Christ au Faubourg (Christ in the Outskirts of the City), 1935

original colour etching and aquatint on Montval paper, edition of 200 , 12 × 8 ¼ in. (30.5 × 21 cm)

On loan from a private collection

Rendered in strong black lines and bold colour, this work depicts Christ in a crowd of working-class people in one of the industrial districts on the outskirts of a major city (perhaps Paris). Four tall, vertical factory smokestacks loom overhead, dominating the upper half of the composition. Below, the crowd moves as a tangle of curving, angled forms, all seemingly straining to see Jesus reaching downward to touch, embrace, and/or heal a person near the left edge of the image. The luminous, haloed figure of Christ stands as a beacon—and as a formal and conceptual counterpoint to the smokestacks above him—amid the harsh cross-pressures of twentieth-century urban life. 

Made in 1935, this image was designed to be plate 1 (after the frontispiece) of Passion, a book published in 1939 by Ambroise Vollard, featuring a series of intense poetic meditations on Christ’s Passion by André Suarès and a suite of seventeen colour aquatints by Georges Rouault (engraved by Georges Aubert). Christ au Faubourg opens the series by imagining the unfolding of Christ's compassion within the fraught context of the artist's own social world.