(Milwaukee, WI) The Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University in collaboration with the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, will present the first American museum retrospective of the works of French Modernist Master Jean Fautrier (1898-1964). The traveling exhibition will premiere at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee, U.S.A. on September 19, 2002 ? December 29, 2002. It will then open at the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, January 28 ? March 29, 2003 and then travel to the Fogg Art Museum, April 26 ? July 20, 2003. The exhibition is jointly organized by the three museums and curated by Curtis L. Carter, director of the Haggerty Museum of Art and Karen Butler of Columbia University.

Fautrier evoked a world of darkness and violence in his paintings of nudes, animal carcasses and landscapes, while pressing the boundaries of traditional academic art further and further into abstraction. His Otages paintings of 1945 reflect the violence of Nazi atrocities during World War II. He is considered a precursor to American Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Fautrierís work has been difficult to classify because he often worked in isolation from the major schools of painting.

 "This exhibition will bring to American audiences for the first time a serious look at an important French modern artist whose work has been largely overlooked in the United States." said Curtis L. Carter, director of the Haggerty Museum.

"We are enormously pleased to be a part of this collaboration between sister academic institutions. Fautrier's work has been much too little appreciated or even understood in this country. The pioneering work of the curatorial team will provide a foundation for all subsequent work on the artist in English."said Dr. James Cuno, director of the Fogg Art Museum.

Fautrier was born in Paris in 1898 and studied in London at the Royal Academy in 1912. After serving in the French army for three years (1917-20), Fautrier began his career as a painter. He had his first solo exhibition in 1924 at Galerie Visconti in Paris. In 1945, his Otages paintings were exhibited at the Galerie René Droun in Paris. After 1955, Fautrier's work was exhibited internationally on a regular basis. In 1960, he was awarded the International Grand Prize along with Hans Hartung at the XXX Venice Biennale. The following year, Fautrier won the Grand Prize at the 7th Tokyo Biennale. The Musée national d'art moderne de la ville de Paris mounted the first major retrospective of his work in 1964, the year of his death. Fautrier's work has subsequently been celebrated in Europe with numerous exhibitions including a major retrospective at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1989.

Despite America's enthusiasm for French art from the early twentieth century on, Fautrier has gone largely overlooked in the United States except for a few exhibition appearances. His first appearance in an American exhibition was in 1930 in the exhibition Painting in Paris at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work was later exhibited in New York at the Iolas and Hugo Galleries in 1952 and 1956, and the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1957. American collectors who acquired his works included Duncan Phillips (1927), Walter Annenberg, William Jaffe, Barbara Rockefeller, Henry Luce, Helene Rubenstein, and the Menil family (1950s).

In the 1940s, Fautrier invented a new process of making paintings, replacing traditional oil and easel painting with haute pâte (high paste) constructions, represented in the exhibition by his Les Otages series. Fautrier, along with André Malraux, took part in the French resistance, and his Otage paintings represent a visual response to Nazi atrocities. Faturier's Originaux multiples of 1950 (hand painted lithographs) helped establish the groundwork for future debates in contemporary arts concerning the identity of a work of art by questioning the usual visual practices concerning original art works. These hybrid works represent an experiment intended to challenge the concepts of uniqueness with respect to original art works and to increase the audience for Fautrier's work.

This premiere exhibition will bring together over 60 works from public and private collections from Europe and the United States. Included in the exhibition will be paintings, works on paper, original multiples, and sculptures, as well as books illustrated by Fautrier. Featured works include a selection from his early period (1926-28), his Les Otages series (1945), and his late abstractions and objects (1955-1964). Institutional lenders include the Musée national d'art moderne, Paris; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Haggerty Museum of Art; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. Among the private lenders is Jacqueline Cousin, the last companion of the artist, who is expected to attend the exhibition opening.

The exhibition will open on September 19, 2002 with a lecture by Yve Alain Bois, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art, Harvard University, at 6 p.m. Bois'  lecture will be followed by a reception at the Haggerty Museum of Art. French pianist Madeleine Malraux will present a concert in conjunction with the opening. Malraux, along with her late husband, the writer André Malraux, was active with the artist in the French Resistance during World War II.
The exhibition catalogue will be the first major Fautrier catalogue in English. It will contain new research on Fautrier in five scholarly essays by Benjamin Buchloh, Columbia University; Yve Alain Bois; Curtis Carter; Karen Butler, Columbia University; and Rachel Perry, Harvard University; new translations of critical writings by André Malraux, Jean Paulhan's Fautrier l'enragé and Francis Ponge's Notes sur les Otages, and previously unpublished letters from Fautrier's personal correspondence with the French critics André  Malraux and Jean Paulhan, with color translations of the works in the exhibition.
It will be the first catalogue, in any language, to link Fautrier's post war work to its greater cultural context, showing his impact on contemporary artistic and literary movements in France and examining his work in light of the art of Jean Dubuffet and informel art in Europe, and concurrent post World War II developments in American Art, including Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. The catalogue, produced by the Haggerty Museum, the Fogg Art Museum and the Wallach Gallery, will be published by the Harvard University Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press.

The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at North 13th St. and West Clybourn Avenue on the campus of Marquette University. Museum hours are Monday - Wednesday, Friday - Saturday, 10 am-4:30 p.m.; Thursday, 10 am-8 p.m.; and Sunday, noon-5 p.m.. Free parking is available in the Mary B. Finnigan Parking Lot (enter on 11th St. through Marquette Lot J). For more information on the exhibition or the Haggerty Museum, contact John Gardner at 414/288-3657.