On Nov. 5, 1948, Georges Rouault took 315 of his 700 unfinished paintings to a factory in Montreuil-sur-Bois, an eastern suburb of Paris, dumped them in a furnace and burned them.
The then 77-year-old artist told a photographer and court official who were present at the destruction of the artwork that he simply didn't have time to finish the works.The French magazine Esprit wondered at the time if it was not a "dangerous precedent for a great creative artist to take upon himself the judgment of the ages, saving this work and destroying that one, leaving behind him no traces of doubts and hesitations through which the human side of the artist could be grasped."
But his daughter, Isabelle Rouault, said recently that her father's criterion was simply how much time would he need to finish them.
"His main concern with each canvas was the stage of its progress," she said.
"My father was very critical of his own work, never satisfied, and he did not like to sell his pictures or even loan them."
"Rouault often spent 10 years on a painting, coming back to it again and again before signing it, so he was sure there was not enough time," said Fabrice Hergott who has organized a London exhibition last year of the French artist's early work from 1903 to 1920.
"Many artists destroy their work because they are dissatisfied with it or their ideas have changed when they return to unfinished canvases," said Simonetta Fraquelli who worked on the exhibition.
"Francis Bacon, the British artist, destroyed his early works, and Michelangelo left the sculpture in Milan known as the Rondanini Pieta unfinished. Maybe the burning was a way for Rouault to complete his life as he saw it."
Despite the fire, between 2,700 and 3,000 Rouaults are left in the world's museums and private collections, and another 900 are unfinished, said Isabelle Rouault. Now 83, she was her father's secretary and catalogued his work.
At the end of 1956, eight years after the fire, Rouault gave up painting altogether. When he died two years later, three months before his 87th birthday, he was considered such an important figure that he was given a state funeral.
Rouault is best known for his pictures of Christ. Unlike the glossy images preferred in the 19th century, his depictions of the Savior surprise and shock. His Christ is gloomy and full of foreboding, boldly outlined in heavy, black brush-strokes, like almost all Rouault's figures.
Rouault was born in a terrible moment in French history, in a Paris cellar in May 1871 during a bombardment of the city by government forces crushing the communist revolution known as the Paris Commune.
Judging by his paintings, Rouault had a dark view of life. His vision might be seen as an echo of the Commune's end, when more people were executed by the government than in the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
Hergott described the painter's early work as anarchistic, related to nothing else that was being painted at the time. His subjects in those years were mainly prostitutes, clowns, circus riders, human-figure targets at fairgrounds and people in the law courts - the accused, the lawyers and the judges.
There is nothing pretty about any of them.
"The paintings close around the subjects like a trap; and in the courtrooms, accusers and accused are presented together without distinction between them," Hergott said.
Rouault was a friend of Henri Matisse. The two men had the same professor, Gustave Moreau, the painter of elaborate biblical and mythological subjects whose Paris studio survives as a museum for his work which he left to the nation.
Moreau was an important, lifelong influence on Rouault; so was the painter's apprenticeship in a stained-glass workshop. The heavy outlines of Rouault's figures resemble the lines of lead that hold painted glass pieces together in a window.
"Rouault's art was the most important thing in his life and he worked at it every day and often at night as well," said Hergott, 31, a curator at the Pompidou Center in Paris where the exhibition was first displayed.
"Rouault preferred to paint on easily available materials like paper and card and he worked flat, on a table.
"His work was appreciated early in this century by some collectors and other artists. It wasn't difficult to put this exhibition together because owners mostly were happy to lend as there has been no big exhibition since the Paris retrospective in 1971 for what would have been Rouault's 100th birthday."
Rouault must have owed much of his success to his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who championed the new. He staged the first solo exhibition of Paul Cezanne, gave money to Paul Gauguin to enable him to survive and exhibited Pablo Picasso's work as early as 1901.
"Vollard recognized Rouault as a great artist and bought everything in his studio in 1917. Rouault is appreciated in many countries and loans to this exhibition came from France, the United States, Japan, Germany, Switzerland and a few from Ireland," Hergott said.
"I wasn't sure what they would look like until I saw them all together on the walls. I was surprised by their quality and intensity at the Pompidou Center."
Hergott considers Rouault's art difficult to appreciate.
"You mustn't judge it just by appearance and subject but by structure as well: There is a strong relationship between form and subject. The aggression is very controlled. He had control like Matisse but he was not colorful like his friend."