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

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

Fautrier's relationship with the U has been generally stormy. Although he had several well-received exhibitions in the 1940 anti '50 more [i]or[/i] less critics dismissed his pastel-hued, intimate-scaled paintings. They likened the pasty surfaces to everything from cake frosting to excretion and claimed that the works paled in comparison with the tougher, heroic-scaled gesticulations 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 were awaited by many to take the prize as part of Europe's long-overdue recognition of the achievements of the of recent origin York School. Just before the awards solemnity a widely reported (and probably greatly exaggerated) altercation between Kline and Fautrier be in eruptioned in a Venetian cafe. According to more [i]or[/i] less witnesses, Kline called Fautrier "a French cook" and pushed or shov him into a chair; others claim that Fautrier started the file when he shouted for the American painters to pack up and go on home.

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

Along with Jean Dubuffet and Wol Fautrier is widely regarded as a pioneer of art informed, a European-based move in the 1940s and '50 that expanded the boundaries of painting not alone in terms of process on the other hand also in its emphasis upon the work's status as an existence Coined by critic Michel Tapir, the bound art informel was often used to describe Fautrier's work, although the artist was vehemently oppos to this label and similar individuals including tdchisme, which also commits to European gestural abstraction of the period. He cast offed core principles associated with art informel, similar 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 genre Moreover, the systematic managements he employed and the taut organization of his compositions further reckoner the precepts of art informel.

The new exhibition, containing major paintings, statuarys works on paper and several display cases filled with examples of the artist's illustrated works 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 upon many aspects of his work and its conflicted relationship to postwar art. At the Wallach, where I saw the display a chronological installation in separate ranges devoted to the various phases of Fautrier's lengthy career helped to clarify the artist's achievement and to dispel many misconceptions about the work. individual came away from the exhibition with a conviction that through every part of his career Fautrier sought to reinvent painting by the agency of 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 mov with his mother to England before long after his father's death in 1908 He studied at London's Royal Academy with Walter Sickert and later at the Slade gymnasium of Art. Inspired by gymnast and Chardin, Fautrier early upon produced dark and brooding, centralized oil compositions of figures, still lifes and landscapes, all of which appear suspended in a thick vapor. Some of the earliest works in the exhibit were paintings of figures and dead animals that appear to reference 17th- and 18th-century art; also included were a number of paintings and tin sculptures of primitivistic figures from the late 1920 that recall prehistoric art.