Biography
Jean Fautrier (*1898 Paris FR | †1964 Châtenay-Malabry FR) is considered to be one of the most significant precursors of Art Informel: a swathe of approaches to abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s which had in common an improvisatory methodology and highly gestural technique. Fautrier was a major contributor to the revitalization of European modern art after Cubism.
Fautrier was born in Paris out of wedlock in 1898. He experienced a lonely boyhood and a youth marked by the loss of both his father and his grandmother. After these losses, he went to live with his mother in London in 1908. He studied art at the conservative Royal Academy, and became familiar with the vast collections of the London museums.
In 1917, at the age of nineteen, he was called back to France to serve in the French army in the First World War where he experienced the horror of the trenches. After the war, he settled in Paris, where his career as a painter finally began. His early works addressed the issues of classical modernist painting itself. His subjects were typical studio subjects common to eighteenth and nineteenth-century painters: still life, the nude, and landscape. The artist’s brooding sensibility is constantly present in these gloomy works. There is an emphasis on shadowy black backgrounds and muted earthy colors which further reflects the underlying sense of the macabre. The surface of the paintings was often scraped and gouged – introducing the subtext of violation in technique and content which would reappear in his later works. In 1929, he started working exclusively on paper and experimented with a ‘coating’ made of a combination of Spanish white and glue that would eventually become his trademark.
Surprisingly unaffected by the prevailing 20th century French movements of Cubism and Surrealism, Fautrier’s greatest inspiration for the work he produced in the 1920’s and 1930’s came from the mystical paintings of British nineteenth-century artist J. M. W. Turner. Turner’s amorphous treatment of space and interest in rich surface texture proved to be a profound influence on the artist.
It is clear that Fautrier’s paintings from this period defied easy categorization and even went against the art trends followed by his French contemporaries. Nevertheless, his work was included in many exhibitions in Paris during the years following the First World War, and he enjoyed a reasonable amount of success and critical acclaim. His paintings were hung in exhibitions alongside the works of Derain, Modigliani, Picasso, and Soutine.
By 1934, the economic depression had hit France and with it, the art market withered. Fautrier ran into severe financial difficulties, stopped painting altogether, and moved to Tignes in the French Alps, where he worked as a ski instructor, and later to Val d’Isère, where he opened a jazz nightclub. During this six-year period, Fautrier is thought to have completed a small number of sculptures, but it was not until the outbreak of the Second World War in the summer of 1940 that he returned to Paris and began to paint again.
During World War II, after a temporary arrest by the German Gestapo, Fautrier went into hiding in a sanatorium. There he began painting the famous Otage (hostage) series, which he did in response to the rounding up and killing of French citizens by the Nazis, which were first showed in 1945. He invented a new process of painting, replacing traditional oil technique with haute pâte (high paste) constructions, using glue-based paint for blends of pigment with transparent and opaque inks. With it the artist composed intricate, luminous harmonies whose impastos and textures induced certain anxiety.
In the paintings of his later years, Fautrier continued to use the methods he had adopted in the Otages series. In response to the post-war shortages faced by the French people, he painted Les Objets, a series of seemingly banal objects which explores the material and cultural losses of the war. From 1957 on Fautrier started to paint pure abstractions, oval shapes on fields with stripes or grids of lines that were generally small in scale. He called them ‘pictures with four sides’ and represented in all their roughness and immediacy, his final statement of what a painting is, a mere composition of lines and shapes within a rectangle. In 1960 he won the international grand prize at the Venice Biennale and the following year won a major award at the Tokyo Biennale.
Fautrier died in Châtenay-Malabry in 1964. His work can be found in numerous major institutions such as the Musée D’Orsay, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Tate, London; the Museo d’Arte della Città di Ravenna and the Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid.