“Better a genius without faith than a believer without talent. We must take them as they are, barely Christian at all,” admitted Père Courturier, the Dominican monk who, draped in dashing white ecclesiastical robes tailor-made by Balenciaga, manipulated behind the scenes of the staid postwar French Catholic Church to make possible works of art such as Matisse’s chapel in Vence, Le Corbusier’s church in Ronchamp, and Notre Dame de Toute Grâce at Plateau d’Assy, Haute Savoie, decorated by communists, Jews and atheists including Léger, Lipchitz and Germaine Richier.

With few exceptions – Chagall, Stanley Spencer – religious painting ran out in the 20th century. Courturier’s enlightened mission was to square the circle of religious art in a secular epoch. In 1945, he had just one Catholic modern artist at his disposal: Georges Rouault, the 74-year-old former Fauve colleague of Matisse’s. Between the wars Rouault had worked in obscurity in the attic of his dealer Vollard’s house, painting a rarely exhibited cast of saints and sinners, prostitutes, clowns, jugglers, judges, kings, as a grotesque, burlesque, human-divine comedy. He is still little-known: among Léger’s jazzy mosaics, Richier’s faceless Christ and Lipchitz’s chunky Madonna, Rouault’s stained glass window at Plateau d’Assy depicting an elongated, tender, pale-faced Saint Veronica is a revelation. Here is modernism’s fractured, pared-down aesthetic underlined by the still, insistent spirituality of icons.

Veronica – vera icon, true image – was a perfect choice for Rouault. His conversion came on reading the Catholic novelist Leon Bloy in 1904, when he “underwent a moral crisis of the most violent sort. And I began to paint with an outrageous lyricism which disconcerted everybody”. Most disconcerting were not Rouault’s Gothic exaggerations or intense colour, but, in an era of irony and chic deconstruction, his sincerity, solemnity, simple moral compass. Briefly, at the end of the “low, dishonest” 1930s and the war-shattered, spiritually hungry 1940s, these made him an artist of the moment: retrospectives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1945 and 1953 were followed by a state funeral in Paris in 1958. Then, amid pop, minimalism, conceptualism, Rouault went back into eclipse. Now several exhibitions this autumn, marking the 50th anniversary of his death, challenge 21st-century audiences to look at him anew.

The Pompidou Centre’s Hommage à Georges Rouault: l’effervescence des débuts occupies the first room of the museum’s collection and focuses pertinently on what Rouault was not. How could he ever have linked himself to the Fauves? Hung opposite Fauvist landmarks such as Braque’s fiery “Paysage de L’Estaque” and flamboyant Matisses, Vlamincks and Derains, Rouault’s early nudes, portraits of young girls and circus pieces stand apart not only for their different treatment of colour – glowing shafts of brightness against dark grounds, occasionally heightened by bright red – but because the typical Fauvist rush of pleasure, optimism, liberation from realism is replaced by a sombre, uneasy sensuality and reflectiveness.

An exquisite nude painted on both sides of a huge clay pot, streaked melancholy blue, stands enticingly at the door. Inside, “Girl at the Mirror” and “Bather with Raised Arms”, from 1906-7, are similarly curvaceous, full figures, their contours clearly delineated, in Rouault’s distinctive early medium of watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper. Yet these women are vulnerable, haunted types, suggesting Mary Magdalene or Lot’s daughters as much as the fin de siècle demi-monde. Similarly, the figures in “Parade”, “Clowns”, “Polchinelle” imprisoned by a baroque ruff, the row of full-frontal faces lining up to pose in “Le Jeu de Massacre” make poignant compositions, their impassive expressions injecting anxiety into the unreal world of the circus.

The emphatic lines and vagabond subjects recall Toulouse-Lautrec; the stark contrasts and emotive appeal derive from Van Gogh; the social commentary and empathy with life on the margins evoke Daumier. Most of all, though, Rouault’s trademark jewel hues set mosaic-like within strong black outlines are rooted in his years as apprentice to a stained-glass-maker and restorer.

The story continues in Europe at the Pinacothèque de Paris, which opens Georges Rouault: Masterpieces from the Idemitsu Collection next week; visiting from its home in Tokyo for the first time, this excellent collection provides an overview of 60 years of work, with an emphasis on the religious and circus figures. In the US, similar ground is covered at Boston’s McMullen Museum, which has just launched Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, placing Rouault’s portraits in the context of contemporary questions of identity and self-invention. “Who among us does not wear a mask? Are we not slaves believing ourselves to be kings?” Rouault asked.

After Vollard bought out his studio, and entire future oeuvre, in 1917 – the artist’s condition was that he did not have to finish anything – Rouault devoted himself to painting solitary figures in an increasingly idealised, hieratic form. The hollowed-out, wistful, big-eyed “Self-portrait”, with its thickly impastoed turquoise-white cap suggesting a worker’s halo, in Boston, and the Idemitsu’s frozen, ice-blue “Christ” are fine examples, showing Rouault, for all his isolation, au courant with the return to classicism of European painting.

In the 1930s, his further retreat, against a blackening political climate, into a dreamy interior world also paralleled that of Matisse’s oriental odalisques and Picasso’s erotic paintings of Marie-Thérèse Walter. Rouault’s figures became remotely Byzantine in their spiritual charge: the Idemitsu’s full-frontal “Pierrot” and “Christ”, both sorrowing, eyes cast down, translucent against a silvery background, look like variations on the same head. Vollard died in 1939 and after a protracted lawsuit, Rouault won back his canvases, then burnt more than 300 of them in 1947, certain he would not complete them as he wished.

Thus released, he began the distinctive late style in which accumulated surfaces of thick paint are layered almost sculpturally, and shot through with light. Boston’s “Sarah”, the mysterious face, eyes closed, set within an arch of white blocks as in a stained-glass window, is a high point. In Paris, the Pompidou dramatises the arc between early and late work with Les Inachevés de Georges Rouault, a permanent display devoted to unfinished late work.

“Art for you is serious, sober, and in its essence, religious. Everything you do will bear this stamp,” his teacher, the symbolist Gustave Moreau, told Rouault in 1891.

Sixty years on, Rouault could respond to developments in abstract expressionism while still proving Moreau’s prophecy true. To contemporary taste, he appears earnest, heavy, slow, but also a wonderful antidote to our slick, unbelieving times.

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Details

Georges Rouault: l’effervescence des débuts, Centre Pompidou, Paris, to October 13, tel: +33 (0)1 44 78 12 33; Georges Rouault: les chefsd’oeuvre de la collection Idemitsu, Pinacothèque de Paris, September 17 to January 18, tel: +33 (0)1 42 68 02 01; Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, McMullen Museum, Boston, to December 7, tel: +1 617 552 8100