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Lot Essay
‘The action of painting is not simply the need to lay paint on a canvas, and one must admit that the desire for expression comes, at its origins, from something seen. As this reality is transformed – modelled into an image according to the temperament of the artist – the image ends up becoming more real than reality itself’ (J. Fautrier, quoted in Fautrier 1898- 1964, exh. cat., Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris, 1989, p. 13).
Painted in 1946 shortly after the completion of his celebrated series of Otages (Hostages) (1943-4), Les Verres (The Glasses) is an exquisite Haute pâte still-life painting that makes powerful use of the same technique which Fautrier had pioneered in these traumatic and revolutionary works of the war period that has been in the same prestigious collection for over thirty years.
Marking a redefinition of the entire practice of painting, Fautrier’s Otages not only addressed and reflected the trauma and repression of the Nazi Occupation of France but also what the artist himself described as his own personal disgust with the traditional means of paint and canvas. Inaugurating an entirely new process that was to effectively give birth to much of the tradition of Informel painting and have major implications for the later approaches of artists such as Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Piero Manzoni, Fautrier replaced the traditional method of using paint and canvas with a new, uniquely devised impasto technique. This ‘haute päte’ method was one in which a sequence of layers of white Spanish coating, oil, glue, ink and coloured powders were intermingled and applied in a methodical sequence onto a paper ground in large, flat washes. Collectively these built to form a unique paste that suggested a timeless, almost petrified form of painting in which Fautrier’s surface grew to become a kind of fusion of flesh, gesture and action blended with earth-like matter and solidified vegetation.
Painted on a plaster and pigment layer of paper laid down onto on a canvas base, Les Verres too is a work similarly defined by a colourful central passage of grainy impasto made from a unique mixture of plaster, powder and glue over and into which Fautrier has painted using a range of different techniques and implements. In addition to sprinkling, spraying and brushing pigment into these pasted layers of matter, Fautrier has also employed a brush, a spatula and a stick to form the texture and depth of the paste and create linear grooves within it that delineate the outline and transparent presence of four tumbler-like glasses standing on a grainy petrified surface. With such a work, it is, ultimately, Fautrier observed, ‘the quality of the matter’ that makes the difference between what he defined as merely ‘decorative painting’ and ‘painting painting’. ‘The canvas’ in a work such as Les Verres, Fautrier said, is something that becomes ‘now merely a support for the paper’ which is ‘covered with sometimes thick layers of plaster (and) the picture is painted on this moist plaster (which) makes the paint adhere to the paper perfectly…It (also) has the virtue of fixing the colours… (within the material itself, within the)... ‘powder, crushed pastels, gouache, ink, and also oil paint (and) it is above all thanks to these coats of plaster that the mixture can be produced so well and the quality of the matter is achieved’ (J. Fautrier, ‘Letters to Jean Paulhan’, quoted in Jean Fautrier 1898 -1964 exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 43-44).
Fautrier claimed that his purpose in painting was to create a wholly personal palette, shape or pattern in which design also has its place so long as it did not destroy the integrity of the pigment or the significance of the colour. In still-life paintings such as Les Verres Fautrier was effectively turning his new impasto technique towards the representation of ordinary, mundane elements and artifacts drawn from daily life in an attempt to celebrate the material facticity of reality; to represent its undeniable tangible, tactile presence and the physicality of its existence. Like his series of landscapes and faces also of this time, or indeed the Otages themselves, all these strongly existentialist pictures were effectively skins of energy and life that had been concentrated and even embedded into the material paste that Fautirer elevated like a ruin at the centre or heart of his works. It is in this respect that Fautrier once declared all his works to be Otages.
Like many other artists associated with what has come to be known as ‘Art Informel’, Fautrier also claimed that his astonishing ability to manipulate his materials with such dexterity came from an essentially emotional and intuitive response to the ‘matter’ he was using. An artist can do ‘no more than reinvent what already exists’ Fautrier insisted ‘one restores, with hints of emotion, the reality that is embodied in material, in form, in colour...The action of painting is not simply the need to lay paint on a canvas, and one must admit that the desire for expression comes, at its origins, from something seen. As this reality is transformed – modelled into an image according to the temperament of the artist – the image ends up becoming more real than reality itself’ (J. Fautrier, quoted in Fautrier 1898- 1964, exh. cat., Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris, 1989, p. 13).
