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S otheby’s is delighted to present an extraordinary group of paintings hailing from the vibrant and innovative theatre of post-war Paris. Held in the same private European collection for over seventy years, these four rarely-seen paintings by Jean Dubuffet, Wols, and Jean Fautrier together manifest a testament to the sentiments of pain, trauma, hope and joy at the close of the Second World War. Created within just four years of one another, Dubuffet’s La cavalière au diamant (The Dancing Partner with Diamonds), Wols’s La Turquoise and Fautrier’s Corps d’otage and Tête d'otage N. 15 signify a pivotal point within the history of the Twentieth Century, at a rich moment of interaction between art, literature and philosophy in a culturally flourishing post-war Paris.
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The paintings in this group denote the vast juxtaposition of collective feelings after the war: Existentialist despair after witnessing war-time atrocities, and euphoric delight in the possibilities of the future. Art historian and curator Sarah Wilson describes this atmosphere in Paris during the immediate post-war years: “Neither the humiliation of the Occupation nor the duration of hostilities and the inconceivable atrocities of mass destruction could have been anticipated. The Second World War would fundamentally change the physical fabric of Europe’s cities and their intellectual life; the Holocaust and the atomic bomb would sever the two halves of the Twentieth Century. With the collapse of any ideology of progress, the project ‘modernity’ called for redefinition; and artists in Paris would define themselves by their strategies of response” (Sarah Wilson, ‘Saint-Germain-des-Prés: Antifascism, Occupation and Postwar Paris’, in: Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts (and travelling), Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968, 2002, p. 236).
The Liberation of Paris took place in August 1944, after four years of German occupation. A year later, in August 1945, the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the Second World War to an end. The close of the war introduced a devastating and surreal new dimension to the individual and wider public, a dimension ceaselessly explored by existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir; Satre’s Being and Nothingness was published in occupied Paris in 1943, while de Beauvoir’s novel Blood of Others and Satre’s The Age of Reason were published in September 1945 to widespread acclaim and appeal. There is an unassailable link between the work of writers and philosophers of this period, and that of the artists of the time, and Dubuffet, Wols and Fautrier were all exploring existentialist concerns wrought by the horrors of the war.
De Beauvoir interpreted the clash between pre-existing moral codes and authentic experience deeply embedded in the public psyche of the time – this very clash is made manifest on the surface of these artists’ paintings, and is explored in their radical choice of media and subversion of classical painterly styles. She writes that the public had, “lost their faith in perpetual peace, in eternal progress, in unchanging essences; they had discovered History in its most terrible form. They needed an ideology which would include such revelations without forcing them to jettison their old excuses.
Existentialism, struggling to reconcile history and morality, authorized them to accept their transitory condition without renouncing a certain absolute, to face horror and absurdity while still retaining their human dignity, to preserve their individuality” (Simone de Beauvoir cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, 1993, p. 18). Thus the art of this period had a specific, hallucinatory intensity that contradicted the tenets of the established school of Paris, the tradition of belle peinture, and indeed stood apart from the burgeoning American avant-garde. Pioneering experiments by Wols, Dubuffet and Fautrier paved the way forward, towards a new style of gesture variously defined by the aesthetic languages of Matière painting, Taschism and Art Informel.
Executed between 1944 and 1947, the four paintings in this group were created and acquired at a time when Dubuffet, Wols and Fautrier remained relatively unknown. Fully immersed within the Parisian artworld of the fifties, the consignor’s late father became acquainted with Michel Tapié, who helped curate this esteemed collection. Wols’s La Turquoise and Fautrier’s Corps d’otage and Tête d'otage N. 15 were previously owned by Tapié, renowned art critic and pioneer of Un art autre. Published in 1952, Tapié’s manifesto of the same title was indeed dedicated to the work of these three artists, plus that of Henri Michaux, acknowledging their elite status within the Parisian post-war intelligentsia: “Tapié’s hyperbolic manifesto drew on the language of existentialism for its vocabulary and philosophical justification: individualism, authenticity, aggression, violence and transgression were celebrated.
From out of his dense and florid prose, matter and gesture repeatedly emerge as defining elements of a new aesthetic” (F. Morris cited in: Ibid., p. 21). Dubuffet, Fautrier and Wols sought to subvert the hierarchical relationship between image and materials, affirming that painting should be derived from grappling with raw media. Choice of material was paramount to the art autre aesthetic, and so too was gestural action and the confrontation between abstraction and figuration, all of which are magnificently evinced on the surface of these four outstanding paintings. While Tapié is listed in the provenance of the Wols and the two paintings by Fautrier, Dubuffet dedicated La cavalière au diamant to his friend and fellow artist, René Guiette, yet another exalted personality within the flourishing cultural scene of post-war Paris.
Another crucial link between La cavalière au diamant, La Turquoise, Corps d’otage and Tête d'otage N. 15 is Galerie René Drouin, a small, prestigious gallery on the right bank in Paris, at the elegant Place Vendôme. Having been an architect before opening his gallery in collaboration with Leo Castelli on the eve of the war, dealer René Drouin played a significant role in promoting the work of Dubuffet, Fautrier and Wols at the very beginning of their careers. While Castelli emigrated to America in 1941, Drouin remained in Paris throughout the war and during the years immediately thereafter, creating a programme that embraced new, difficult, ‘outsider’ art in Paris.
Indeed, Fautrier’s Tête d'otage N. 15 debuted during the gallery’s seminal Otages, peintures de Jean Fautrier exhibition in November 1945, where the artist’s Otages paintings were shown publicly for the first time. Similarly, Dubuffet’s La cavalière au diamant was exhibited for the first time at Galerie René Drouin’s legendary exhibition, Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie, Hautes Pâtes de Jean Dubuffet, in May and June of 1946. Drouin allowed Dubuffet to work in the basement of his gallery, and indeed was the first to publicly exhibit the artist’s work. The Wols, La Turquoise, was exhibited at the gallery for the first time a year later in May and June of 1947; Drouin was also the first to exhibit works by Wols, and was introduced to the artist via his friend and renowned author Henri-Pierre Roché.
Thus the stories of these four spectacular and rare paintings are inextricably linked, and evocative of a rich and innovative moment within twentieth-century art history. Legendary writer and critic Jean Paulhan was a strong advocate of Dubuffet, Fautrier and Wols, and his influence on these artists was cemented by the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais exhibition Jean Paulhan and his Painters, held between February and April in 1974. La cavalière au diamant, La Turquoise, Corps d’otage and Tête d'otage N. 15 were highlights of this exhibition, and their inclusion marked one of the last moments in which the works would be exhibited publicly for over thirty years.
The prestigious provenance of these paintings alludes to their great importance within each artist’s respective oeuvre, and together the works demonstrate the exceptional forethought behind collecting works by artists so early in their illustrious careers, and indeed works by artists that were not grouped together – in exhibitions nor in literature – at the time. The story of post-war Paris cogently unfolds on the surface of these paintings, inviting the viewer to consider at once the existentialist fears and euphoric hopes of a collective psyche after the war. They embody a collective vision of human existence at the precipice of a new world order; this is Post-War painting at its finest.
