The light in Georges Rouault’s paintings is dirty and murky. His roughened yet translucent surfaces, reminiscent of both earth and stained glass, are passageways through which color shines from out of the lower depths. Rouault’s glowing russets and ochers feel as if they have been wrung from the mud. His turquoise blues glimmer like gems underwater, and his pearly grays suggest uneasy skies just before or after a storm. Bruised pinks, blood reds, and purplish browns are raw and swollen — inflammations that evoke the whipping post and the height of passion. His black contour lines, which bring to mind leaded windows and iron cages, are Medieval in tone and spirit. Yet his pictures — whether they depict Christ or clowns, whores or angels, judges or saints — are decisively Modern.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash has brought together a stunning grouping of 26 of Rouault’s paintings — judges, clowns, and whores, as well as a few land- and seascapes — pictures that merge ancient Egyptian Fayum portraiture, medieval spirituality, and 20th-century Expressionism. The results are cartoonish pictures that are deeply emotional and brutally honest. The exhibit is remarkable in that, for the first time in America since the 1953 retrospective at MoMA, a major grouping of Rouault’s paintings has been brought together in one space. This allows for us to see the artist’s remarkable range and variousness of touch.

Rouault (1871–1958) spent a year working directly in the courtroom, and he painted prostitutes in the studio. But, although his figure paintings are as individual as portraits, they are not of individuals: They depict characters from the artist’s unique cast of grotesque types. Ripe with humility, they are surprisingly free of caricature, satire, moralizing, and judgment. Rouault’s pictures come not from a place of looking down upon, or of pointing fingers, but from looking within. Though his pictures may rally against the arrogance and ignorance of the Modern bourgeoisie, they convey ancient and universal horrors — facts of life that come not with being a product of the Industrial Revolution but, rather, with being human.

Rouault’s figures belong nowhere and everywhere. Painted in Paris, where the artist was born and spent his life, their clothing may date them and identify their professions, but they exist, beyond place and time, as wandering prophets or messengers. His prostitutes bring to mind Rembrandt’s Bathshebas. His tramps, peasants, and beggars, weighed down by their meager possessions, resemble Christ bearing the cross. His heads of laborers and tragic clowns are almost interchangeable with his mocked Christs. And his judges, although they are ugly and brutish and unbending, are — in a manner of “they know not what they do” — like innocent props or wooden puppets in an absurd theater.

Almost every great painter’s art suffers from reproduction, but some works endure more than others. Rouault’s expressive bluntness comes through in the photographs of his paintings, but it is often at the sacrifice of his humility, delicacy, and intimacy. In reproductions we get the beating of Rouault’s socialist drum but little of his spiritually timbrelled finesse.

That is why it is essential to see the work of Rouault in the flesh — so that the actual images can overpower those weaker, overbearing pictures concocted by the mind’s eye. As welcome as this exhibit is, however, it is not the long-overdue, mammoth retrospective one hoped for. The show contains a number of great pictures, such as “Le Superhomme” (1916), “Ludmilla” (c. 1930), “Le Dernier Romantique” (1937), and “Pierrots” (c. 1939). But it focuses mostly on small nonreligious paintings, most of them in watercolor or gouache, created between 1903 (when Rouault for a time abandoned religious themes for social causes) and 1939. Still, the show is dense, moving, and beautifully arranged. Viewers used to the vulgarity, tongue-in-cheek irony, or socially conscious brow-beating of some Expressionistic or contemporary figure painting (not to mention the forced, limpid sexuality embraced by painters such as Lisa Yuskavage), may be encouraged by the experience of single pictures that are capable of eliciting such a wide range of responses.

Rouault’s “Filles (ou, Deux Prostituées)” (1906) gives us two seated nudes. One floats above the other like an apparition. The other, as with the nude in the masterpiece “Fille (Femme aux Cheveux Roux)” (1908), is the color of overripe fruit. She is large and meaty and stubborn — as solid and rooted as an oak. She is piggish, and her expression is hard-won. Her hand looks like a bloodied claw, and she inflates like a balloon, as if she were expanding and rising. Yet she is fully human. Reluctantly carrying her wares (her bulbous breasts, thighs, and belly) with her like heavy tools of the trade, she conveys the animalism, disruption, and fleetingness of the life of the whore.

“Acrobates XIII” (1913) is a painting originally owned by Rouault’s lifelong friend Matisse. One of many masterpieces in the show, the picture is of two male acrobats, both of whom are concocted out of forms that are as a-jumble as a juggler’s balls. Their expansive, rubbery arms snake around their heads, yet their bodies are taut and friezelike. Beautifully lithe (as with Matisse’s dancers), they do not depict performers; rather, they convey the muscularity, rhythm, and fluidity of the performance.

Rouault chose, as he said, to “wander the inhospitable shores where Orpheus sings his woes.” His characters have been summoned — possibly resurrected — and they come from troubled lands. Yet, like Orpheus’s animals and trees, they are moved to dance because of the tenderness of the musician’s song. Rouault’s art certainly is tragicomedy. Its stage is lit not by full sun but by the light of dusk or dawn. Rouault knew this about his art. He wrote in his poem “Portrait Spiritualiste de Terre d’ombre”: “Tragic is the light.”

Until June 9 (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Ave. at 78th Street, 212-744-7400).