Jean Fautrier: rapturous texture: an enigmatic pioneer of art informel, French painter Jean Fautrier created a varied and often contradictory body of work that was the focus of a recent U.S. museum survey - Critical Essay

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by David Ebony

Ever since his thickly impastoed canvases were first shown internationally in the mid-1940s, French painter Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) has generated controversy among critics, collectors and curators of postwar abstraction. Many Europeans viewed Fautrier as the quintessential painter-poet, whose existentialism-tinged works convey at once the trauma, angst and tentative optimism of those years. However, he confounded his supporters in the 1950s, when he began to mass-produce copies of his own paintings as well as those of other artists.

Fautrier's relationship with the U.S. has been generally stormy. Although he had several well-received exhibitions in the 1940s anti '50s, some critics dismissed his pastel-hued, intimate-scaled paintings. They likened the pasty surfaces to everything from cake frosting to excrement, and claimed that the works paled in comparison with the tougher, heroic-scaled gestures of the Abstract Expressionists. In addition, there was a serious Fautrier backlash in America in 1960 when he and Hans Hartung, representing France, shared the grand prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. That year, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline and Philip Guston, representing the U.S., were expected by many to take the prize as part of Europe's long-overdue recognition of the achievements of the New York School. Just before the awards ceremony, a widely reported (and probably greatly exaggerated) altercation between Kline and Fautrier erupted in a Venetian cafe. According to some witnesses, Kline called Fautrier "a French cook" and pushed or shoved him into a chair; others claim that Fautrier started the row when he shouted for the American painters to pack up and go home.

Since then, Fautrier has rarely been shown in the U.S., although several exhibitions in recent years have helped renew interest in the work. In 1996, he was featured in "L'informe: mode d'emploi (Formless: h User's Guide)," a sprawling group show organized by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which did not travel but garnered significant attention abroad. A 1998 exhibition of Fautrier's early paintings at New York's Michael Werner Gallery also attracted considerable notice. Last fall, a major touring museum survey of some 60 Fautrier works debuted at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee. The artist's first ever U.S. museum retrospective, the show traveled to Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery in New York and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge. Jointly organized by the three institutions, the exhibition was cocurated by Karen K. Butler, a Columbia Ph.D. candidate, and Haggerty director Curtis L. Carter. The show's catalogue, including historical texts and essays by Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Rachel E. Perry and others, constitutes the first comprehensive Fautrier monograph in English.

Along with Jean Dubuffet and Wols, Fautrier is widely regarded as a pioneer of art informed, a European-based movement in the 1940s and '50s that expanded the boundaries of painting not only in terms of process but also in its emphasis on the work's status as an object. Coined by critic Michel Tapir, the term art informel was often used to describe Fautrier's work, although the artist was vehemently opposed to this label and similar ones, including tdchisme, which also refers to European gestural abstraction of the period. He rejected core principles associated with art informel, such as an antirealism stance and an opposition to the idealism of geometric abstraction. He insisted that his work was based in reality, and, indeed, his early paintings were Courbet-like studies of still lifes and other traditional genres. Moreover, the systematic procedures he employed and the taut organization of his compositions further counter the precepts of art informel.

The recent exhibition, containing major paintings, sculptures, works on paper and several display cases filled with examples of the artist's illustrated books, examined Fautrier's relationship to art informel, as did a video showing the artist at work and in conversation with writer Jean Paulhan. In the film, Fautrier demonstrates his technique and explains his position on many aspects of his work and its conflicted relationship to postwar art. At the Wallach, where I saw the show, a chronological installation in separate rooms devoted to the various phases of Fautrier's long career helped to clarify the artist's achievement and to dispel many misconceptions about the work. One came away from the exhibition with a conviction that throughout his career Fautrier sought to reinvent painting by constantly returning to the fundamental principles of the medium, to simple lines and forms, and to studies of the historical origins of art-making.

Born in Paris, Fantrier moved with his mother to England soon after his father's death in 1908. He studied at London's Royal Academy with Walter Sickert and later at the Slade School of Art. Inspired by Turner and Chardin, Fautrier early on produced dark and brooding, centralized oil compositions of figures, still lifes and landscapes, all of which appear suspended in a dense vapor. Some of the earliest works in the show were paintings of figures and dead animals that seem to reference 17th- and 18th-century art; also included were a number of paintings and bronze sculptures of primitivistic figures from the late 1920s that recall prehistoric art.