Georges Rouault's Miserere et Guerre (Mercy and War), a series of fifty-eight large-format aquatints published in 1948 after nearly three decades of creation and revision, is the most significant work of Christian printmaking in the twentieth century. The plates were begun in the years immediately following the catastrophe of the First World War - Rouault started making what would become the series in 1916-1917 - and the shadow of industrial warfare and mass death pervades every image. The title invokes Psalm 51:1, the great penitential prayer traditionally attributed to David after the Bathsheba affair: 'Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.'
The fifty-eight plates are organized loosely in two sequences: the first, Miserere, concerns human suffering, sin, and the Passion of Christ; the second, Guerre (War), depicts the horrors of modern warfare and their relationship to the divine suffering that the Cross represents. The captions beneath the plates - written in French, often with biblical resonance - function as compressed theological texts: 'Are we not all convicts?' stands beneath an image of debased human faces; 'He who believes in me, though he die, shall live' runs under a resurrection-suggestive image; 'Lord, it is you I recognize in this path' appears beneath a plate of Christ mocked.
Rouault developed the aquatint series in close collaboration with his dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had originally commissioned a set of illustrations for a book project that was never completed. Rouault worked on the plates obsessively, reworking and darkening them through successive printings over decades. The final plates published in 1948 are significantly different from the earliest states - heavier, darker, more monumental. The technical process mirrors the theological content: these are images forged through repeated return, refinement under pressure, the accumulation of layers.
The visual language Rouault developed for the Miserere draws on three sources: his early training in stained-glass restoration, which gave him the thick black contours and jewel-like color patches of his mature style; the Expressionist tradition of Emil Nolde and the German Expressionists, whose violent distortion of the human figure in the service of spiritual intensity he paralleled without direct influence; and the tradition of satirical illustration from Daumier and Goya, which provided him with the vocabulary for depicting social degradation and political violence.
The plates depicting Christ - the Passion sequence within the Miserere section - are the theological heart of the series. Rouault's Christ is neither the serene Byzantine Pantocrator nor the anatomically tortured Baroque Christus doloris, but something closer to Isaiah 53's vision: a figure so defined by suffering that his identification with suffering humanity is complete. Romans 3:23 - 'for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' - is the theological premise from which the series operates: the degraded faces of judges, criminals, prostitutes, and soldiers are not separate from the divine story but its setting and substance.
The Beatitudes of Matthew 5:4 - 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted' - provide the series with its eschatological orientation. The suffering Rouault depicts is not meaningless or final; it is the condition that the divine compassion (miserere) addresses. The war plates depicting the devastation of villages, the deaths of soldiers, the grief of survivors are not simply documentary horror but are placed in a theological context in which suffering invites divine response.
Rouault was a deeply devout Catholic, formed in the devotional tradition of the Third Order Franciscans and the Catholic social movement. He knew Jacques Maritain, the leading Thomist philosopher of the century, whose defense of art as a form of genuine knowledge and whose concept of the Christian artist as a contemplative informed Rouault's self-understanding. The Miserere can be read as Rouault's version of Maritain's Art and Scholasticism: a demonstration that art in the tradition of sacred craft, brought into genuine contact with the horrors of the twentieth century, can still generate genuinely sacred images.
The Miserere plates are held in major print collections worldwide. Complete sets are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The series has been continuously reprinted and remains accessible.
For further reading: Pierre Courthion, Georges Rouault (1961); Fabrice Hergott and Sarah Whitfield, eds., Georges Rouault: The Sacred and the Profane (2008); William Dyrness, Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation (1971); Robert Schiff, 'Rouault's Miserere: The Artist as Prophet,' Art Bulletin 52 (1970); Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism (1920).