One can, in fact, abandon oneself (not however without some second thoughts) to the call of that which is seen and keenly felt.  The real is the springboard; it gives the impetus to everything that will ensue.  There is nothing to do but let yourself go. 

Jean Fautrier

The real always guided Jean Fautrier's aesthetic practice, taking on many forms during his forty-five-year career.  From his early investigations of still life, landscape, and the nude to his visceral renditions of trauma in the Otage series, from his exploration of the everyday world of things in his Objet series to his efforts to democratize the postwar art market by inventing a serially fabricated but still original kind of painting in his originaux multiples, Fautrier's work was always anchored in history, both cultural and political. 

And yet this rootedness is not, of course, the whole story. Worldly experience was always filtered in Fautrier's work by aesthetic practice and theory.  He was deeply concerned with questions of technique and the physical nature of art making, as his letters to André Malraux and Jean Paulhan attest.  In turn, Fautrier's reception by these writers and by the poet Francis Ponge brought out the ideas inherent in his work, placing it firmly within the most important French intellectual currents of the time.

One of the curatorial objectives of this exhibition has been to maintain a balanced view, to present Fautrier's engagement with the world and his involvement with art and ideas as equal and inextricable aspects of his work.  This balance is especially important in an exhibition that constitutes, rather incredibly, Fautrier's first major exposure to an American audience.

Fautrier's paintings of the late 1920s anticipated the emergence of art informel,  a postwar pictorial aesthetic that deployed the formal innovations of gestural abstraction as an antidote to French geometric abstraction and the academicism of the later School of Paris. These early nudes, still lifes, and landscapes evoke a world of darkness and violence while pressing the boundaries of traditional academic art further and further toward abstraction.  The inventions of his maturity - the haute pâte  (high paste) technique for making paintings, which provided him with a highly personalized alternative technical process, and the originaux multiples, which raised important questions for future artists and the public concerning the relevance of originality and uniqueness - guarantee Fautrier a significant place in the history of art. 

Yet for all his restless spirit, Fautrier maintained a commitment to craft.  While he eventually abandoned the easel and the traditional methods and materials of oil painting, he maintained the scale of easel painting, never expanding his work to monumental dimensions.  While he was close to some of the most radical thinkers of his day, his art was driven by a desire for technical control and mastery over the medium, never by theory or criticism.  He was obsessed with such basic factors as color and texture and what they could convey.  Black, dark brown, salmon, dark green, blue, gray and yellow are prevalent in the works through the mid-fifties, often present in unusual, even disturbing combinations.  In the later Objet series, pinks, greens, and purples adorn his haute pâte constructions, endowing them with a kitschy ambience.

This exhibition of Fautrier's work examines his major stylistic periods, including the early black period (1926-1928), the Otage series (1942-1945), and the later abstractions and objects of the informel period (1947-1964).  Although many previous exhibitions have focused separately on the wartime Otages, the nudes and still lifes of his black period, or the works on paper, this exhibition considers his oeuvre as a whole, relating it to contemporary French artistic and literary movements and to American abstract expressionism.  The result is a view of Fautrier that does not pretend to be comprehensive, but that does attempt to give a well-rounded picture of his work to the first-time viewer while advancing scholarly understanding of its significance and context.

The catalogue includes essays by Curtis Carter, Karen Butler, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D.  Buchloh, and Rachel Perry.  Carter in "Fautrier’s Fortunes: A Paradox of Success and Failure," considers the artist's critical and commercial fortunes in relation to developments in French and American art from the 1920s to the 1960s.  Butler in "Fautrier's First Critics: André Malraux, Jean Paulhan, and Francis Ponge" examines the contemporary critical reception of the artist, situating his aesthetic technique  in the context of French philosophical and literary debates.  Bois in "The Falling Trapeze"  discusses the problem of kitsch as a "nihilistic defilement of high culture" in Fautrier's post-war art with particular reference to a single painting.  Buchloh in "Fautrier's Natures mortes" considers the artist's early works as well as his Otages through the lens of the memento-mori still-life tradition.  Perry in "The Original Multiple" examines Fautrier's much-neglected work on the borders of originality and reproduction, discussing the important questions it raises concerning originality and uniqueness. 

It is our hope that this exhibition and catalogue will shed light on why Fautrier fluctuated between success and neglect in his native France and why he has yet to gain a foothold in the U.S. beyond a small circle of critics, museums, and collectors.  It is our further hope that this exhibition will make that neglect a thing of the past, replacing it with a broader and deeper understanding of Fautrier's work, not only  in the United States, where it is so badly needed, but worldwide as well.

Curtis L. Carter
Karen Butler