and didn’t finish?
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, it was one he worked on and then you can see it in his notebooks, there’s essentially just a big X through it. He decided, you know, I’m not including this. And he doesn’t portray the resurrected Jesus a lot in his work. And that’s very intentional because he wanted his viewers to really grapple with the ongoing agony of Jesus in his identification with the suffering, which was an emphasis within Catholic theology at the time. I think that’s sometimes misunderstood, that again, that there’s not hope here, that it’s this sort of brutalism, but I think if you are attending carefully to what Rouault is trying to do, you see both the looking suffering straight in the face, being with it truly, just as Jesus was, so that there can be hope of that being redeemed.
Case Thorp
Are they all religiously oriented? The paintings of Miserere?
Wesley Vander Lugt
In the Miserere? No, so there’s a similar juxtaposition in the Miserere of some sacred images, obviously lots of images of Jesus in different aspects of the passion of Jesus, but there’s all kinds of different figures. There’s a judge, there’s nomads, there’s a prostitute, you know, and those are sprinkled throughout the whole series.
Case Thorp
Several episodes ago, I talked to someone about the role of lament in the Christian life. And, Rouault’s work feels heavy because of the darkness and the suffering that seems to come through and the way in which he’s capturing people in the moment of lament. What do think we could learn today from Rouault’s particular style of suffering and lament?
Wesley Vander Lugt
It’s a great question. I think we can learn a lot, particularly because I think both confession and lament are difficult, often upstream practices for us in the contemporary world. But, you know, whether it’s the work of the artist or the work of a community gathered to worship, I think our task is to tell the whole story of God. Right? And I think unless we grapple with the depth of our need and the depth of the brokenness of the world, we won’t properly grasp just the incredible depth of the good news. And that’s how I view the gift of Rouault’s work, that he’s someone who comes in and says, don’t look away yet. You need to look deeper. You need to grapple longer with the reality of this world as stained by evil and sin so that your heart can be prepared to hear the true good news that’s found in Jesus.
Case Thorp
I believe I read that towards the end of his life he burned almost 300 of his own pieces, which would be millions and millions of dollars today. Do you know why he did that?
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah. Well, there was a dispute around the ownership of his work. He had a patron, Vollard, who, you know, he was a good patron for a while.
Case Thorp
Is he the same gallery owner that featured Picasso and so many?
Wesley Vander Lugt
I believe so, yeah. I know there was a family name, you know, of Vollard, so, but yeah, that work, there was a dispute around if he was going to have permanent ownership of it, and rather than giving that up, giving up his ownership, he decided to just get rid of it. And that was his answer to the dispute.
Case Thorp
Wow. Hey, that answers it pretty much.
Wesley Vander Lugt
I want to point out as well, in case that you mentioned you can go ahead and put Rouault in a search engine and get some good images. But one of the really cool things about this book is that rather than including all of the images that the authors talk about in the volume, which can get kind of expensive and Rouault’s work is still under copyright, so it’s difficult. We created a webpage to view museum links to all of this work. It’s ivpress.com/rouault. And that gives you access to dozens of images directly on museum sites that are really high quality and give you good accurate information about each work.
Case Thorp
Great, well we will certainly put that in the show notes.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, it’s a little bit hidden. You have to find it in a footnote or on page 165 way at the end. So I always like to point it out because it’s a really neat resource to have those images up as you’re reading the book and as you’re learning about the work.
Case Thorp
Now you do have some pictures in here, some paintings, but they’re not Rouault’s.
Wesley Vander Lugt
We have one full page Rouault in the book, partly that’s because of the copyright costs to put his work in print. But the provenance of this book was a symposium where we had a presentation on Rouault, either a historical angle or looking at a particular theme in his work, and then there was a contemporary artist who responded to that with their own art making.
And so part of that was to show not only was Rouault a powerful artist, but he is a powerful artist in that he is instigating and inspiring the work of many others. So those works that are in the book are contemporary artists who are creating in conversation with Rouault to show how that conversation continues today.
Case Thorp
And then at the end of each chapter, you have those reflections from the, you have a reflection from each artist. So you can go look at their particular piece and then read their reflection and how the two connect.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, I love to, when possible, give, you know, artists don’t always like to talk about their work because it can be explained to death, right? But these artists are very gracious to explain a little bit of that process of meditating on the work of Rouault, creating in their own method and style and what that conversation is like. And I think that’s a real gift for any artist, recognizing that you’re always in a stream of conversation, you know, creativity is always about entering a tradition, learning that tradition, responding to the voice of others and improvising on that. So those little snippets are, they’re full of lots of wisdom.
Case Thorp
Now, do you know when and how did the Roman Catholic Church begin to embrace his work?
Wesley Vander Lugt
It wasn’t until the late fifties when you started to see that shift, certainly in the sixties after Vatican II, there was more openness there. But I can’t remember what the date was. There was a really significant exhibit of his work in New York and the Americans started talking about Rouault at that time and including the American Catholics. And I think that put a fair amount of pressure on Catholics on the other side of the pond to say, wait, maybe we’ve missed something. Maybe this, maybe we should claim Rouault as our own because now he’s coming to international acclaim. But there’s sometimes, you know, good results from some pressure like that.
Case Thorp
For sure. Talking about the pressure. This is kind of off-topic, but I read once how the African American leaders in the US were trying to push Roosevelt to Integrate the armed forces and they kept saying now is the perfect time and what big war we can do this and Roosevelt said I can’t do it, but you can make me do it.
And his point was he didn’t have the political power at the moment because he read the situation so well. But he said, you go out and march and write letters to the editor and do speeches and you can make me do it. So what do you think? What does humanity need to take away from Rouault into time ahead?
