Jean Fautrier

Jean Fautrier was born in Paris on 16 May 1898 and died in Châtenay-Malabry on 21 July 1964. After training at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he returned to Paris around 1920 and began developing a practice that moved steadily away from figurative expressionist realism toward a materially driven abstraction. Over the following decades he would become one of the foundational figures of Tachisme and Art Informel, movements that reshaped European painting in the postwar era.

The work for which Fautrier is most widely known emerged from the darkest years of the Nazi occupation of France. Working in hiding near the Vallée-aux-Loups between roughly 1943 and 1945, he produced the Otages — a cycle of paintings in which oil and plaster were built up on paper or board into dense, relief-like surfaces evoking mutilated human forms without depicting them explicitly. The series was first shown at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris in 1943, and the landmark exhibition Les Otages followed at the same gallery in 1945. Within the cycle, Tête d'otage — an ovoid head pressing up through a violently worked ground — became one of the most reproduced images in French postwar art, held in versions by the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris alongside other European institutions. The Otages are widely credited as a pivotal body of work for the emergence of both Tachisme and Art Informel, and their moral weight has never diminished.

Fautrier continued to develop his material language through the late 1940s and into the 1960s, producing late Art Informel paintings in which the figure dissolves entirely into textured abstraction — works that influenced a subsequent generation of European painters and are held by institutions including the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice also extended to sculpture and to the concept of originaux multiples, editions of works presented at the Galerie Billiet-Caputo in 1950, the Galerie de la NRF in 1953, and the Galerie Hugo in New York in 1956. His first solo exhibition had taken place as early as 1924 at the Galerie Visconti in Paris, and the arc of his career was surveyed in the 1957 exhibition Fautrier, 30 ans de figuration informelle at the Galerie André Schoeller and Galerie Rive Droite.

Posthumous recognition has been sustained and international. The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris mounted solo exhibitions in 1964, 1989, and again in 2018 with Jean Fautrier — Matière et Lumière. The Kunstmuseum Winterthur presented a solo show in 2017, and in 2023 Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York organized Jean Fautrier: A Private Collection. His work remains in the permanent collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée de l'Île-de-France in Sceaux, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is represented on the primary market by the Galerie de la Présidence in Paris.