Lot 28
  • 28

Jean Fautrier

Estimate
700,000 - 900,000 GBP
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Description

  • Jean Fautrier
  • Corps D'Otage
  • signed and indistinctly dated
  • mixed media on paper laid down on canvas
  • 116 by 89cm.
  • 45 6/8 by 35in.
  • Executed circa 1943, this work will be included in the forthcoming Jean Fautrier Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Marie-José Lefort, Geneva.

Provenance

Alfonso Ossorio, East Hampton
Galerie Stadler, Paris
Acquired directly from the above in 1963

Exhibited

Paris, Galerie René Drouin, Les Otages, Peintures et Sculptures de Fautrier, 1945
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris-Paris, 1981, p. 121, no. 236, illustrated in colour
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, La Grande Parade - Highlights in Painting after 1940, 1984-85, no. 75, p. 124, illustrated in colour
Toulouse, Réfectoire des Jacobins, Un Art Autre, 1997, illustrated in colour (on the cover of the pamphlet)
Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Fautrier, 2004-5, no. 41 (incorrectly titled)

Literature

Francis Ponge, Note sur les Otages, Peintures de Fautrier, Paris 1946, p. 3, illustrated
Yves Peyré, Fautrier ou les Outrages de l'Impossible, Paris 1990, p. 10, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Milwaukee, The Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art; New York, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery; Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, Jean Fautrier, 2002-03, p. 38, illustration of installation view

Condition

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to fully convey the textured surface in the original. Condition: This work is in good condition. The work has been relined and restored onto a new wooden keyed stretched which has successfully secured the overall pattern of slightly raised but stable craquelure. Examination under ultra violet light reveals a number of retouchings, notably in the background. There are also a few retouchings on the figure which appear to cover small areas of paint loss.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Catalogue Note

Paramount to Jean Fautrier's illustrious series Otages (Hostages), this masterful work was central to the artist's breakthrough exhibition at Galerie René Drouin, Paris in 1945 in which also Tête d'Otage No. 24 (lot 26) was shown. It is one of the most significant paintings by his hand ever to appear at auction. A stunning conflation of beauty and horror, Corps D'Otage epitomizes the height of Fautrier's career, as the artist himself noted in a letter in 1944: "it seems to me that the evolution has been insane and that I'm finally arriving at what I have always hoped." (Exhibition Catalogue, Milwaukee, The Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art; Jean Fautrier, 2002-03, p. 209) Indeed, enthusiasm for his new cycle led Fautrier to delay the exhibition from January to February in order to include ten more canvases. When the landmark show opened, the obsessive repetition of aesthetically sublime yet intensely mournful subjects led to an overwhelmed and shocked public reaction. However, enlightened critics such as André Malraux and Francis Ponge perceived how the compositional harmony of graceful lines and poetic colours of the paintings bespoke a profoundly tragic beauty, comparable to no less art historical precedent than the sculpture of Michelangelo.

During the war Fautrier's Parisian studio had been a rendezvous for intellectuals and artists associated with the French Resistance such as Malraux, Ponge, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Paulhan, and Paul Éluard, and in January 1943 it was searched by the Nazis looking for an excuse to intern the artist. Following this harassment and brief imprisonment by the Gestapo, Fautrier was impelled to abandon Paris and Paulhan suggested he retreat to shelter in a psychiatric asylum at Châtenay-Malabry just outside Paris, where he remained until 1945. As Fautrier recalled to Palma Bucarelli in 1960, while there he was exposed to the depraved inhumanity of the Nazis as they tortured and executed prisoners at night in the woods around the sanatorium. Bearing auditory witness to these torments urged Fautrier to depict the horrors of war with the supremely affecting Otages, while the danger of possible recrimination meant that he did not sign or date any of the works until the Drouin exhibition in 1945. Defined by Malraux in the preface to the Drouin catalogue as "Hieroglyphs of pain", the Otages embody both the recognition and remembrance of suffering, while also standing as serene images in their own right. Eight years after Picasso expressed the horror of martyred Spain in his revered epic Guernica; Fautrier enlisted a serene and enigmatic aesthetic language to advance powerful reflections on the worst atrocities of the Twentieth Century.

Breathtaking in their freshness and ground-breaking in their pictorial technique, the Otages marked the birth of Art Informel and declared Fautrier as one of its leading figures. Strongly influenced by Art Brut and together with artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Wols, Fautrier pursued an improvisational approach, gestural abstraction and a technique freed from the conventions of classical easel painting that revolutionized the aesthetics of visual arts in Europe at this time. Indeed, the Otages series completely broke with tradition, as attested by Michel Tapié: "it was in 1943, on seeing some new works by Fautrier, that I had the impression for the first time that there was something else [..] Two staggering shows marked in 1945 the beginning of that something else with which we are now beginning to feel at home, seeing in it inexhaustible suggestions for adventures in depth: I am referring to Jean Fautrier's Hostages and to Dubuffet's High Impastos." (Michel Tapié, Un Art Autre, 1956)

Fautrier's technique enlisted unprecedented accumulations of material to strike a dichotomy between the cruelty of the subject and a compositional tenderness filled with sinuous contour and gorgeous colour. He developed an extremely innovative method, involving an haute pâte consisting of enduit, a thick plaster impasto used for wall repair. Having mounted and glued paper on a canvas lying on his studio table, he applied a thick ground layer to the paper to create something of a bas-relief. He then drew with gouache or ink and sprinkled pigment that would become absorbed into the thick wet impasto before finally varnishing the completed work. As observed by André Malraux: "the technique of his current pictures, which are very few in number, requires a rapid execution, and many of them seem to be lyrical improvisations but are the sudden fruits of a slow ripening, in the sense that modern poems are." (André Malraux cited in a letter to Alexander Iolas, 1956, in Exhibition Catalogue, Milwaukee, The Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art; New York, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery; Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, Jean Fautrier, 2002-03, p. 190). The present Corps D'Otage is the apotheosis of this remarkable method, its delicate sculptural surfaces modulating the pastel hues of creams, pinks and greens into beautiful chromatic concert. While this mesmerising tableau will forever relate to humankind's worst betrayal, its surfaces hold a profound sense of emancipation and the cathartic glimmer that art endures.