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, I thought about how to title this book for a long time. There was only one presentation at the original symposium that took this prophetic angle, but I think it’s a very appropriate title and theme to talk about the prophetic nature of Rouault’s arts and the potential for art in general to be prophetic in our times. And I think part of that is to tell all the truth, and tell it slant, like the line from the Emily Dickinson poem goes, “Tell it slant, yeah, not straight up in our face, but tell it slant through particular artistic mediums,” telling it slant. In Rouault’s case, you can’t even quite see the whole figure sometimes, and it’s blurry, he has his particular angle. But that’s true of any kind of art making, whether poetry or music, that there’s a slantness, there’s an elusiveness to the power of art that enables that truth telling to get behind some of our natural defenses, to engage the whole person, and then to let the force of that truth has its impact. So yeah, I think my encouragement would be to let Rouault’s prophetic voice have its due. And part of that means you have to take time with his work. I think the way that we’re used to looking at images so quickly and cycling through is a real disservice for encountering artwork like this as it’s intended to be encountered, which is slowly and contemplatively and asking questions about it and of ourselves in that encounter. I talk about resonance with artwork and this sort of resonance that allows that prophetic voice to speak. It requires time and it requires attention and it requires a willingness to let the art speak on its own.
Case Thorp
You’re getting into my second episode questions. So let’s save the good stuff for there. How did the conference go? What year did you present the conference?
Wesley Vander Lugt
That was back in the fall of 2022. It was the first major conference that I hosted here at Gordon Conwell around this theme of theology and the arts. And it was a beautiful gathering where you had artists as well as pastors, art historians, interested laypeople gathering to really engage this interdisciplinary idea of an artist who made an impact in his world and in society. So in order to understand Rouault, you really need to understand the dynamics and particular challenges and the particular opportunities of his cultural moment. And that was a, it was a beautiful time.
Case Thorp
And a product of the Leighton Ford Initiative for Theology, Arts, and Gospel Witness. Tell us more about the Institute or the Initiative.
Wesley Vander Lugt
That’s right, yeah. This institute, yeah, the Leighton Ford Institute in Theology, Art, and Gospel Witness, we have really three different parts of the mission of this initiative. The first part is to come alongside the mission of the seminary. So there’s an educational mission to it that art has the capacity to engage and form the whole person. So if we’re seeking to train students holistically, then the arts are a great gift there in our curriculum and in the warp and woof of what the seminary does. The other part of it is events and gathering groups of people, connecting the seminary and the church, the seminary and the broader community around topics that really create a point of contact for robust theological and cultural conversation. So we’ll do events on visual arts for sure, but also music and the performing arts in general, literature and poetry, and try to cycle around knowing that in a city like Charlotte, there are incredible communities of artists and a great interest in this topic. And then there’s the research side of things of contributing to scholarship and the conversation around theology and the arts, which this book has tried to do.
Case Thorp
So good. What do you have coming up soon?
Wesley Vander Lugt
The next big event is focused on the Psalms. It’s called the Art of the Psalms. And in that event, in each session, there is a poetic response to the Psalms. There’s musical, there’s kinetic responses to the Psalms, as well as the traditional homiletical engagements and scholarly engagements. So pairing all of these different responses and ways of engaging with the Psalms to show just how deeply impactful they can be.
Case Thorp
That’ll be great. I am more and more convinced of the embodied nature of spiritual growth, that we have to make it kinetic and creative and beautiful. When we have, here at First Presbyterian Orlando, access to online worship, so if folks are traveling or at home, they can participate. But I watch how that has expanded since COVID. We certainly had it before COVID, but our numbers just shot up crazy. And they’ve stayed up, we assumed, as people came back on campus, those numbers would go down, but they didn’t. But I am convinced that our worship services need to be more kinetic, more engaging from the embodied side of things in order for someone to realize, this is more than just absorbing information through the computer. You know, can get a TED Talk anytime, but there’s something about being in that sanctuary with the Fellowship of Believers and the rising and the sitting and the taking in the people around you, such that in the arts, way in which the arts lift our soul, and even if we aren’t so versed in the arts, boy, we know an old metal building compared to a beautiful architectural places significance and it makes a difference.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Yeah, that’s right. And I mean, that’s one of the reasons why the arts are such a gift to the church is they help us to tap into the sensory nature of our lives and incorporate that into our worship together. And that, of course, being a gift of God to us. And if we’re able to engage every sense, not only will there be more formative and doxological capacity there, but where you’ll wanna be there, right? To your point that this kind of digital connection has its place and is a gift in some ways, but how much better to be engaged in that fully sensory embodied experience? And the arts are absolutely crucial in making that happen.
Case Thorp
Crucial, crucial. Well friends, in the next episode, I’m gonna turn our attention towards more explicitly how art and theology speak to one another, belong to one another. So if this episode invited you to slow down and look a bit more deeply, let me encourage you to share it with a friend, with a neighbor, maybe an artist you know that would be encouraged by the conversation. Wes, thank you so much.
Wesley Vander Lugt
Thank you.
Case Thorp
Friends again, his book that he has edited is A Prophet in the Darkness: Exploring Theology in the Art of George Rouault, published by InterVarsity Press Academic. You can go learn more about Dr. Vander Lugt’s work at WesleyVanderLugt.com. Friends, thank you for inviting us into your day. You can check us out across the social media platforms or go to our website at wecolabor.com. Drop us your email and we’ll send you a copy of Zeitgeist, our latest journal on faith, work, and culture. In fact, I think Dr. Vander Lugt needs to be featured in our next journal. Many thanks to the Canaparo family for making today’s episode possible. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessing is on you.
