The enigma of Jean Fautrier and his ‘hieroglyphics of pain’

The art historian Michel Tapié once observed Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) destroying his own paintings, ripping into canvases covered in masses of thick pigment. ‘I know how much strength he had to exert in order to tear up those glued surfaces,’ he wrote, describing the dense layers of colour as ‘hard as stone’.

Fautrier’s coarse, coagulated surfaces evoked the raw textures of everyday life. In his ordered studio in the suburbs of Paris, the artist created turmoil in haute pâte (high paste).

Today this style is known as Art Informel, the product of a movement that emerged in France out of the chaos and destruction of the Second World War. Its proponents were a group of battle-worn individuals who had experienced human suffering and bore the responsibility of survival.

Locked up in their own sense of being, they painted this experience with an existentialist gloom: faces emerged like apparitions from the darkness, buildings seemed off-kilter, and solitary figures conveyed an unsettling sense of aloneness.

Together with Hans Hartung, Wols, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Jean Dubuffet, Fautrier created what André Malraux described as the ‘hieroglyphics of pain’ — works that rendered the depths of human emotion in paint.

Paradoxically, this exposure of feeling did not translate into the artist’s own private life. Fautrier was an enigmatic individual who rarely gave interviews and left behind very little autobiographical information when he died in 1964.

The air of mystery surrounding Fautrier is set to change this month with the publication of the catalogue raisonné directed by the art historian Marie-José Lefort — an endeavour that has taken almost 40 years to complete. To mark its launch in September 2023, Christie’s in Paris held a private selling exhibition L’Enragé: Hommage à Jean Fautrier, which, it is hoped, will contribute to a better understanding of the artist.

Fautrier’s life and career paralleled the political upheavals in his native France. Born in Paris in 1898, he moved to England with his mother after the death of his father in 1908, and enrolled at the Royal Academy at the age of 14. It was in London that he discovered the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the colours of which were to have a profound impact on the artist for the rest of his life.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Fautrier returned to France to enlist. He was discharged in 1921 due to ill health, and settled in Paris, where he fell in with a group of bohemian writers (he always preferred authors to artists), among them René Char, Paul Eluard, André Malraux and Georges Bataille. He held his first exhibition at the Galerie Visconti in 1924.

Fautrier’s early works are darkly impressionistic: blurry still lifes and solitary nudes. Malraux wrote that ‘although they are flowers and landscapes from an intense, lyrical world, I think of Goya’s etchings’.

Between 1934 and 1935, Fautrier abandoned painting and moved to the French Alps, where he opened a dance hall and became a ski instructor. According to Paul Nyzam, head of the Post-War and Contemporary Art department at Christie’s in Paris, the move was economic. ‘The stock market crash of 1929 affected him greatly,’ he says. ‘The art dealer Paul Guillaume ended his contract with Fautrier which had ensured him a regular income.’

Fautrier did not return to Paris until 1940, during the Second World War, when he embarked on a new direction in painting. ‘I liked the idea of mixing things,’ he said. ‘Of being able to take oil, watercolour, whatever — powders if they were at hand. A formula had to be found to be able to work with everything.’

Out of this radical experimentation came a new, semi-abstracted style, in which figures were reduced to a series of scoured, limbless shapes. Visceral and irrational, these disfigured forms seemed to embody the monstrosity of the times. In 1941, three of Fautrier’s paintings were donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

‘Otages’ (‘Hostages’), is a series made between 1943 and 1945, when the artist was staying at the Maison de Santé in the Vallée-aux-Loups, a psychiatric ward in the Paris suburbs. Fautrier had retreated there after being arrested and held for four days as a suspected member of the Resistance in January 1943. From his room he could hear prisoners being executed by the Gestapo in the nearby forest, and it was the anguish he felt, according to the art historian Sarah Wilson, that provided the impetus for the paintings.

Tête d’Otage, from 1944, is a distorted image of a head the colour of bruised flesh. In the 1945 work Otage (above), splashes of red and yellow paint suggest lesions and wounds. The art critic Pierre Restany described these paintings as expressions of ‘anger, fear, hatred, impotence, tenderness and human solidarity’.

The Otages were followed by a series of large-format works titled ‘Traps’, which conveyed injury through cracked, scarred and stucco-like surfaces. Later, in 1956, he expressed his outrage at the Soviet invasion of Hungary in a series of sgraffito heads titled ‘Partisans’, in which streaks of red paint look like congealed blood.

The Otages were followed by a series of large-format works titled ‘Traps’, which conveyed injury through cracked, scarred and stucco-like surfaces. Later, in 1956, he expressed his outrage at the Soviet invasion of Hungary in a series of sgraffito heads titled ‘Partisans’, in which streaks of red paint look like congealed blood.

The artist also revisited the still-life genre, creating works that the French writer Jean Paulhan described as inhabiting an ‘excessive and monstrous world, violent and abusive, where pears are bigger and where flowers are more convulsed than flowers. Seeing them, one forgets that fruits are made to be eaten, flowers to be smelled and landscapes to rest calmly.’

As a legacy of his alpine dance-hall days, Fautrier took his titles from old jazz standards such as Sweet Baby and I’m Falling in Love, improvising with colour and form, moods and styles, like a free-form jazz musician urging the melody into more challenging territory.

Inspired by Fautrier’s febrile gestures, Michel Tapié published Un Art Autre (‘Art of Another Kind’) in 1952. This manifesto proposed a form of art that emphasised materials and colour over images, a grappling with raw media on canvas that would be an alternative to the American-dominated Abstract Expressionism. It became known as ‘Art Informel’ and typified the work of a group of mainly European artists such as Pierre Soulages, Antoni Tàpies and Dubuffet.

Fautrier, however, was wary of being categorised under such a title, and rejected the idea that his work was mere abstraction. ‘No art form can create emotion if it does not bear some trace of the real,’ he said in 1957.

His final years were spent on the peripheries of the art world. He was garlanded with awards at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and the Tokyo Biennale in 1961, but by then the artist of the wounded and infirm was being supplanted by Pop Art’s shiny optimism.

Remarkably, his paintings found a following not in France, but in Germany. A group of young post-war artists — among them Gerhardt Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz — perceived in Fautrier’s ravaged layers, a way to address their country’s violent past.

Today, Nyzam believes Fautrier to be ‘one of the most important 20th-century European artists. As well as having a decisive influence on younger artists, he gave birth to an absolutely original and independent body of work,’ he says.