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

Figurative Nude (1929) is a 3-foot-high canvas in which a female stands against a slate gray background. Her faintly rendered, rotund torso and delicately etched facial features evince the monumental simplicity of an ancient fertility goddess. The deep red that delineates Reclining Nude (1929), stretching across the entire width of the large canvas (approximately 32 by 51 inches), resembles the blood-red pigment used by prehistoric cave painters.

Still lifes such as The Hung Sheep (1926) and Vase of Flowers (1927) recall a type of memento mori and exemplify the meditation on death that permeates much of the artist's oeuvre. The Glaciers (1926) is an ominous, Turneresque seascape painted with masses of black, gray and deep blue brushstrokes. A number of these canvases were shown to some acclaim alongside works by Soutine, Modigliani, Kisling and Derain in Fautrier's first shows at Galerie Zborowski in Paris in the mid-1920s. At one of those exhibitions, he met Andre Malraux, who became a lifelong friend and supporter and who, on several occasions, wrote about Fautrier's art (one of these essays, along with some of his letters to the artist, are included in the catalogue).

Just as Fautrier began to gain some notice in the early 1930s, he retreated from the Paris art scene, put his career on hold and settled with his wife in the French Alps. He became a ski instructor and opened a jazz nightclub at a ski resort in 1934. Later in the decade, when the war began, he returned to Paris and resumed painting. He also collaborated with writers such as Paul Eluard, Rene Char and Francis Ponge, who invited him to illustrate their works. The results of some of these projects were on view in the show.

Distressed by the war and trying to find a way to vent his rage, Fautrier began painting in a more aggressive manner than before. Vegetation (1940), for instance, is an agitated composition featuring three loosely arranged horizontal bands. A dark green area at the bottom is covered with slashing black brushstrokes. In the upper portion, fluid, calligraphic white lines are scribbled on a fresco-like ground of pale yellow and green. This painting reminds one of the impact that Fautrier has had on the work of a host of artists ranging from Bram Bogart to Cy Twombly.

Fautrier was arrested by the Gestapo in early 1943. The charges were unclea5 but some contemporaries claimed that the Nazis accused him of gold trading, while others say that his pornographic illustrations for Georges Bataille's novel Madame Edwarda, published the year before, made him a target. In any case, he was released after a short time.

His studio, in Chatenay-Malabry on the outskirts of Paris, was located near a wooded area where the Nazis executed their prisoners. Haunted by the screams of the victims, which he heard at night, Fautrier conveyed the feeling of helplessness and terror in his "Otage" (Hostage) series. This group, which included sculptures and paintings, was well represented in the survey. The works caused a sensation when they were shown in 1946 in Paris, where they were widely acclaimed as some of the most radical inventions of contemporary art.