Painted in 1946 shortly after the completion of his celebrated series of Otages (Hostages) (1943-4), Les Verres (The Glasses) is an exquisite Haute pâte still-life painting that makes powerful use of the same technique which Fautrier had pioneered in these traumatic and revolutionary works of the war period that has been in the same prestigious collection for over thirty years.
Marking a redefinition of the entire practice of painting, Fautrier’s Otages not only addressed and reflected the trauma and repression of the Nazi Occupation of France but also what the artist himself described as his own personal disgust with the traditional means of paint and canvas. Inaugurating an entirely new process that was to effectively give birth to much of the tradition of Informel painting and have major implications for the later approaches of artists such as Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Piero Manzoni, Fautrier replaced the traditional method of using paint and canvas with a new, uniquely devised impasto technique. This ‘haute päte’ method was one in which a sequence of layers of white Spanish coating, oil, glue, ink and coloured powders were intermingled and applied in a methodical sequence onto a paper ground in large, flat washes. Collectively these built to form a unique paste that suggested a timeless, almost petrified form of painting in which Fautrier’s surface grew to become a kind of fusion of flesh, gesture and action blended with earth-like matter and solidified vegetation.
Painted on a plaster and pigment layer of paper laid down onto on a canvas base, Les Verres too is a work similarly defined by a colourful central passage of grainy impasto made from a unique mixture of plaster, powder and glue over and into which Fautrier has painted using a range of different techniques and implements. In addition to sprinkling, spraying and brushing pigment into these pasted layers of matter, Fautrier has also employed a brush, a spatula and a stick to form the texture and depth of the paste and create linear grooves within it that delineate the outline and transparent presence of four tumbler-like glasses standing on a grainy petrified surface. With such a work, it is, ultimately, Fautrier observed, ‘the quality of the matter’ that makes the difference between what he defined as merely ‘decorative painting’ and ‘painting painting’. ‘The canvas’ in a work such as Les Verres, Fautrier said, is something that becomes ‘now merely a support for the paper’ which is ‘covered with sometimes thick layers of plaster (and) the picture is painted on this moist plaster (which) makes the paint adhere to the paper perfectly…It (also) has the virtue of fixing the colours… (within the material itself, within the)... ‘powder, crushed pastels, gouache, ink, and also oil paint (and) it is above all thanks to these coats of plaster that the mixture can be produced so well and the quality of the matter is achieved’ (J. Fautrier, ‘Letters to Jean Paulhan’, quoted in Jean Fautrier 1898 -1964 exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 43-44).
Fautrier claimed that his purpose in painting was to create a wholly personal palette, shape or pattern in which design also has its place so long as it did not destroy the integrity of the pigment or the significance of the colour. In still-life paintings such as Les Verres Fautrier was effectively turning his new impasto technique towards the representation of ordinary, mundane elements and artifacts drawn from daily life in an attempt to celebrate the material facticity of reality; to represent its undeniable tangible, tactile presence and the physicality of its existence. Like his series of landscapes and faces also of this time, or indeed the Otages themselves, all these strongly existentialist pictures were effectively skins of energy and life that had been concentrated and even embedded into the material paste that Fautirer elevated like a ruin at the centre or heart of his works. It is in this respect that Fautrier once declared all his works to be Otages.
Like many other artists associated with what has come to be known as ‘Art Informel’, Fautrier also claimed that his astonishing ability to manipulate his materials with such dexterity came from an essentially emotional and intuitive response to the ‘matter’ he was using. An artist can do ‘no more than reinvent what already exists’ Fautrier insisted ‘one restores, with hints of emotion, the reality that is embodied in material, in form, in colour...The action of painting is not simply the need to lay paint on a canvas, and one must admit that the desire for expression comes, at its origins, from something seen. As this reality is transformed – modelled into an image according to the temperament of the artist – the image ends up becoming more real than reality itself’ (J. Fautrier, quoted in Fautrier 1898- 1964, exh. cat., Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris, 1989, p. 13).