Jean Fautrier French, 1898-1964
"Jean Fautrier is a painter of wounds — his Otages series transformed the horror of occupation into matter, bearing witness with incomparable moral and aesthetic force."
Jean Fautrier (1898–1964) was a French painter and sculptor whose work anticipates both Art Informel and Arte Povera. His celebrated Otages (Hostages) series, begun during the German occupation of France and first exhibited in 1945, transformed atrocity into matter: thick, encrusted surfaces of paper pulp and paint, trembling between figuration and abstraction. Recognized as a pioneer of the post-war European avant-garde, his work is held at the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, and numerous international collections.
"What I am looking for is a way of inscribing horror without depicting it — to make suffering tangible through pure matter."
Jean Fautrier was born on 16 May 1898 in Paris. He showed exceptional talent from childhood and was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts in London at the age of fourteen. He fought in the First World War, and the experience of violence and destruction left a permanent mark on his sensibility. In the 1920s and 1930s he worked as a painter and innkeeper in the Alps, producing dark, sensuous figurative works that attracted the attention of dealers and collectors.
The decisive turn came during the Second World War. Hidden in a psychiatric clinic in Châtenay-Malabry to escape the Gestapo, Fautrier could hear the sounds of executions in the neighbouring woods. He began the Otages series: thickly layered compositions built up from paper pulp, plaster, lead white, and oil, in which barely legible heads emerge from encrusted, wounded surfaces. When exhibited at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris in October 1945, the works provoked controversy and fascination in equal measure. Jean Paulhan's catalogue text, Fautrier l'enragé, gave them their critical frame.
Fautrier went on to develop this matière-based approach across many series, including Objets and Nus. He was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1960, alongside Hartung and Chillida. He died on 21 July 1964 in Châtenay-Malabry. His work is held in major collections including the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, and the Kunsthalle Hamburg.
Major exhibitions: Galerie René Drouin, Paris (1945, Otages); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1989, retrospective); Tate Modern, London; Venice Biennale (Grand Prize, 1960).
Works in public collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon.
Selected bibliography: Jean Paulhan, Fautrier l'enragé, Gallimard, 1962; Dominique Clévenot, Jean Fautrier, Cercle d'Art, 1997; Centre Pompidou, Fautrier, Catalogue d'exposition, 1989.